How TitanX Hit $9.7M ARR With Phone Intent Data and a Frontspin Acquisition

What did you spend on the IP?

$1,000,200 upfront, $800 seller note.

What's revenue today at TitanX?

Today we're sitting at the time of recording this, we're at 9,700,000 ARR.

What's your largest customer pay you per year today?

One just expanded to $40.06 ARR, three year contract.

Oh, wow. Okay. So it's a $1,200,000 contract. Did you get creative on this acquisition? Was it 10,000,000 acquisition, a million upfront, how'd you structure it?

Yeah. It was a $13,000,000 acquisition. We put 7,000,000 upfront. We went growth equity. So we raised 27,000,000 and then 10,000,000 went in our pocket as secondary cash.

Zoom, if Henry shuck it some info came and offered you $200,000,000 of all cash today to sell the company, do you take it? Hey, folks. My guest today is Joey Gilkey. He's a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TitanX, a sales intelligence platform that created the phone intent category. He famously bet his entire net worth on the company, shutting down three other cash flowing businesses to focus on a proprietary model that predicts who will actually answer your cold call. Under his leadership, it's grown to millions of revenue, they just recently raised a series a. Joey, you ready to take us to the top?

Let's do it, brother.

Alright. So tell me first, how did you get into this space? Are you an ex sales guy, or when did you launch?

Yeah, man. I've been in the enterprise sales world my whole career, so I started off in the fortune world.

Okay. So tell me about that. When did you acquire that piece of IP? What year?

That was August 2023, and I acquired it for a different reason than it turned into. So I seem like a brilliant... I'm more just like a brilliant idiot. Thought how I was gonna use it was I was gonna build it for my my fractional business. It was gonna be the moat around that services company. We started using it in like a licensing model at the fractional company, and then I realized pretty quickly that it was it

was like dark magic that was heavily expensive and very slow. And if I can get my hands on it, can throw money in R and D and optimize it. Plus I knew where a lot of the bodies lived when it comes to where does unique telco data live and fraud detection data, all that kind of stuff.

So why... What did you spend on the IP to do? You know, was it millions of dollars or...

1,000,000 on the dot. Cash? $200 upfront, $800 seller. Nope. So I turned $200,000 into what is currently valued at 100,000,000. Yeah.

Okay. Well, and now we have to... Like, I gotta figure out where to jump around. I'm curious about so many things. So I guess why did you feel like you needed to buy the IP versus just build it from scratch? Where are the million bucks just bought you so much time?

It bought me a ton of time for one. For two, a lot of my competition... Again, the goal is to to both build the moat and pull the drawbridge up from competition. So a lot of folks in my space were starting to to look at it, see it, use it a little bit, and there were some big behemoth competitors like Memory Blue, abstract marketing and things of that nature on the like outsourced sales development world that were starting to their hands on it. I was like, if I'm gonna protect this and have a unique value prop, I gotta own it. And I'm gonna dictate who can use it.

What what... I mean, I interview a lot of folks that tell me they have proprietary data and then when you dig under the hood, all they're doing is buying other people's data. They're running an ETL process on it and then selling it back to customers. What was the actual proprietary dataset here? Was it a process or an actual dataset?

It is both. Right? So... And it's been built upon dramatically at this point. So when I bought it, it was a tech enabled service. So there's a lot of like technology enabling humans in the loop to power it. And so for us, it was more about how do we make this scalable without having a deprecation of the quality of the outcome. So if anything, it's actually gotten faster, it's gotten cheaper. It's... We can do it at scale at this point and it's more effective in terms of the data we're able to find now.

So fast forward to today, you've grown this thing, you bought it for 200 k cash plus 800 sellers note. What's revenue today at TitanX?

TitanX is sitting... We just did a small acquisition. We paid low 8 figures for that. And that is in the dialer space. So we acquired a company called Frontspin at the time of this going out that will be very public. So Frontspin was built for high velocity dialing. Not a very sound business, but an incredibly sound and scalable technology can scale to a million users. And we've been power users of Frontspin in a lot of

different ways. It actually powered the call center in the early days. That's how we know so much about it. It excels in call deliverability. So anyways, today we're sitting at the time of recording this, we're in early twenty six, we're at 9,700,000 ARR.

That's post acquisition. Right?

Post acquisition, they're contributing about 2,000,000. So for me, excuse me, well, old school. TitanX is sitting at about $7.7.0.2, 7.4 and Frontspin at 2.1.

And did you get creative on this acquisition? If it's, know, what is it 10,000,000 acquisition, a million upfront or how do you structure it?

It was a $13,000,000 acquisition. We put 7,000,000 up front. We went growth equity. So we raised 27,000,000, 10 of which is primary. So that's for growth, a little bit more than 10. 7,000,000 went towards the acquiring Frontspin, 6,000,000 of that from Frontspin CEO got rolled in, and then 10,000,000 went in our pocket as secondary cash.

Because I wanna... First off, it's very rare to find a founder that's as transparent as Joey, so I'm gonna really push on this. One of the things that I see founders, they're just making a mistake right now is, you know, when you go out and raise external capital, people say, Nathan, you just hate VC. That's not the... That's not true. What what I actually am saying is if you're gonna go give up control, take cash as well. Don't give up control and cash. So like Joey gave up some control here with the series a, but he also got paid. He got his first bite. I mean, I don't know Joey what your personal net worth is, but I imagine 10,000,000 secondary is meaningful for you.

Yeah. I mean, it it certainly adds some padding. I mean, I've done well in my career, but it... I did bet my net worth on this So I'm basically just replenishing a lot of capital at this point but yeah, it helped.

So let me ask you a question, you raised the 27,000,000 at what valuation?

Just under 190 something, 92. But since then we've grown, we've added about a million to in the past month since the acquisition finished. So we're well over a 100.

The reason I'm bringing this up is this is a really cool arbitrage here, mostly public companies do this, but you're doing it in the private markets. What I mean by that is when you did the 27,000,000 round at a, we'll just call it a 100,000,000 post money and you're doing 7,000,000 of ARR, that's about a 14.3 X multiple at the same time you use that money to go buy Frontspin, was 2,000,000 of revenue, Right? For call it, I think you said 7,000,000. Right? That's right. Is that right? That's 13. Four x. 13. Oh, 13. Okay. Still, you're still in the money.

And so I wanted to give them a piece, put them on the cap table. Obviously, it's earned. So And I had a lot of criteria. I wanna control. I wanted to steer the ship. Don't touch my culture respectfully. Go after yourself if you want to. And they were like, cool. We believe in that. It was great.

Guys up in, know, Founderpath by Main Gate. It looked very supportive of Joey's deal. I'll just put it that way. So Update, you'd also, I guess Joey say good things about UpData.

Oh, they're awesome. You know, that was the biggest thing is I need a partner that believed in our vision, knew our market. Like when they showed up for the first management meeting, they'd interviewed customers, done deep market research, so I became prepared.

Whenever you're ready though, I will convince Trey and eventually you to take a $5,000,000 term loan from Founderpath with a with a four year IO period and an all in interest rate in a 12 to 14% range. No warrants, no PGs, no nothing.

Click with that. There we go.

Alright. Hey. So where do you... Do you keep running this playbook over and over? I mean, you effectively could buy your way to a $100,000,000 of revenue just doing the same thing over and over.

Yeah. I mean, I look at... Again, this is the buy versus build risk quadrant for me. It's it's more along what's the timeline? What's our goals? When's our recap timeline? And when we're actually recap this thing again? I plan on rolling this thing two three times in terms of rolling equity over. I just really believe in the vision. It's always gonna be about the partner. It's gonna be about the valuation clearly and what the secondary looks

like on those deals. But we have, know, with where TitanX lives today, we are an intelligence layer that lives between where people get their data from. So think ZoomInfo, Clay, Apollo, Cognism, and where they dial that. Right? So that goes through Salesforce, SEPs, and that eventually makes it to Nooks and Orem and now Frontspin. Well, we we captured the bookend there on Frontspin with with having the dialer and the intelligence layer built in. What is...

What I do believe is the future. I don't wanna be a data provider in the sense of I'm not trying to compete with ZoomInfo and those guys. I think data is a commodity. But it's how we manipulate that data, how do we use AI to really help inform better decisions, how do we close the full feedback loop of here's how I built the list, here's how it scored with TitanX, here's how it performed in the dialer, what does that tell me about the next list for my reps. So they will probably play an MMA play there. I've got a couple targets in mind I can't necessarily talk about. Know you're gonna ask on that front end of the bookends.

How do you know how do you know I'm gonna ask you? Will you listen to the show?

I haven't listened. I've read your book back in the day actually when I was broke. Oh nice. Yeah that was good. I actually arbitraged a few things. I arbitraged a chrome extension back in the day off your rock. Yeah. I went and bought a chrome extension. Look at terrible reviews. Yes. The unique part about us is there's... If you think about our whole model, we've got 70 plus signals that we're pulling in our sources. Most of

which are either compliantly scraped in some ways or purchased on the private markets or it's public data. And then there's there's human elements to what we do that's impossible for added touch. Outbound dialing is regulated by FCC's TCPA guidelines, so you can't touch that. I mean, that's a very small micro thing, but we have a lot of other things.

No. I think that's extremely relevant though. I mean, you just give a perfect example. When when someone comes to me and says, Nathan, you should you should invest in the company. We have proprietary data. If they can't give me an answer like you just gave, I say, guys, like, the Foundation Models aren't just gonna scrape this and anyone can get this easily. What's your IP? So that that makes a ton of sense. It's super interesting. Guys,

remember, am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 into five fifty software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube, and

I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. Question I've got for you, how are you getting customers today? Because when I put TitanX and Ahrefs, there's like no traffic. I think he maybe did a recent rebrand, but how are you getting customers today?

I would say right now we're 45% inbound organic or about 9%.

Wait. Where is that though? Look. I'm not seeing any. I'm seeing very little inbound organic here.

Is it a different website you're getting traffic from?

No, titanx.io is correct. I mean we get about 9,000, 10,000 uniques a month.

So maybe Ahrefs is just full of it.

It's full of it, yeah. Interesting. Now we probably generate, you know in our average ticket we have different customer bands, So we have three to 10 reps, 10 to 30 reps, 30 to 50, 50 plus. Those kinda correlate to a price range of 24 k, 50 k, 90 k, and 250 k. 45% is coming through inbound, organic, that's about a 140 meetings a month just from the website with the high ACV. Outbound's our bread and butter.

Clearly we use our own product and so about 38% comes through outbound sourcing, phone only. And then I would say the rest is a mix of paid referrals and affiliates. We're building the referral affiliate market right now. A really underutilized channel for us, but it's powerful.

What's your highest... What's your largest customer pay you per year today?

We're sitting at Well one just expanded to $40.06.

406,000 a year.

Three year contract, yeah.

That's great. Okay, so $40.06 per year or over that three years? AR, one year Each year. Oh, wow. Okay. So so it's a $1,200,000 contract.

Yeah. We have one right now that's... They're they're a publicly traded company. They're currently at a 250,000, but they're about to expand like 1.5 ARR in a three year.

What makes your sales team be able to drive that upsell revenue? Is it number of dials, number of seats, product based upselling something?

Yeah. It's... So we're we're unique in the sense... Not not unique. We're we're consumption based, it's a credit model. And so we're very hands on account management, technical account management, technical solution consultant. We have a VP of customer strategy that comes from the space. So when we jump into an org like the one I'm talking about, they... We got in at two fifty. We've only got one team. Currently, there's six teams I can expand to. So

a lot of it's moving to different teams and therefore adding credit consumption. Their credit allotment goes up, but then there's also different plays. You can go up, down, sideways, you can get into their partner side, you can get into their go to market inbound side. So six is the outbound side, but then you have other channels that are... Other departments we can crawl our way through. They aren't over consuming, therefore it's an expansion opportunity or they're

under consuming, it's a turn flag. And then we're just looking for different ways. And now naturally that we've acquired the dialer, now we have a whole another product line that we'll be able to add on. It gives us a whole another level of intelligence and signals for how they're using platform.

Interesting. As we wrap up here, finish your revenue story. You launched in 2023 with acquisition of IP. What was 2024 ending ARR?

Well, we didn't have one because I didn't launch this till June '24. So I acquired in '23 as the IP to be the moat around the services company. I made the decision in early twenty four to sunset the services company again, it was doing mid 7 figures. And then June 06/01/2024 is when we took our first dollar beta launch, 200 users. It was like a... We're trying to do a PLG model like the first month or

two I realized that's for the birds. And so we ended up going zero to 1,400,000 at the end of twenty four, and then 1.4 to whatever 6 ish, six something end of twenty five. And then now we're with the combined acquisition and the growth of 26 so far about 9.7.

Really fascinating. And all that early, again, going from zero to six minute revenue that quickly, I wanna just make sure I'm not missing any learnings from you. Was there any like customer acquisition strategy you used on those early days?

Yeah. Mean, like, one, we do have a superpower in our tool. It's like why we have high retention is why our NRR is out the roof. It's why our magic number is a 4.1 the last quarter.

What's NRR?

The net revenue retention. Oh, what's this?

I know I... 1.36. Come on. You know me. You know I know what NRR means. Shit. But you're at $100,136? Okay.

Yeah. Gross dollar retention's a little low. It's like 92. We're fixing that. And then our our magic number was 4.14 versus

Why do you say you're fixing the 92? Mean, that's not terrible in this segment to have 92 gross, but 136 net.

I wanna see us at 97. It's my goal.

Yeah. Interesting. Alright.

That's a little Well, hey.

Finish up with prediction here. What do you guys think you'll finish 2026 with?

2026, 18.7.

If someone came... If Zoom... If Henry Schuckett's Venmo came and offered you $200,000,000 of all cash today to sell the company, do you take it?

Absolutely not. That's why it's too long. It's so quick. Well, I have, you know, part of my growth equity deals, I threw in some kickers I need.

Tell me what you mean by that.

If we 2.5 x, I get something back. If we three x, I get something back. If I three x on a certain timeline, I get something something something back.

Like you set up an ESOP pool and that gets distributed to you at certain revenue targets?

Yeah. Bonus structures, I get equity back, points back, so on.

Super smart. This is awesome. I've learned a ton here, Joey. If people wanna follow follow you online, learn more from you, where can they find you?

I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Linkedin.com/in/joegilkeandtienext.io.

Guys, really interesting founding story. Had a 7 figure agency in 2023. He said, you know what? I'm using this one tool. Let me go buy the IP. Was called PhoneReadyLeads. Spent about a million bucks to do that 200 k cash up front. The rest was a seller note. Ultimately, took that 200 k and turned into a $9,000,000 ARR business, 9.7. Now today, it started off with 200 beta users and call it June 2024. He then killed

that model, moved towards enterprise, and broke $1,400,000 at the end of twenty twenty four, scaled to 6,000,000 into 2025. Again, now today scaling nicely. Just did a series a of $27,000,000 at around a 100,000,000 post money valuation of which there's a large secondary component of $10,000,000. The rest went to his first or a second really acquisition of a company called Frontspin doing 2,000,000 of ARR, bought it for $13,000,000. Creative deal structure there as well. Now focused

on breaking call at $1,415,000,000 bucks here in 2026. TitanX.io. If you're doing outbound and you're using phone numbers, test them out. Joey, thanks for taking us to the top.

Thanks, Appreciate it.

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