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hey folks my guest today is muhammad yunus he's the founder and ceo of v fares the leading virtual events hybrid platform in the world he led the growth of the company from two people back in 2016 to 250 plus today in 2021 he's gonna share revenue here in a second muhammad you ready to take it to the top absolutely all right what's revenue today uh so right now we are at a point where we should be hitting close to 40 million dollars in 2021. that's incredible now where were you exactly a year ago where did you finish 2020 uh it was around 30 million how are you how are you doing this when you have competitors like hop in and visible raising gobs of capital you're bootstrapped i believe uh yeah absolutely uh so i think i see in our case uh uh you know as you know with all respect to in and visible within our customer base we we don't hear much about them again we finally deal with the enterprise customers who really care about uh the visual look and feel of how their event should look like they want their events to be memorable so we are a lot more in that uh 3d highly visually appealing version and platform whereas many others are 2d enhanced networking tools and and you know we don't compete with those guys much within the enterprise sector i remember in march when we came on last year i was shocked by your your average acv which backs up the story you just told what is your average acv today is it still like the 14 to 30 000 range uh yeah actually uh i think as of now our average customer is paying us thirty three thousand dollars um so that's what they're paying us now um you know for the past five months and and what so why are they paying so much more you mentioned visual customization are there other things you're sort of upselling against that no one else is doing or they're doing a poor job at sure no i think for us the the the following is the key right so first for our platform looks uh visually appealing is one of the most beautiful platform out there that's one the second thing is our platform is also something that is end-to-end integrated so again when we work with these enterprise customers they care about integrations with their crm providers like salesforce hubspot uh they care about integration with the likes of marketing um you know if it's uh you know if it's a an ats company whether it's you know a couple of others so it's a it's a fully end-to-end integrated system and third and last thing is that see we have been in the market for almost more than five years so we have far more depth in terms of future set versus anyone else when a customer is coming to us uh you know they get uh far more depth in terms of features if they're doing a trade show they will have the ability to showcase their products sell their products if they're doing a job fair they can pull up their jobs rss feed they can you know have candidates apply for jobs and so forth so uh when it comes to their depth of future set we also have that versus a lot of other players out there and how many customers today uh roughly close to uh 1250 plus active paying customers at this point 1 250. that's true well that's up significantly so so you've gone on the show twice back in 2018 you had broken about a 2 million do you remember this back in 2018 2018 you were flirting with like a 1.7 million dollar run rate and then pre-covered so this was uh i guess very early last year i think this is right right you were at about just a three million dollar run rate you almost 10x yeah i remember telling you that number and i was like no i gosh i wish like i really hit that number but yeah i was hoping to hit 3 million then we hit 30 million so that's what happened yeah so so where were you in early 2020 run rate wise do you remember uh it was close to 2.4 to 2.8 million dollars yeah wow so so okay so essentially what happened was you went from 2.5 million in run rate to 22 million and or 20 million in terms of run rate in december of like this past december so almost 10x growth during covid yeah well and so what drove that i mean there's hard covet is obviously important but there's also a lot of hard work there absolutely there are two things right first of all uh i think prior to covert you have to be a very forward-looking organization to try out virtual events so you have to be one of those fortune 500 fortune 2000 companies in order to do something unique now with kobet what has happened is that everyone is you know forced to learn about virtual events to do virtual events and when they went out there trying to look for a platform we were one of the most trusted platform out there so if you go on g2 you know again with all respect to all the other people who have raised tons of money you will see us as number one when it comes to the highest rated platform so no one no one and i say that with a lot of confidence no one can beat us on customer support uh so as much as a software play uh one thing where we just um you know we are better than anyone else out there is you know how how great our customer support is versus anyone else out there that's one then again you know when they were researching uh who's the most uh you know trusted player most you know the player with uh a lot of um great reviews and then again you know player with with a bit of a you know who can help you run event that is highly memorable we came out there at the top right so we were the one who got a lot of that influx of new business we in fact had to turn uh away tons of business you know this this 30 million could have easily been 60 million have i've been not caring about customer support in many cases we let the customers uh just you know we have to apologize to them that you know the kind of support that we aim to provide unfortunately we feel that we may not be the right vendor exactly that week when we got tons of customers here you have 562 reviews on g2 which means you probably get a lot of organic traffic from there maybe some paid as well but the playbook you run to make sure when you impress a customer they actually take the time to go leave a review is an important playbook what does that sound like yeah i know i think see within the events industry what happened is that anytime a customer is coming to any vendor including us i think they they they know that they're going to work for uh weeks if not months for that one day that one day that one day for virtual event has to go just perfectly well and would always go ahead and do their research so they will they want that social proof so they will see g2 they will ask us can you give us social proofs they will ask us for references and then you know once once they are done doing a virtual event with v fairs they know how much how much those reviews have helped them so again just by default they go out there and and post some of those reviews of course we encourage them you know as well that you know if you feel that you whatever you know whether it's good or bad service we would love you to kind of go ahead and share that internally as well externally with the world talk to me about team today how many folks full time uh 250 people and how many are in support uh so in support we would have roughly around 120 plus people wow okay how did you scale that so almost half your team is in support are they all based in the states or how did you scale that team uh so uh so they're based all over the world so you know from us to canada to australia singapore etc but bulk of our support is based out of either pakistan or out of some of the other asian countries again they work uh u.s time zone they work uk european time zones so we we kind of assign them based on where our customer base is this is also just an insane amount of this must take a lot of your time you had 45 people on about on the team about 16 months ago you've hired over 200 people i mean how do you hire 200 people in 18 months you know i think we we have uh we have that brand recognition in most of these countries so again when we were hiring uh we went to this uh you know online university drive we went to the best universities out there in the world and we literally heard any any good candidate that was available at that time what'd you do you reached out to like the deans of the schools and said send them our way or what was the playbook there the the we reach out to the career services team uh so again you know in some of these universities we're already well known some of them are our customers to begin with uh so again they would say that by the way we use v first platform they're hiring go ahead you know and they will recommend sometimes hand-picked candidates and will give it to us smart how many engineers on the team uh roughly around 50 15 5-0 okay and last time we spoke you were just scaling up your your sales team you had two quota carrying reps right before covet hit and you had them on an annual quota of 500 000. what does that look like today uh so we have roughly around 27 of them right now okay so that's...