How Bizzabo CEO Eran Ben-Shushan grew to $43.9M revenue and 600 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is iran ben shushan he is the ceo and co-founder of biz up ibizabe an all-in-one event success platform one of the fastest growing event tech companies in the world he's led the company winning the people's choice award at the event tech awards for three years in a row before this company he was an event marketer and served as the ceo of the rosh pina media media convention he also was a team leader and systems engineer at elbit systems he graduated laude from the interdisciplinary center school where he studied business and participated in the prestigious zell entrepreneurship program often considered the y combinator of israel iran are you ready to take us to the top i am ready is hey is that programmed by samsel the real estate mogul yes ah very good we'll study the heck out of him man that guy just seems like a genius did you get to spend meaningful time with him uh i wouldn't say meaningful but spent enough time to leave a mark very good enough so that you can use it to make visibo uh you know 100 million dollar company right indeed all right very good all right talk to us about the company um what does the company do and how do you guys make money yeah you know uh visibo is a company that is trying to take events to the modern era which means we all go to those events professional events whether they are internal external bigger events uh there are a lot of inefficiencies at events and it's not only about functionality it's also about the data aspect and how can you really leverage the data at events to make them measurable automated and personalized this is what visible does we do it by uh building an end-to-end platform which is extremely robust so we take care of everything from your website registration email marketing agenda management mobile app analytics uh you name it so we kind of built 15 different startups into one startup which is a very powerful tool and is today the system of record for organizations to manage their events we sell it under a sas annual subscription model usually uh multi-year uh and that's how we uh make money and that's what in essence visible does and just because we don't have time to go on every customer code on average what would you consider an annual contract to come in or out like 10 grand 100 a million yeah so we look at it by different cohorts we have three different cohorts but i would say across the board the average is 25k 25 000 bucks okay very good so call it maybe 2000 bucks a month or something like that um let me let me ask you a question most other event applications like this i've had on the show with the exception of maybe like reggie at cvent and dan at social tables there there's always major churn issues because people will have an event in january then they will cancel when they don't need your software then they will re-sign up next january like when they need it again so my question to you is how do you how do you which by the way i don't actually consider that churn because they're still paying every year it's just they cancel in between how do you measure churn and how do you keep your you know however you measure it low we measure churn just like like any other company uh i think what you're referring to really depends on the type of customer you're thinking of we sell to customers so think about corporations that run dozens of events at minimum annually uh and in this case sometimes we even have customers that run a thousand events a year right those would be customers that have three business events or professional events every business day uh they think about visible or their event platform is something that is recurring constant a part of their life cycle and and blood circle in their organization so we we think about churn just like any other company that has annual subscriptions okay so when you look at trailing 12 months what is before you add back expansion revenue what does gross churn come in at about uh gross churn so we went through a process in the past a year and a half of really identifying what is the sweet spot for us in terms of the right customers uh that visible would be also the right fit for them right it's not about what's the right customer for us it's what uh for what kind of organization visible is the right tool and not an overcoat not an overkill or too much and not uh too little so uh we had to uh go through a process of deciding and making some difficult decisions about some cohorts of customers that we will need to split ways if they cannot get to certain level and of criteria and obviously doing it with the utmost respect and being a super customer centric company this is something we always believe in uh so in terms of gosh churn that would be around i would say eighty percent and in the past uh you know six months or so negative net churn so overall pretty healthy so just to be clear 80 percent of your revenue over the past 12 months churned no no no retention i was about to say that that'd be not a good position so 20 churned 80 retained now the way to get to net negative is you obviously make up that 20 churn with expansion so what's total expansion been something above 20 i assume yep but what is it like starting like 30 or just barely above 20. it's uh between 20 to 25. oh okay fair enough good so that puts your you know said differently net net revenue retention is above 100 maybe up as high as 105 percent correct and that's you know and and obviously when you look at it quartized by different segments between uh you know uh smb to mid market to enterprise you would see different ratios obviously typical to assess business of course yeah of course that's the nice thing about net revenue retention is it equalizes our poo differences right it's just it doesn't matter if someone's paying you a buck or 100 million bucks when you when you you know if the dollar churns it's no big deal if the 100 million turns that's a really big deal talk talk to me about how you've structured your kind of use cases around expansion tell me the story of someone that started off paying you 20 grand a year and they expanded to 40 or 50 grand why are they expanding is an event volume number of seats data play what is it yeah so uh that's you know obviously it needs to start from having the right business model in place and thinking about that in the right time and building it into your model and then it needs to be highly correlated to the value of the platform i would say that we would see typically two use cases one is we on the same team they would start little with us and then they will give us the rest of the business on on the same team of more events or within an organization we would have the classic land and expand uh type of approach where you would go into an enterprise organization you would start with them uh with one local team and then then let's say you get 100 events uh and you know one or two teams and then they make the referral which is there's nothing better than that to other teams in the organization and that would be another expansion model yep interesting um we jumped into the economics pretty quickly here let's put all this on a timeline when did you launch the company what year we launched the company uh first product out to the market was summer of 2012. okay and we actually started we had we had an interesting story and we started from trying to solve the problem of people going to events and not knowing who to meet so you know we were i was an event planner myself but we were also attending a lot of events and i'm sure a lot of the people listening to us and maybe yourself as well when going to these events sometimes it can be really frustrating you're there everything is left for serendipity and luck and uh nothing is really predictive and there's no science behind it although you would think that in 2019 and even back then 2012 you should be able to have all the tools and all the data out there whether on social networks or your mobile device or your computer to run those events in a much better way but that frankly doesn't exist and that bothers us a lot so as entrepreneurs who said we're going to fix it but two years in our customers actually told us you know you build this great mobile networking app why aren't you doing also the other elements of events which are actually more painful and we need even more help there and are even more mission critical to the success of the event like the website like registration analytics agenda email marketing you know combined with the social aspects and networking aspects and around two years in so call it mid late 2014 we realized we have even a bigger opportunity ahead of us where what's traditionally out there in the in the market is more of you know legacy solutions that are focused more on functionality and we said we're going to build visibo to be a strong holistic functional platform with an even stronger data infrastructure and that's how it's built so that was the timeline launch 2012 expanded the book the model and became a sas company towards 2015. and iran how many how many customers have you scaled to now today yeah i can't say exact numbers uh but uh in the high hundreds yeah no no by the way a range is fine so fair to say between 700 and a thousand something like that around that yeah very very good all right and then um walk me through what the team looks like today so how many folks we have 120 people originally we're from israel i guess the name and the accent uh my you know uh but uh you probably picked on that but uh we started the company in israel i myself moved here to new york and joined one of the co-founders were three co-founders who started the business i joined uh alone my co-founder who uh came here first around four years ago we have around 50 people in the israeli team everything around product engineering and design is based in tel aviv incredible team incredible talent uh and and we're very happy of having this structure in place and here in new york we have all the go to market team so marketing sales customer success client services and operations and how much capital have you raised to build the company have you managed to stay bootstrapped we no we uh raised to date 56 million dollars oh brutal man i was liking you so much and then i'm going oh he's raised a bunch of money we just uh closed our series d round uh earlier in april a month ago uh 27 million dollar round yeah why why was that the right time to raise more capital listen the the event space uh is one that uh you know a it wasn't always obvious that uh or not it was initially an uphill battle i would say to raise capital right not always maybe the sexiest uh industry but uh over the years and i think also later on with some of the transactions like sievent and others people realize there is a huge market opportunity and one that is very tight and correlated with marketing automation and crm and events being a black box so huge addressable market not a lot of sophisticated tools in the market to solve the problem and pretty complex problem to solve event planners and in general events are complex there's a high level of anxiety and the set of tools that they need so you know visible is heavy technology it has a lot of functionality built into it that we were able to execute well in over the years and that requires capital and as for the timing why now is the right timing because visible is you know definitely i'm very proud to say after hard work and a lot of passion in the past seven years is a market leader among modern software for events and uh i guess that we and also the investor that participated identified that we're probably the company that has the highest potential to become the next category defining platform and be able to really revolutionize the space and doing that with additional capital and going after bigger customers and more enterprise accounts and having the means and the capital to build the level of innovation that we have in mind is something that uh resonated with us as the right timing to raise more and how much time do you think you need to break like the 15 or 20 million ar mark um like within reach yeah it's gonna happen soon yeah i mean do you i mean is it is it uncomfortable enough where you don't think it can happen this year or it's a fair stretch goal for this year probably it's to happen next year um but very early next year yeah no no that's great and do you think most of that like when you have your internal kind of strategy discussions do you think that will come from expansion revenue or new customer logos altogether both now i know obviously both but what do you think's going to be a bigger driver expansion or new i think uh this year more is going to come from new and probably next year in 2021 we're going to start seeing actually that shifting because the courts of more enterprise customers coming on board is going to be more prominent towards uh or or throughout this year and then expanding them in 2020 and 2021 so that's that might change the books and the balance a little bit in the future yeah and then when you look at the past 12 months are you still able to double year over year or are you getting too big to be able to still do that that and above yeah huh we are able and and even more yeah okay so past 12 months you are more than 100 percent over your growth yeah that's great um last question here before i capture kind of more your story and where you see the space going um you know 700 customers right at a kind of two thousand dollar per month price point i didn't say the exact number but let's call it roughly yeah well sorry you said hi hundreds and i said fair to say between 700 a thousand you said sure i said around that number yeah okay get fair okay good well maybe that answers my question because if it was 700 at the acv you told me before that which was about 24 a year or two grand a month that puts you at 1.4 month which is 16 a year it sounds like you're still kind of working towards the 15 mark or something like that so you have less than 700 customers at this point and also remember that the acv is the current acv and historically you know that also that's also a metric that doubled almost year over year over time yeah yeah well and i didn't ask i wasn't asking acv i was asking kind of arpu average revenue per user per month so maybe that's a bit i i assume look by the way i don't want to like pin you down here right but i want to get the general ranges right so we're in the right ranges i mean you know fluctuate plus or minus 10 you are yeah okay fair enough let's move let's move past that so um you just raised additional capital um when you go out and raise how aggressive are you being in terms of how many months of burn you want to raise for are you a 12-month kind of guy 24-month kind of guy what do you plan for uh 24 and also thinking about how we can you know build a sustainable business i think that's also important at the level of uh you know company that we're at i think that we're at a stage in maturity of the business uh and from an operational standpoint that we're able to uh double or have high growth rate and also think about building a healthy business with healthy unit economics that that can you know can put you in a position to uh take the business to profitability should you choose to do that mm-hmm and then i mean when you when you go out and raise the kind of money that you just raised in your head you guys kind of have where you plan to spend most of that in terms of whether it's more sdr's or more tech people team builder product features things like that how aggressive are you comfortable driving burn ups i mean will you go to the point would you be comfortable burning a million bucks a month for a couple months to you know get the growth you need uh i would and that the you know the reason is because when you have uh a whale oil machine that is working and you get strong sentiment from the market and you strongly believe in the long term and the market opportunity so i strongly believe that's what you need to do but you need to do it responsibly by you know measuring yourself whether leading or lagging indicators and making sure that you're not going for too long without having a sustainable model behind it yeah yeah so the number you're really talking about here is kind of cac and cac relative to payback period kind of getting that money back you have healthy expansion so you can afford to pay more upfront if you know they're going to stick with you for a while um will you pay more than a year of acv to bring them on or maybe go up as high as two years in terms of cac payback you mean yeah yeah so if you're doing 24 grand acvs are you comfortable spending 50 grand and you get a new 25 000 your account um yes yeah yeah because and why are you so confident when you say that because we know that uh those who are buying our product really need it and we feel confident about the ltv yeah yeah nope that makes fair sense that's the answer i would've given very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh i'll have to say the hard thing about hard things maybe you get a lot but i'm i just think it's a phenomenal book number two oh actually i meant to ask you this i can't imagine you know vista's very aggressive they just raised 14 billion they're behind steven they're trying to deploy capital i know there was a term sheet there had to have been a term sheet going aaron don't raise 27 million bucks at whatever valuation you know sell to us for a premium you know whatever two three four you know points higher than that um why'd you decide that when you did that raise it was not the right time to exit um i think i think we're going after a big play and i'm a strong believer in what we're doing and we want to do it the right way and and really change the way events operate reggie came on and said they just passed 500 million bucks in ar aiming at a billion are you eroding a bit a bit of his revenue are you do you have customers leaving cbnt and joining you guys there are yeah yeah you can say that with confidence that's a fun thing to say yeah all right we prefer staying focused on us and less about you know less talking about the competition and caring about you know our customers our employees and doing the right thing oh come on if you could if you had two customers that you could add tomorrow and one was a stephen customer and one was not an event customer you would take this event customer every day every day let's just call this beta spade there okay number number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um yeah i i like a lot what uh you know satyanadella did for microsoft i think that uh that order of magnitude of change for a culture and and really picking up a company in such a way is phenomenal number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh i like uh you know the google uh collaborative tools spreadsheets uh docs and uh phenomenal number four number four how many hours of sleep breaking every night around six and what's your situation married single kiddos two kids married oh okay and how are you i am 40 soon i'm 39 30 or 40 at the end of the year hold on to it baby 39 years old last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um entrepreneurship is a long journey and i think too if i may one is um when you go after a specific market just strategize what is the right market for you it can save you a lot of time and be relentless going after it and not just being tempted to all the interest that you sometimes get and can be confusing and the second one you know when making hires think about them at least four to six years ahead having the right people in the company so when you imagine that you have is that the right person at least four years ahead guys there you have it uh bizabo a band playing in the event management space aiming to get that 15 million dollar run right here hopefully in early next year in 2019 2020 hopefully they can do that industries 27 million extra bucks uh iran is happy to drive burn up to even a million bucks per month if he has to because he understands his economics are sound and they are 20 revenue churn annually 25 expansion so 105 net revenue retention he's happy to pay up to two years of acv to get that customer on board currently 120 people again building the company between tel aviv and the states ron thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much nathan and we call it event success not event management we believe that's the future thank you