Spingo

Craig Peeler's fascination with live experiences began in high school, where he ran sound for theater shows, sporting events, concerts, and even his prom. After college, he launched Spin Media Marketing, a consultancy for product development and media production. The spark for Spingo came when he and his wife Amanda created a local events section on their website—initially just one part of a broader entertainment and business directory. Amanda manually curated event content online, correcting typos and finding listings that didn't yet exist digitally. Within months, the events section was driving 80% of all website traffic, revealing an enormous unmet demand.

Craig and his team had previously created an innovative DVD with over 6,000 menus that aggregated student films, music videos, and local business directories—moving 20,000 copies through university bookstores. This gave him experience with content distribution and user experience design. When they migrated that success to a website, the events section's overwhelming popularity led to a pivotal moment: media companies in Utah approached them to acquire Spin Local. Rather than sell outright, Craig negotiated a licensing deal. Spingo was born as a separate product—an API and embeddable calendar widget that media companies could integrate into their websites. During the first two years (2012-2014), licensing revenue from these media and app partnerships made up 80%+ of revenue, with Spingo eventually powering 5,500 entertainment apps reaching 200 million viewers monthly.

Craig's breakthrough customer acquisition strategy was trade shows and newspaper industry conferences. He positioned Spingo not as a vendor selling software, but as a thought leader helping local media companies reclaim their greatest asset—local relevance. While competitors filled booths with pop-up banners and tablecloths, Craig brought stage lighting, 80-inch TVs, and high-energy event demonstrations based on his production background. He gave talks about how newspapers should "own the local" and stop trying to compete nationally. His message resonated: "Don't try to be everything. Be the things that are happening down the street." By attending half a dozen to a dozen trade shows, momentum built quickly. Advertising attempts on newspaper websites failed because they were trapped between the ad sales team and editorial—but meeting decision makers face-to-face at conferences unified the room behind his vision.

For the first two years, licensing revenue worked well. But in 2015, Craig noticed something crucial: event makers had registered 200,000 accounts on Spingo voluntarily, and the ticketing value associated with those events totaled approximately $8 billion in annual ticket sales. Yet Spingo was capturing only a small fraction of that value. Simultaneously, he discovered a critical flaw in the marketing attribution model. Spingo was driving tens of thousands of clicks to event ticketing pages, but conversion rates were terrible. When he surveyed event makers about what drove attendance, they'd say billboards—yet his own research showed 78% of attendees at one event had already bought tickets before seeing the billboard. The real problem: event makers lacked visibility into what actually worked. In 2015, promotional revenue (event makers paying for featured listings and self-serve ad campaigns) exceeded licensing revenue for the first time, signaling a market shift. Online advertising targeting newspaper decision makers proved ineffective, but trade shows dominated.

In February 2016, Craig launched Event Master—a unified SaaS platform combining event marketing, ticketing, logistics management, staff scheduling, and an attendee app. Within months, they signed up 254 events, with strategic focus on high-volume events (5,000+ attendees). Five contracts already involved events with 100,000+ attendees. Event Master was forecasted to generate 80% of revenue in 2016, a complete reversal from the licensing-heavy revenue of earlier years. By integrating ticketing and marketing into one platform, Spingo could finally prove ROI and close the attribution loop—solving the core problem that event makers are "masters of chaos" juggling fragmented tools. The strategy leveraged Spingo's existing relationships and brand trust built over years of content curation and media partnerships, allowing rapid conversion of a large existing user base into paying SaaS customers.