In this episode of Tickets to Travel, Mario is joined by Ian Chen, CEO & co-founder of Discotech, the platform that lets users “save money, party smarter.” Ian shares the story behind Discotech’s rise from a frustrating Vegas club experience to becoming a powerhouse for nightlife, festivals, and travel experiences—now with over 1.9 million app downloads.
They explore how Discotech has evolved from VIP table bookings to a full-service nightlife and festival marketplace, including affiliate travel deals, guest lists, and even $50,000 tables. Ian also reveals trends shaping nightlife today—from Gen Z’s shifting habits to the lasting impact of pandemic-era “revenge partying”—and explains how data, affiliate partnerships, and tech are driving their growth into music festivals, travel, and potentially even sports.
If you’re in nightlife, events, or travel—or just love a great entrepreneurial story—this episode is packed with insight.
Download the Discotech app to save money and discover nightlife and festival experiences:
https://www.discotech.me
Subscribe to Tickets to Travel at www.tttpod.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Tickets to Travel, the Business of Travel Experiences. I'm your host, Mario DeWine, and today on the pod we have Ian Chen from Discotech. Welcome to the Pod Ian.
(00:01):
Thanks for having me, Mario.
Glad you're here. Because I think what I've seen about Discotech is that you are a huge distributor of nightlife, ticketing, and now getting into experiences from what I gather, right?
Yeah. How did you get started in this? Were you a club kid? Did you just wanna find a place where you could get every single nightlife ticket in one place? Like how did disco tech come about?
Yeah, so yes and no. Like myself and I started disco tech with a co-founder. Neither of us had any professional ties to the nightlife industry.
We were just in our mid late twenties going out and having a good time. The. Idea for Discotech hit us from the customer's perspective. Ah we were going to Vegas with a group of our friends and we booked a table at a very prestigious club venue through a human promoter a random guy.
We show up that night. Go to check in for our table and we're told at the front desk that that offer was not gonna be honored and it was gonna be double the price that we were quoted and that like we agreed on no way. So really bad experience. We ended up paying for the bill because we were just all there.
We didn't know what else we were gonna do. We didn't want it to ruin our entire trip. No one felt good about it. And so we're just like, God, like why isn't there like a website or a mobile app that can like, make this easy? Why do we have to go through these shady, untrustworthy middlemen?
And that was essentially the aha. There's no app currently doing this. Like we can be the first guys.
So you're almost like a a digital promoter. Every single club you could think of at this point. So in the very beginning we were like that. We were a way for people to book VIP tables at nightclubs, just on the app, on our website.
This was 12 years ago. And over time we went from just servicing the high-end VIP clients to servicing like the masses. So we started offering affiliate ticket sales for our customers, oftentimes discounted. And then another like kind of the secret sauce behind it was actually the free stuff, the guest lists.
We started offering free admission to a lot of clubs and pool parties around the country. And then that's when the organic traffic really started to take off. 'cause who doesn't like free stuff.
Exactly. Yeah. The free is the lead in. And then essentially someone claims they're free tickets and then they have access to paid tickets.
Is that how it worked with the venues? Were they seeing you as a marketing partner? A hundred percent. So to them we're
affiliate, like we're a promoter. Instead of like a street guy, we're like a promoter with an app and a website and to the customer, we certainly got them in on the free and discounted stuff.
And once we build trust with them, we saw that our conversions for the higher spend full price tickets or VIP tables started to increase as well. So we got 'em with the free entry. They love us for that of course. And then we also are able to monetize on like bigger spend items down the road.
You obviously have a very large following on social media. I would guess we
got it. We're a little late into the social media game, but we, I think we're somewhere in the 50,000 plus like real followers on social media. Our app's been downloaded over 1.9 million times.
Okay. So we definitely have just a much larger following on our mobile app, which is our core product, and our website gets like hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month.
What I was getting at that you guys are obviously you're selling fun. Essentially to this audience and.
Over this time period. 'cause how long ago was that, Ian? That was 12 years. 12 years ago? Yeah. Okay. So October,
2013, I think. Something
(00:22):
like that. Okay. That's amazing in of itself because lots of things have happened in that 12 years where I think nightlife has shifted quite a bit. I think there's been, when you look at Las Vegas, there's the onset of residencies and larger.
Larger artists bigger table numbers, there's certain experiences where I've been to and it's $40,000 to sit underneath Tiesto. And So you guys sell this type of thing as well? what are some of the things you've seen change over that 12 years in terms of nightlife and how it's being sold?
Yeah, so much has changed. So 12 years ago, clubs weren't even selling tickets. You either had a table or you showed up and paid cover at the door or you're on someone's list. The ability to buy a digital ticket didn't even exist when disco tech existed, which is why we didn't sell tickets 'cause no one was doing it.
clubs definitely moved into the modern age, started to digitalize, started to sell things online, which enabled us to help them sell the tickets online as well. You mentioned one piece, which is the, residencies. When we started disco tech, the whole EDM, DJ train, hadn't really fully permeated through the country yet.
So we were there with the rise of EDM and how like that took over most of the nightlife scene we were around for COVID, of course. Which was like a huge game changer.
Yeah. Let me stop you there for just a second. 'cause, you saw this happening because you're, I would guess your lead market is Las Vegas.
It's our biggest market.
Yeah. That, that, that would probably be a big, so when COVID happened and everything shut down, obviously your numbers went to zero. Yeah. But what was the strategy where you're sitting there with your leadership team and you're saying. How are we gonna get people to go out and have fun again?
I'll be honest. Our vision of what was gonna happen during COVID and what was the actual reality was like completely off.
When COVID happened, we're like, okay, there's no way the government's gonna shut down. Like this is gonna be shut down for three months, like four months, like total disbelief, economic collapse, like there's, it's impossible. So we were always operating incorrectly on the assumption that things were gonna open back up sooner rather than later.
When it seemed like we were in it for a longer haul, we did the only thing that we really thought we could at the time, which was we tried to transition into digital streamed like events and festivals, which is what the clubs and festivals are trying to do themselves. There were no like in-person events, so their revenue was zero.
Our revenue was zero. People were trying to migrate to Zoom festivals. We tried to sell that. It did not work for anybody. Long story short, it was just really hard for us. We. Had almost no revenue for a year and a half. We laid off more than half the team, understandably.
When COVID ended, we didn't have to do anything to convince people to go back to the party.
Was there like this light at the end of the tunnel where there was a certain performance or a certain club opening that was like, you started to see the numbers start to tick back up? What was that moment?
Yeah. If I remember
correctly, like
Miami didn't give a. Like, didn't give a shit
about sport in general. Didn't
give a shit. Yeah. Like they didn't care. So Miami's nightlife remained open for most of COVID and our Miami numbers were truly stellar, never seen anything, probably never will see anything like that again.
Cause they had the entire, , they captured all the demand. So Miami was making unbelievable amounts of money per venue. And we're like, oh my God. Like people wanna party., So when COVID lifted on a national basis, there was definitely a good three, like at least six months of revenge partying.
Where all the clubs saw numbers that like again, we'll never, we probably will never see again. Knock on wood, barring like another pandemic. And so like people were so ready to blow money on nightlife after the pandemic, and so we didn't have to do anything to convince anyone. We just had to be there for them and we were, and so that helped us recover back from zero and get the ball rolling again.
(00:43):
There was certainly like a slump after that momentum ended, and I think that slump continues today in the sense that. We're seeing some systemic shifts with Gen Z, just not drinking as much, not going out as much. So nightclubs are hurting, like they're going, a lot of them are going outta business.
It's a tough, it's a tough time right now for that industry and disco tech, we've really expanded our addressable market to music festivals, which has been more robust over the last few years and that's been a great move for us. And today we're trying to expand beyond that into just a general travel experiences category to grow the business.
Yeah, no, it makes complete sense. And obviously one of the reasons why we wanna have this discussion, 'cause that's what we look at is that the tickets to travel namesake of the show is what drives the demand for all of the travel supply that's around it. And even a nightclub, so to your point of Miami, you're right. No one cared in Florida. Miami was a great nightclub city anyway. But I would venture to say, and maybe you have data to back this up, there's a ton of people from New York, a ton of people from California who are just going to Miami specifically to go to nightclubs and of course, buying up hotel rooms in the process.
Am I warm here? Did you see that number happen?
Oh a hundred percent. People were traveling from everywhere to go to Miami. It wasn't just like locals going out. Music festivals, these are, they're almost always travel related, right? You have to book a ticket to go to the festival, get a hotel,
so people who are attending these events for the event must also spend probably more than they have to budget even more for travel, for hotel for all their other expenses related to it. And that we saw that kind of as like an adjacency.
Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. And so the other piece is maybe listeners don't know this as well, but you're right gen Z does not drink as much.
They spend more on experiences. They're not I dunno what the word is, but they're not really beholden to the same social norms that. Previous generations have been, had adhered to. And so you bring up moving into sort of travel and experiences, have you guys worked with any travel suppliers already to create these experiences and what have you seen that kind of works on your platform because of the type of audience that you have around nightlife?
Yeah, we do. There are a number of called producers who provide the, the hotel and transportation around festivals. There's a company called like One and only there's Vibey. There's there's a handful of them. And so we actually partner with those companies as their affiliate because customers on Discotech are looking to get tickets and deals to the festivals.
And then at the same time, we also hit them with, oh, by the way we also have these hotel package travel deals for the same festival. If you're interested.
Did you do something with. Groove crews and others that are in this crew space as well.
Yes. Groove Cruise like friendship.
There's a number of like travel cruises where they essentially package, it's all just one package. Yeah. You get the room at the cruise, you get all the parties on the cruise. We're selling those as well. Yacht week is another example.
You rent the yacht, but they provide you with a party every single night.
I'm fascinated by that because you, one groove crew any of these are basically floating nightclubs. Float floating resorts. What I think you bring to it or what Discotech brings to, it's just a set of data, right? So you're collecting where these people are coming from, what their, possibly their behavior.
What part does data play in the. Process of a customer working with Discotech?
I think for us it's usually just in terms like, how do we target people? If you're a local nightclub or a regionalized music festival we'll try to target people within a certain radius of that event.
And of course try to target our users based on the type of music we believe that they like. There's usually like customers who are like, they're into EDM and there are some customers, they're into hip hop, and so we use that to try to target our customers while keeping everything relevant.
The genre based targeting is interesting to me. Is it a majority of or percentage of your audience base, like EDM, what's the spread Yeah. Between, because I think that's helpful for a lot of people to understand where that targeting comes from and how they can utilize Discotech to be, to get access to that specific demographic or audience.
Yeah.
Yeah. We certainly target based on demographic, although just 'cause you like EDM doesn't mean you don't like country, for example. EDM is by far the largest segment of our, like most of our customers, the majority are like we tag them as like EDM lovers.
(01:04):
And then say a quarter of them are like hip hop. It drops pretty precipitously after number two. But we do all kinds of genres again, like country rock, pop k-pop.
That's huge too. I mean that, yeah. That's the other thing I'm getting at is I think what's helpful is you have a huge EDM database.
what differentiates these type of people? From other genres that a big brand could come and talk to you and say, Hey, listen, I know I'm trying to find these people specifically. Because I don't think I'm a pretty old guy I love EDM music. I love H House music, but I don't go to clubs.
I'm not there to see exactly who would be your target audience. And I think there is a lot of brands out there who maybe from a sponsorship perspective or activation from a travel perspective who might wanna work with you?
What are some of the insights that you guys have found about your audience?
Yeah, so first, in terms of a gender demographic, we're about 55% male. 45% female. Yeah, it skews on the younger side. Most of our active users are gonna be 21 to 30, early thirties for females, and it skews a little, the range is wider and it skews a little older for the male demographic.
I think in general our users are more affluent than average. I think just when we look at what percentage do you use the iPhone app versus the Android app? It's 80 to 90% are on iPhone. Even though the split is much more normal in the general population, I think because iPhone users on average are more affluent and there is a portion of our clientele that is the luxury class,
because these people are spending 40, $50,000. On a VIP table for one night, and maybe they're booking like three nights in a row. It's a small percentage of our total market, of our total audience, but we definitely have some bigger fish in there
that's really interesting I think, because when. Suppliers may feel like I don't know if someone's gonna buy a $10,000 trip on disco tech, for example. I think it's important to say, Hey, you have that audience base there. Is that a real product that you have is a $50,000 table? Is there anything crazy like that we should note that there are guys sell fairly regularly?
I'll be candid. Like the most expensive tables that we typically will realistically sell are in like the 50,000 per table category.
There are some that are offered in like the six figure category. We've yet to sell one of those. I imagine if you're buying one of those, like you don't need to go through Discotech but 10 K and up tables are like pretty commonplace.. even Vegas, on any given night, there are tables that are like 10 k.
And yeah, those are not that uncommon.
That's great. That's good to know because like I said, there are travel suppliers out there who probably don't know it, but they wanna target the right audience and they wanna make sure that, Hey, you know what, I'm gonna sell a few of these because I think the other piece that from a supply slash distribution perspective, suppliers wanna understand.
How easy it is, how frictionless it is to put their supply on your platform. So if I was a tour operator, like a vibey or one of these guys who obviously gone through a tremendous amount of work to curate this experience, how would they work with you?
Yeah, so as an affiliate we're we try to make things like very easy and scalable.
We typically just track our sales with an affiliate tracking link . so that we get credit or a promo code. Our motto, or I guess our what we say on our app and our website is save again, save money Party smarter. Yep. So we're always trying to give some kind of perk or deal to the end user.
And so if we can get like a discounted tracking link, which is like something that like Cirque du sole gives us, for example or a discounted promo code. We push that to our audience and then we. We take it from there. Yeah. We just, it's super simple
to set up. Yeah. You track it, you invoice them or you have payment set up and they pay you for that lead essentially once it closes.
Again the tickets themselves of the live event drive the travel demand. Does this mean that you might sell some hotel rooms one day?
We are, again, we're selling hotel rooms as part of these travel packages already. Got it. So we're not like directly integrated, like with we're not like API integrated with any hotel providers. At least not yet, but we're certainly open to the idea of exploring it because again, it's so adjacent to what we're already selling.
Yeah, I think there's probably a few people in this audience who are like, ah, we might wanna have that conversation.
(01:25):
So what's next for Discotech, other than the travel experiences stuff, are you guys. Looking to go more international or is it bigger audiences somewhere? Are you doing any strategic deals that'll give you access to better inventory? Is there anything out there that you could talk about?
Certainly we're always looking for international expansion opportunities. So the vast majority of our users are US-based and we do currently work with festivals and clubs in other countries.
So we're in like the three major cities in Canada. We're in Ibiza, Bali like the uk. Places where there's a good concentration of nightlife, but it's like those international opportunities are just a small piece of what we do. We've largely been focused on the us but we are certainly looking to just get more and more festivals, club venues, experiences on the platform.
We've built it. We just need to fill it. And if we fill it and if we can help them save money and party smarter, it's like things work out. I think one thing that just as you're talking and just understanding how the business works have you ever thought about doing like a direct to fan thing with a particular DJ or an artist or promotions group and say, Hey, you know what?
You can cut people out at this whole equation by going directly to these audiences and being an exclusive provider of an experience or a. Let's say a tour of a particular dj, would that be something you could do on the platform?
We would love to partner with artist management and help them promote their tours on disco tech?
Would we wanna be exclusive? Like we certainly would. I'll be honest. Look, I don't think we have the leverage that like a Live Nation ticket Master does by any means. There's no risk in partnering with us.
There's no signup fee, there's no subscription costs. We work purely on commission as an affiliate, and so why not sell tickets through us? Given that. You, we only take a 10% commission, right? Yeah. No I think it just depends on the size of the artists essentially.
There's a certain amount of them who are not gonna get that Live Nation Ticketmaster. so depending on how easy it is for you guys to take that inventory and to promote it, there's probably this level, of artists, let's say like a young gravy or a like a TikTok artist , where they're looking for expanded distribution , to your type of audience. I'm just wondering if that's something that's of interest to you guys no, I'm just like, it's certainly of interest and it would be very, so for you, it's a supply game.
Yeah, it's very easy for us to onboard new inventory. In fact, like I would say the technology behind Discotech is like really optimized for scaling and bringing on more events. We've done a good job over the last decade plus of building that, and now it's really just.
Getting more inventory and then getting more end users, it's supply and distribution. Yeah. And maybe there's some platform in the middle of all of that, but if you can optimize either, because you could have all the distribution in the world, but if you don't have the right supply, it's not gonna convert and you're not gonna have repeat business
and so that's why I think it's really interesting. You're now in a stage where you're like, I can vary the amount of supply that's gonna. Be directly related to this type of person. You told us a story of how you created the business with your co-founder, but by trade, are you a tech guy?
So I started my career at Bain and Company as a management consultant. And then I moved into the private equity realm. So I worked as a private equity associate, doing d due diligence on m and a deals.
A few years and then just made the leap into becoming the the CEO of a. Startup.
You just follow your passion. And it just made sense. We've just been messing
around
figuring it out, making mistakes. Yeah. But it's worked out, right? Like you get to do cool stuff.
And also, 'cause where I was going with that was trying to understand, 'cause anytime I talk to a distributor now at any level, the buzzword becomes about ai . and so I was just curious how do you answer that question? Like, how are you guys working with ai? Is it from a
A backend perspective, or is it more like suggestions on the front end? Like how do you guys see AI coming into
Yeah. Your business?
Currently today we love leveraging AI as just like a tool, right? Like our engineers use it to make their lives easier. The business side of things uses AI to.
(01:46):
Make our to help us do our jobs. We certainly believe that at some point, Discotech needs to leverage this key buzzword as well to improve the experience for our end users. Yeah. Again, AI is like a pretty loose term. Are we already using ai? I think from a strategic level, like when I talk to a number of different startups and when they go to talk to VCs or other investors in the, in this game there's always this buzzword of how are you gonna use the ai? And so I liken it as everybody has a response to this.
It's just, it just depends on. How your teams want to initiate it. Yeah. And so I'm just curious obviously the end user experience there'll be some layer of AI to do that, but like how do you see it as I guess, beneficial to the business growing?
Down the road, the most powerful use case for us would be using AI to help people.
Party smarter. So saving them time in finding the events that they really want because rather than scrolling and endlessly scrolling and asking yourself, do I want that? Disco tech can just be like, Hey, we really think you'll like these events. And if we're accurate about it. They save time, they find these great events and then we, of course get higher conversion.
Personalization is really exactly stuff you're talking about. Yeah.
Personalization recommendations notifications. I think that's certainly one way of doing it. And then yeah, leveraging AI on the business end to do like better marketing, right? Creating better content and reaching.
A more targeted audience.
If I were to go to Discotech today, like what do you think is the coolest experience that I could purchase and. While you're thinking about that, what's the aspirational thing? Do you think you'd wanna go sell a suite at the World Cup next year?
Coolest experience. That's a tough question. There's so many cool, like music festivals and as mentioned there's like yacht week, which I think is like pretty cool. And we do things in all sorts of exotic places. But I think it depends on the customer and like what they like. Honestly for me, I'm also like a house head myself. I love electronic music. To me it's still, and this is gonna sound cookie cutter, but like EDC is still just like super cool if someone hasn't been, it is like an amazing festival. It's really incredible.
I'm not sure I've been to a, festival that does it like they do. Yeah.
Insomniac knows what they're doing. Yeah.
Yeah. They're doing it in Medellin, Columbia, so maybe we go. Okay.
I didn't even know about that, but we can certainly talk about that.
That sounds awesome. Could you do sports? Could you do, like I mentioned World Cup? 'cause it's coming up. There's a lot of different, there's a I would love to, yeah. Yeah. Do you think it would resonate with your audience?
The truth is, I don't know, right? But. When we went from nightlife into like music festivals. In hindsight, it seems like super obvious, but like we weren't sure really if was gonna work.
at first this seems crazy, but then fast forward how many years, then you're like, okay, this is a viable part of our business now.
Yeah. After festivals, we started doing like other, like shows that we thought were adjacent to what we're already doing. So like comedy clubs.
we're selling decently for those. We also do like theater and concert shows. Magic Mic Live in Vegas as an example. Yeah. Du Soleil. These are other types of live performances. Yeah. Those are performing really well on Discotech. Again, we have a large audience in Vegas and they're looking for.
Other things to do. Some of our audience is older now maybe shifting to new things, and so we've been pleasantly surprised by. These adjacencies. Now sports, I think is one more adjacency beyond like theater and concerts. But I can certainly see it , so yes, we were, would love to add like sporting events to the platform if we can get the the right partnerships.
Are there other mechanisms that you guys have, not just the app, do you have push notifications? Do you have email that is targeted? Like how do you guys market a particular experience?
So we certainly do push notification marketing and we believe that is like the most effective tool or lever that we have.
(02:07):
We also do email marketing blast, but those have been like way less effective than the push. The pushes lately. Yeah. We also leverage our social media account as well. We do like ticket giveaways for our festival partners and story posts, so that's another tool as well. But for the most part, I think beyond the push notification blast, which is impactful.
Yeah. Our users are just browsing the app and the website and discovering events for themselves.
So in terms of distressed inventory, like that's core to what we do, because when clubs are just trying to fill their venue. Yeah. Because it's not a good look for anyone when the club is empty. It sucks for the dj. You need audience there to help everyone have fun, build the energy. And of course, the more people there, the more drinks or food is purchased.
So that's where like the disco guest list comes in? . You sign up, you get in for free, you show up early, like everyone's a winner, including like the venue, right? They'll sell more drinks, they'll sell more concessions, even though they're letting you in for free. So that's very core to what we do.
And that's what like the guest list is all about. It's about filling venues.. And then discounts, right? If you're really, if you have really heavily distressed inventory, give us a big discount. We'll push it out to our audience. If they buy it, great. If not you're in the same position you were before.
There's no real risk for anybody. It's just another marketing touch point to a specific market.
I don't think it requires any new lift.
Because we just treat it as an event. A music event. A sport event. It's an event. Yep. And if we can offer a discounted ticket or a free guest list, in my head, my engineering team might be like, shut up. I feel getting us into right now, I feel like it'd be handled the exact same way.
So I don't think there would be a tech lift. And from a. From like a sales perspective, I would love to try it.
From an affiliate perspective, you guys probably do redemption of a promo code, or do you do will call or is there, what, how do you typically transfer the ticket to somebody in a guest list situation?
so the guest list usually works a little bit differently in the sense that , it's really archaic. Okay. But there's literally a list at the venue,
on
a spreadsheet. I print it out, piece of paper or like a Google Doc or however they manage it. And there'll be like names on the list that will say Discotech next to it. And like people check in with their name and then check marks. Yeah, that's it. Like
they, they print them a ticket and you get to go into town, beach, or whatever it is. Exactly. That's, no, that's
literally how it works. That's literally how it works.
You're right that a lot of this on the ticketing side, if I look at it from, let's say hotels,
they're probably . 10, 20 years behind hotel connectivity. In terms of I'm gonna book this hotel room on a website, it's gonna go right into the system. I deal with the hotel now versus the distributor, they don't really have that at on ticketing just yet, unless that's why Ticketmaster's so huge.
Because it you buy it on Ticketmaster, it's in that system. It's in the primary, yeah. Versus you you're this external distribution end where they have to walk in and. Present themselves, show an id, validate that they're the person, then they print you the ticket and you walk in and have a great time.
Yeah. So it's, there's all these sort of complexity. That's why I like to have these conversations , okay, how easy is it? How, what's the tracking? Like? How do payments work? Because it always comes down to that. It comes down to time and money
and I think if we're doing a promo code, it's just so easy,
because. They're just going through their existing ticketing provider. So like payment is like already solved. We're just pushing out the deal to our customers and push as long as it's a compelling savings, like our customers are happy getting advertised to.
(02:28):
Even if they don't wanna go to this event, they're like, oh, disco tech's only sending me like deals., Maybe they'll send me something I do care about, so I'm not gonna uninstall this app. That's the stickiest part of your business is you've got one point, what'd you say, 1.8 people with the app downloaded?
Yeah, I think we just
Broke through 1.9 mil, and is a lot of that organic or are you guys doing, you doing Google and a few other things to get people to, to do organic? The
majority
throughout all of our history has been
organic. Yeah, I get that sense. That's awesome.
And I think largely because of like the guest lists, right? Someone's Hey, download discotech, you can get into this club or party for free.. Or Hey, download discotech, you can save money on tickets. The whole save money party. Smarter thing only, we only came up with that like a year ago.
We looked at what was working and we're like, okay, we need to communicate the value proposition more quickly.
What's the next level for disconet? Not in terms of supply that you're gonna get. Are you looking to get acquired? Are you looking to exit? Are you just trying to just go global and just own this for the rest of your life?
I think in the medium to long term, exiting would be fantastic. Like we've already been doing this for 12 years.
We've been doing it a really long time. I would say like in the last year again, we had to recover from the pandemic.
Things are finally stable and good again. Our mission is really just focusing on growth, growing users, growing top line, growing profitability. And we believe that as long as we can do that, good things will happen because companies are bought. They're not sold. And that's really the only thing we can control right now. So we're just trying to focus on being like a lean, mean, cash flowing machine. But yeah, we would love to sell down the road,
You're also a consultant, so you're a management consultant. You understand how all this stuff works. And so I, I would imagine that you're into building, you're making sure the it flies and then you probably gotta.
Probably 10 other ideas that you wanna get going at some
point. I used to work on the buy side, like buying companies. Like LBOs, so I totally, yeah I'm definitely very familiar with how that all works. And so for us it's just if we can focus on EBITDA and grow ebitda, things are good.
Hey man, thanks for your time. Congratulations on your wedding. I'm pretty sure you had a great time thank you out in Bali and obviously, hopefully we'll be able to do this again soon, and track your progress at disco Tech.
Appreciate it, Mario. Thanks again. Thank you.
Welcome to Tickets to Travel, the Business of Travel Experiences. I'm your host, Mario DeWine, and today on the pod we have Ian Chen from Discotech. Welcome to the Pod Ian.
(00:01):
Thanks for having me, Mario.
Glad you're here. Because I think what I've seen about Discotech is that you are a huge distributor of nightlife, ticketing, and now getting into experiences from what I gather, right?
Yeah. How did you get started in this? Were you a club kid? Did you just wanna find a place where you could get every single nightlife ticket in one place? Like how did disco tech come about?
Yeah, so yes and no. Like myself and I started disco tech with a co-founder. Neither of us had any professional ties to the nightlife industry.
We were just in our mid late twenties going out and having a good time. The. Idea for Discotech hit us from the customer's perspective. Ah we were going to Vegas with a group of our friends and we booked a table at a very prestigious club venue through a human promoter a random guy.
We show up that night. Go to check in for our table and we're told at the front desk that that offer was not gonna be honored and it was gonna be double the price that we were quoted and that like we agreed on no way. So really bad experience. We ended up paying for the bill because we were just all there.
We didn't know what else we were gonna do. We didn't want it to ruin our entire trip. No one felt good about it. And so we're just like, God, like why isn't there like a website or a mobile app that can like, make this easy? Why do we have to go through these shady, untrustworthy middlemen?
And that was essentially the aha. There's no app currently doing this. Like we can be the first guys.
So you're almost like a a digital promoter. Every single club you could think of at this point. So in the very beginning we were like that. We were a way for people to book VIP tables at nightclubs, just on the app, on our website.
This was 12 years ago. And over time we went from just servicing the high-end VIP clients to servicing like the masses. So we started offering affiliate ticket sales for our customers, oftentimes discounted. And then another like kind of the secret sauce behind it was actually the free stuff, the guest lists.
We started offering free admission to a lot of clubs and pool parties around the country. And then that's when the organic traffic really started to take off. 'cause who doesn't like free stuff.
Exactly. Yeah. The free is the lead in. And then essentially someone claims they're free tickets and then they have access to paid tickets.
Is that how it worked with the venues? Were they seeing you as a marketing partner? A hundred percent. So to them we're
affiliate, like we're a promoter. Instead of like a street guy, we're like a promoter with an app and a website and to the customer, we certainly got them in on the free and discounted stuff.
And once we build trust with them, we saw that our conversions for the higher spend full price tickets or VIP tables started to increase as well. So we got 'em with the free entry. They love us for that of course. And then we also are able to monetize on like bigger spend items down the road.
You obviously have a very large following on social media. I would guess we
got it. We're a little late into the social media game, but we, I think we're somewhere in the 50,000 plus like real followers on social media. Our app's been downloaded over 1.9 million times.
Okay. So we definitely have just a much larger following on our mobile app, which is our core product, and our website gets like hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month.
What I was getting at that you guys are obviously you're selling fun. Essentially to this audience and.
Over this time period. 'cause how long ago was that, Ian? That was 12 years. 12 years ago? Yeah. Okay. So October,
2013, I think. Something
(00:22):
like that. Okay. That's amazing in of itself because lots of things have happened in that 12 years where I think nightlife has shifted quite a bit. I think there's been, when you look at Las Vegas, there's the onset of residencies and larger.
Larger artists bigger table numbers, there's certain experiences where I've been to and it's $40,000 to sit underneath Tiesto. And So you guys sell this type of thing as well? what are some of the things you've seen change over that 12 years in terms of nightlife and how it's being sold?
Yeah, so much has changed. So 12 years ago, clubs weren't even selling tickets. You either had a table or you showed up and paid cover at the door or you're on someone's list. The ability to buy a digital ticket didn't even exist when disco tech existed, which is why we didn't sell tickets 'cause no one was doing it.
clubs definitely moved into the modern age, started to digitalize, started to sell things online, which enabled us to help them sell the tickets online as well. You mentioned one piece, which is the, residencies. When we started disco tech, the whole EDM, DJ train, hadn't really fully permeated through the country yet.
So we were there with the rise of EDM and how like that took over most of the nightlife scene we were around for COVID, of course. Which was like a huge game changer.
Yeah. Let me stop you there for just a second. 'cause, you saw this happening because you're, I would guess your lead market is Las Vegas.
It's our biggest market.
Yeah. That, that, that would probably be a big, so when COVID happened and everything shut down, obviously your numbers went to zero. Yeah. But what was the strategy where you're sitting there with your leadership team and you're saying. How are we gonna get people to go out and have fun again?
I'll be honest. Our vision of what was gonna happen during COVID and what was the actual reality was like completely off.
When COVID happened, we're like, okay, there's no way the government's gonna shut down. Like this is gonna be shut down for three months, like four months, like total disbelief, economic collapse, like there's, it's impossible. So we were always operating incorrectly on the assumption that things were gonna open back up sooner rather than later.
When it seemed like we were in it for a longer haul, we did the only thing that we really thought we could at the time, which was we tried to transition into digital streamed like events and festivals, which is what the clubs and festivals are trying to do themselves. There were no like in-person events, so their revenue was zero.
Our revenue was zero. People were trying to migrate to Zoom festivals. We tried to sell that. It did not work for anybody. Long story short, it was just really hard for us. We. Had almost no revenue for a year and a half. We laid off more than half the team, understandably.
When COVID ended, we didn't have to do anything to convince people to go back to the party.
Was there like this light at the end of the tunnel where there was a certain performance or a certain club opening that was like, you started to see the numbers start to tick back up? What was that moment?
Yeah. If I remember
correctly, like
Miami didn't give a. Like, didn't give a shit
about sport in general. Didn't
give a shit. Yeah. Like they didn't care. So Miami's nightlife remained open for most of COVID and our Miami numbers were truly stellar, never seen anything, probably never will see anything like that again.
Cause they had the entire, , they captured all the demand. So Miami was making unbelievable amounts of money per venue. And we're like, oh my God. Like people wanna party., So when COVID lifted on a national basis, there was definitely a good three, like at least six months of revenge partying.
Where all the clubs saw numbers that like again, we'll never, we probably will never see again. Knock on wood, barring like another pandemic. And so like people were so ready to blow money on nightlife after the pandemic, and so we didn't have to do anything to convince anyone. We just had to be there for them and we were, and so that helped us recover back from zero and get the ball rolling again.
(00:43):
There was certainly like a slump after that momentum ended, and I think that slump continues today in the sense that. We're seeing some systemic shifts with Gen Z, just not drinking as much, not going out as much. So nightclubs are hurting, like they're going, a lot of them are going outta business.
It's a tough, it's a tough time right now for that industry and disco tech, we've really expanded our addressable market to music festivals, which has been more robust over the last few years and that's been a great move for us. And today we're trying to expand beyond that into just a general travel experiences category to grow the business.
Yeah, no, it makes complete sense. And obviously one of the reasons why we wanna have this discussion, 'cause that's what we look at is that the tickets to travel namesake of the show is what drives the demand for all of the travel supply that's around it. And even a nightclub, so to your point of Miami, you're right. No one cared in Florida. Miami was a great nightclub city anyway. But I would venture to say, and maybe you have data to back this up, there's a ton of people from New York, a ton of people from California who are just going to Miami specifically to go to nightclubs and of course, buying up hotel rooms in the process.
Am I warm here? Did you see that number happen?
Oh a hundred percent. People were traveling from everywhere to go to Miami. It wasn't just like locals going out. Music festivals, these are, they're almost always travel related, right? You have to book a ticket to go to the festival, get a hotel,
so people who are attending these events for the event must also spend probably more than they have to budget even more for travel, for hotel for all their other expenses related to it. And that we saw that kind of as like an adjacency.
Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. And so the other piece is maybe listeners don't know this as well, but you're right gen Z does not drink as much.
They spend more on experiences. They're not I dunno what the word is, but they're not really beholden to the same social norms that. Previous generations have been, had adhered to. And so you bring up moving into sort of travel and experiences, have you guys worked with any travel suppliers already to create these experiences and what have you seen that kind of works on your platform because of the type of audience that you have around nightlife?
Yeah, we do. There are a number of called producers who provide the, the hotel and transportation around festivals. There's a company called like One and only there's Vibey. There's there's a handful of them. And so we actually partner with those companies as their affiliate because customers on Discotech are looking to get tickets and deals to the festivals.
And then at the same time, we also hit them with, oh, by the way we also have these hotel package travel deals for the same festival. If you're interested.
Did you do something with. Groove crews and others that are in this crew space as well.
Yes. Groove Cruise like friendship.
There's a number of like travel cruises where they essentially package, it's all just one package. Yeah. You get the room at the cruise, you get all the parties on the cruise. We're selling those as well. Yacht week is another example.
You rent the yacht, but they provide you with a party every single night.
I'm fascinated by that because you, one groove crew any of these are basically floating nightclubs. Float floating resorts. What I think you bring to it or what Discotech brings to, it's just a set of data, right? So you're collecting where these people are coming from, what their, possibly their behavior.
What part does data play in the. Process of a customer working with Discotech?
I think for us it's usually just in terms like, how do we target people? If you're a local nightclub or a regionalized music festival we'll try to target people within a certain radius of that event.
And of course try to target our users based on the type of music we believe that they like. There's usually like customers who are like, they're into EDM and there are some customers, they're into hip hop, and so we use that to try to target our customers while keeping everything relevant.
The genre based targeting is interesting to me. Is it a majority of or percentage of your audience base, like EDM, what's the spread Yeah. Between, because I think that's helpful for a lot of people to understand where that targeting comes from and how they can utilize Discotech to be, to get access to that specific demographic or audience.
Yeah.
Yeah. We certainly target based on demographic, although just 'cause you like EDM doesn't mean you don't like country, for example. EDM is by far the largest segment of our, like most of our customers, the majority are like we tag them as like EDM lovers.
(01:04):
And then say a quarter of them are like hip hop. It drops pretty precipitously after number two. But we do all kinds of genres again, like country rock, pop k-pop.
That's huge too. I mean that, yeah. That's the other thing I'm getting at is I think what's helpful is you have a huge EDM database.
what differentiates these type of people? From other genres that a big brand could come and talk to you and say, Hey, listen, I know I'm trying to find these people specifically. Because I don't think I'm a pretty old guy I love EDM music. I love H House music, but I don't go to clubs.
I'm not there to see exactly who would be your target audience. And I think there is a lot of brands out there who maybe from a sponsorship perspective or activation from a travel perspective who might wanna work with you?
What are some of the insights that you guys have found about your audience?
Yeah, so first, in terms of a gender demographic, we're about 55% male. 45% female. Yeah, it skews on the younger side. Most of our active users are gonna be 21 to 30, early thirties for females, and it skews a little, the range is wider and it skews a little older for the male demographic.
I think in general our users are more affluent than average. I think just when we look at what percentage do you use the iPhone app versus the Android app? It's 80 to 90% are on iPhone. Even though the split is much more normal in the general population, I think because iPhone users on average are more affluent and there is a portion of our clientele that is the luxury class,
because these people are spending 40, $50,000. On a VIP table for one night, and maybe they're booking like three nights in a row. It's a small percentage of our total market, of our total audience, but we definitely have some bigger fish in there
that's really interesting I think, because when. Suppliers may feel like I don't know if someone's gonna buy a $10,000 trip on disco tech, for example. I think it's important to say, Hey, you have that audience base there. Is that a real product that you have is a $50,000 table? Is there anything crazy like that we should note that there are guys sell fairly regularly?
I'll be candid. Like the most expensive tables that we typically will realistically sell are in like the 50,000 per table category.
There are some that are offered in like the six figure category. We've yet to sell one of those. I imagine if you're buying one of those, like you don't need to go through Discotech but 10 K and up tables are like pretty commonplace.. even Vegas, on any given night, there are tables that are like 10 k.
And yeah, those are not that uncommon.
That's great. That's good to know because like I said, there are travel suppliers out there who probably don't know it, but they wanna target the right audience and they wanna make sure that, Hey, you know what, I'm gonna sell a few of these because I think the other piece that from a supply slash distribution perspective, suppliers wanna understand.
How easy it is, how frictionless it is to put their supply on your platform. So if I was a tour operator, like a vibey or one of these guys who obviously gone through a tremendous amount of work to curate this experience, how would they work with you?
Yeah, so as an affiliate we're we try to make things like very easy and scalable.
We typically just track our sales with an affiliate tracking link . so that we get credit or a promo code. Our motto, or I guess our what we say on our app and our website is save again, save money Party smarter. Yep. So we're always trying to give some kind of perk or deal to the end user.
And so if we can get like a discounted tracking link, which is like something that like Cirque du sole gives us, for example or a discounted promo code. We push that to our audience and then we. We take it from there. Yeah. We just, it's super simple
to set up. Yeah. You track it, you invoice them or you have payment set up and they pay you for that lead essentially once it closes.
Again the tickets themselves of the live event drive the travel demand. Does this mean that you might sell some hotel rooms one day?
We are, again, we're selling hotel rooms as part of these travel packages already. Got it. So we're not like directly integrated, like with we're not like API integrated with any hotel providers. At least not yet, but we're certainly open to the idea of exploring it because again, it's so adjacent to what we're already selling.
Yeah, I think there's probably a few people in this audience who are like, ah, we might wanna have that conversation.
(01:25):
So what's next for Discotech, other than the travel experiences stuff, are you guys. Looking to go more international or is it bigger audiences somewhere? Are you doing any strategic deals that'll give you access to better inventory? Is there anything out there that you could talk about?
Certainly we're always looking for international expansion opportunities. So the vast majority of our users are US-based and we do currently work with festivals and clubs in other countries.
So we're in like the three major cities in Canada. We're in Ibiza, Bali like the uk. Places where there's a good concentration of nightlife, but it's like those international opportunities are just a small piece of what we do. We've largely been focused on the us but we are certainly looking to just get more and more festivals, club venues, experiences on the platform.
We've built it. We just need to fill it. And if we fill it and if we can help them save money and party smarter, it's like things work out. I think one thing that just as you're talking and just understanding how the business works have you ever thought about doing like a direct to fan thing with a particular DJ or an artist or promotions group and say, Hey, you know what?
You can cut people out at this whole equation by going directly to these audiences and being an exclusive provider of an experience or a. Let's say a tour of a particular dj, would that be something you could do on the platform?
We would love to partner with artist management and help them promote their tours on disco tech?
Would we wanna be exclusive? Like we certainly would. I'll be honest. Look, I don't think we have the leverage that like a Live Nation ticket Master does by any means. There's no risk in partnering with us.
There's no signup fee, there's no subscription costs. We work purely on commission as an affiliate, and so why not sell tickets through us? Given that. You, we only take a 10% commission, right? Yeah. No I think it just depends on the size of the artists essentially.
There's a certain amount of them who are not gonna get that Live Nation Ticketmaster. so depending on how easy it is for you guys to take that inventory and to promote it, there's probably this level, of artists, let's say like a young gravy or a like a TikTok artist , where they're looking for expanded distribution , to your type of audience. I'm just wondering if that's something that's of interest to you guys no, I'm just like, it's certainly of interest and it would be very, so for you, it's a supply game.
Yeah, it's very easy for us to onboard new inventory. In fact, like I would say the technology behind Discotech is like really optimized for scaling and bringing on more events. We've done a good job over the last decade plus of building that, and now it's really just.
Getting more inventory and then getting more end users, it's supply and distribution. Yeah. And maybe there's some platform in the middle of all of that, but if you can optimize either, because you could have all the distribution in the world, but if you don't have the right supply, it's not gonna convert and you're not gonna have repeat business
and so that's why I think it's really interesting. You're now in a stage where you're like, I can vary the amount of supply that's gonna. Be directly related to this type of person. You told us a story of how you created the business with your co-founder, but by trade, are you a tech guy?
So I started my career at Bain and Company as a management consultant. And then I moved into the private equity realm. So I worked as a private equity associate, doing d due diligence on m and a deals.
A few years and then just made the leap into becoming the the CEO of a. Startup.
You just follow your passion. And it just made sense. We've just been messing
around
figuring it out, making mistakes. Yeah. But it's worked out, right? Like you get to do cool stuff.
And also, 'cause where I was going with that was trying to understand, 'cause anytime I talk to a distributor now at any level, the buzzword becomes about ai . and so I was just curious how do you answer that question? Like, how are you guys working with ai? Is it from a
A backend perspective, or is it more like suggestions on the front end? Like how do you guys see AI coming into
Yeah. Your business?
Currently today we love leveraging AI as just like a tool, right? Like our engineers use it to make their lives easier. The business side of things uses AI to.
(01:46):
Make our to help us do our jobs. We certainly believe that at some point, Discotech needs to leverage this key buzzword as well to improve the experience for our end users. Yeah. Again, AI is like a pretty loose term. Are we already using ai? I think from a strategic level, like when I talk to a number of different startups and when they go to talk to VCs or other investors in the, in this game there's always this buzzword of how are you gonna use the ai? And so I liken it as everybody has a response to this.
It's just, it just depends on. How your teams want to initiate it. Yeah. And so I'm just curious obviously the end user experience there'll be some layer of AI to do that, but like how do you see it as I guess, beneficial to the business growing?
Down the road, the most powerful use case for us would be using AI to help people.
Party smarter. So saving them time in finding the events that they really want because rather than scrolling and endlessly scrolling and asking yourself, do I want that? Disco tech can just be like, Hey, we really think you'll like these events. And if we're accurate about it. They save time, they find these great events and then we, of course get higher conversion.
Personalization is really exactly stuff you're talking about. Yeah.
Personalization recommendations notifications. I think that's certainly one way of doing it. And then yeah, leveraging AI on the business end to do like better marketing, right? Creating better content and reaching.
A more targeted audience.
If I were to go to Discotech today, like what do you think is the coolest experience that I could purchase and. While you're thinking about that, what's the aspirational thing? Do you think you'd wanna go sell a suite at the World Cup next year?
Coolest experience. That's a tough question. There's so many cool, like music festivals and as mentioned there's like yacht week, which I think is like pretty cool. And we do things in all sorts of exotic places. But I think it depends on the customer and like what they like. Honestly for me, I'm also like a house head myself. I love electronic music. To me it's still, and this is gonna sound cookie cutter, but like EDC is still just like super cool if someone hasn't been, it is like an amazing festival. It's really incredible.
I'm not sure I've been to a, festival that does it like they do. Yeah.
Insomniac knows what they're doing. Yeah.
Yeah. They're doing it in Medellin, Columbia, so maybe we go. Okay.
I didn't even know about that, but we can certainly talk about that.
That sounds awesome. Could you do sports? Could you do, like I mentioned World Cup? 'cause it's coming up. There's a lot of different, there's a I would love to, yeah. Yeah. Do you think it would resonate with your audience?
The truth is, I don't know, right? But. When we went from nightlife into like music festivals. In hindsight, it seems like super obvious, but like we weren't sure really if was gonna work.
at first this seems crazy, but then fast forward how many years, then you're like, okay, this is a viable part of our business now.
Yeah. After festivals, we started doing like other, like shows that we thought were adjacent to what we're already doing. So like comedy clubs.
we're selling decently for those. We also do like theater and concert shows. Magic Mic Live in Vegas as an example. Yeah. Du Soleil. These are other types of live performances. Yeah. Those are performing really well on Discotech. Again, we have a large audience in Vegas and they're looking for.
Other things to do. Some of our audience is older now maybe shifting to new things, and so we've been pleasantly surprised by. These adjacencies. Now sports, I think is one more adjacency beyond like theater and concerts. But I can certainly see it , so yes, we were, would love to add like sporting events to the platform if we can get the the right partnerships.
Are there other mechanisms that you guys have, not just the app, do you have push notifications? Do you have email that is targeted? Like how do you guys market a particular experience?
So we certainly do push notification marketing and we believe that is like the most effective tool or lever that we have.
(02:07):
We also do email marketing blast, but those have been like way less effective than the push. The pushes lately. Yeah. We also leverage our social media account as well. We do like ticket giveaways for our festival partners and story posts, so that's another tool as well. But for the most part, I think beyond the push notification blast, which is impactful.
Yeah. Our users are just browsing the app and the website and discovering events for themselves.
So in terms of distressed inventory, like that's core to what we do, because when clubs are just trying to fill their venue. Yeah. Because it's not a good look for anyone when the club is empty. It sucks for the dj. You need audience there to help everyone have fun, build the energy. And of course, the more people there, the more drinks or food is purchased.
So that's where like the disco guest list comes in? . You sign up, you get in for free, you show up early, like everyone's a winner, including like the venue, right? They'll sell more drinks, they'll sell more concessions, even though they're letting you in for free. So that's very core to what we do.
And that's what like the guest list is all about. It's about filling venues.. And then discounts, right? If you're really, if you have really heavily distressed inventory, give us a big discount. We'll push it out to our audience. If they buy it, great. If not you're in the same position you were before.
There's no real risk for anybody. It's just another marketing touch point to a specific market.
I don't think it requires any new lift.
Because we just treat it as an event. A music event. A sport event. It's an event. Yep. And if we can offer a discounted ticket or a free guest list, in my head, my engineering team might be like, shut up. I feel getting us into right now, I feel like it'd be handled the exact same way.
So I don't think there would be a tech lift. And from a. From like a sales perspective, I would love to try it.
From an affiliate perspective, you guys probably do redemption of a promo code, or do you do will call or is there, what, how do you typically transfer the ticket to somebody in a guest list situation?
so the guest list usually works a little bit differently in the sense that , it's really archaic. Okay. But there's literally a list at the venue,
on
a spreadsheet. I print it out, piece of paper or like a Google Doc or however they manage it. And there'll be like names on the list that will say Discotech next to it. And like people check in with their name and then check marks. Yeah, that's it. Like
they, they print them a ticket and you get to go into town, beach, or whatever it is. Exactly. That's, no, that's
literally how it works. That's literally how it works.
You're right that a lot of this on the ticketing side, if I look at it from, let's say hotels,
they're probably . 10, 20 years behind hotel connectivity. In terms of I'm gonna book this hotel room on a website, it's gonna go right into the system. I deal with the hotel now versus the distributor, they don't really have that at on ticketing just yet, unless that's why Ticketmaster's so huge.
Because it you buy it on Ticketmaster, it's in that system. It's in the primary, yeah. Versus you you're this external distribution end where they have to walk in and. Present themselves, show an id, validate that they're the person, then they print you the ticket and you walk in and have a great time.
Yeah. So it's, there's all these sort of complexity. That's why I like to have these conversations , okay, how easy is it? How, what's the tracking? Like? How do payments work? Because it always comes down to that. It comes down to time and money
and I think if we're doing a promo code, it's just so easy,
because. They're just going through their existing ticketing provider. So like payment is like already solved. We're just pushing out the deal to our customers and push as long as it's a compelling savings, like our customers are happy getting advertised to.
(02:28):
Even if they don't wanna go to this event, they're like, oh, disco tech's only sending me like deals., Maybe they'll send me something I do care about, so I'm not gonna uninstall this app. That's the stickiest part of your business is you've got one point, what'd you say, 1.8 people with the app downloaded?
Yeah, I think we just
Broke through 1.9 mil, and is a lot of that organic or are you guys doing, you doing Google and a few other things to get people to, to do organic? The
majority
throughout all of our history has been
organic. Yeah, I get that sense. That's awesome.
And I think largely because of like the guest lists, right? Someone's Hey, download discotech, you can get into this club or party for free.. Or Hey, download discotech, you can save money on tickets. The whole save money party. Smarter thing only, we only came up with that like a year ago.
We looked at what was working and we're like, okay, we need to communicate the value proposition more quickly.
What's the next level for disconet? Not in terms of supply that you're gonna get. Are you looking to get acquired? Are you looking to exit? Are you just trying to just go global and just own this for the rest of your life?
I think in the medium to long term, exiting would be fantastic. Like we've already been doing this for 12 years.
We've been doing it a really long time. I would say like in the last year again, we had to recover from the pandemic.
Things are finally stable and good again. Our mission is really just focusing on growth, growing users, growing top line, growing profitability. And we believe that as long as we can do that, good things will happen because companies are bought. They're not sold. And that's really the only thing we can control right now. So we're just trying to focus on being like a lean, mean, cash flowing machine. But yeah, we would love to sell down the road,
You're also a consultant, so you're a management consultant. You understand how all this stuff works. And so I, I would imagine that you're into building, you're making sure the it flies and then you probably gotta.
Probably 10 other ideas that you wanna get going at some
point. I used to work on the buy side, like buying companies. Like LBOs, so I totally, yeah I'm definitely very familiar with how that all works. And so for us it's just if we can focus on EBITDA and grow ebitda, things are good.
Hey man, thanks for your time. Congratulations on your wedding. I'm pretty sure you had a great time thank you out in Bali and obviously, hopefully we'll be able to do this again soon, and track your progress at disco Tech.
Appreciate it, Mario. Thanks again. Thank you.
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