How Bizzabo CEO Eran Ben-Shushan grew Bizzabo 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...