How Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat grew Hopin to $73.6M revenue and 100K customers in 2024.

guys i'm going a little crazy here it's the week of may 11th and i'm fighting like heck not to be a degenerate and download tick tock anyways i hope you're safe and happy and healthy quick reminder about today's interview i time stamped the interview below in the first comments you can skip to the critical moments where the ceo shares revenue data or growth data or things like that that'll save you time number two our founder shout out this week goes to deepankarawa building a great stealth company out there in india and lastly we're about to play today's interview i'm gonna hang out in the comments for 30 minutes to engage with any questions or comments that you guys leave alright here we go hello everyone my guest today is johnny buffer had he is the ceo and founder of hopkins the online events platform the company has grown from one person to a 40-person remote company in five months and grew in revenue from zero to a million bucks in ar in three weeks johnny ready to take us to the top absolutely so some more context around this we are recording here on april 21st some of my friends have moved their in-person events to online and they are using your platform and i said well if this guy's in the business of events and he's doing them online i want to talk to him right now because your business must be going through all kinds of growth yeah uh absolutely it's been a it's been a pretty crazy period so tell us how crazy right so if people want to follow along the siteshopn.t.o.hopin.to what do you guys do johnny so we're a virtual events platform uh that really focuses on engagement and networking you know most of you guys have heard of virtual events before or been to them and i i feel like uh you know you kind of shrug in general um you know there's been a virtual event for 12 years kind of always sucked and and so what we've tried to do is uh bring them online not make them look too animated or too cheesy in a way and also in in the opposite sense you've seen like the the offerings that are like more like websites built with pictures of what areas should look like if you know what i'm trying to say and we focus on more of the networking engagement interactivity and the things you really go to an event for yep this is a those of you that are only listening on itunes right now or google podcasts um the the interface looks very much like kind of how you would go live on youtube in terms of like there's live chat but there's also nice buttons like a reception area you can go into uh or going to one-on-one meetings uh via via kind of a meetings icon there's a lot of other stuff built in uh what i mean is there anything else besides those features i just mentioned uh johnny that you see a lot of your customers using today oh absolutely and if you're looking at the website on april uh 21st as we are on today yeah today yeah that is uh we have a new website coming out that shows all our functionality i mean we're in early access to early access but we have so many users now but we do have a really big waitlist we just don't have a big enough team to basically handle the support uh and the customer success but in terms of the product itself um that website is about nine months outdated it was just me on the team when the website was pushed out we didn't have 23 engineers and almost every image that you see there you have 23 full-time engineers right now yeah i mean and what's the total team size uh 38 38 okay so did you raise you must raise capital to scale that quick yeah we raised capital about three months ago or two months ago from axel ventures okay and how much did you raise we raised a five million pounds around seven million dollars and what so that was before really the virus was it was right as the virus was kind of hitting ish but they were there any chats about the virus during the raise and the diligence no there was nothing there was the virus hadn't hit yet i mean the process began in december yeah and so i was that was it was a crazy raise really there was a lot of interest you know i i you know in november i was you know because we had seen the incubation i mean one of the cool things about events is and you can see it with like eventbrite right you invite um you invite a thousand people to an event right a thousand people will see the eventbrite logo get excited and if they have a great experience they'll say when i run my next event maybe i'll use eventbrite i've seen that before now uh on the other end of the funnel though um going to a physical event is complicated it's not very accessible it's not easy to to bring people in basically uh it's not easy to plan it whereas with hopin i always said we're probably gonna be the fastest growing company in the world when we decide to push out because we saw the viral effect you get a thousand people in a funnel coming into one event and then on the other end of the funnel when they finish the event if they have a great experience it takes 10 minutes to set up an event on open you know and and you can engage your entire and this is what we're seeing you know because we have virtual gym nights people do we have conferences i mean we really consider ourselves just a venue and that's why we kind of allow people to do any type of event they want to do and just give them the tools to do it and so that's our philosophy and it's worked really well but it's also why i feel like you know i was saying it in november uh you know always to the people around me that hey when we launch we better have a team because we're going to be in a lot of trouble uh to to scale this uh basically uh functionally so i want to talk more about the virality and scaling and put this on a timeline though for us first when did you write the first line of code for the platform uh two years ago okay so that would be in 2018. and then when was your first dollar of revenue um so our first dollar of revenue there was a few stages in that but probably uh mid 2019 but we were in private beta we've been in private beta for a long long time but point is you were able to write the first line of code get an mvp up and actually generate your first dollar revenue in under a year basically sounds like eight to ten months yeah yeah it was it was a speed dating company using our events for for a speed dating event so yes that's funny okay and today what's the average customer pay per month or per year to use you guys uh so we have a self-service early early access plan um and the average i mean the starting cost is 99 per user per seat basically um now what does that mean though is that per per organizer of the event or per attendee of the events that's per organizer of the event okay so it's definitely not per per be very very expensive yeah very very expensive it would be like a luxury venue no we're we're not that expensive as a venue so it's 99 per organize a per organizer so per seat and that organizer allows you to moderate to do things in the event basically as you expect with any other uh proceed product but it also allows it also gives you a hundred registrations included per organizer so this is uh how we thought about it that you have 10 organizers for example in your account then you'd probably you'd have 1 000 free tickets to use every month to get people to come to your events yep and then after that you pay 50 cents per head and that's our free plans or sorry that's our early access plan and then we have a um a enterprise plan that be begins much higher okay and how many customers are you working with today monthly uh how many customers i think uh close to uh 1 200 now so walk me through the transition of the wait list you have even on the website right now there's no like wait it doesn't look like it says join waitlist join 10 000. how are you moving people from the waitlist over to paid yeah it's really difficult right now it's uh we begin we we started the pipeline with the type form basically the type form got overrun and we couldn't track it and then we decided to send it through to clear bit to to send enrich the data and then what we realized now and is that because coronavir has happened or proven 19 we've actually had just too much inbound too much inbound to and this is like it sounds incredibly bad because it would have been my dream in november for that but too much inbound to prop to do things properly and that's a serious problem because we don't have proper support uh for those on the early access plan so we're trying to even slow down we have this wait list now close to a 180 000 and we've probably onboarded about 2 000 of it does that 180 000. that's just people that put in their email and said i want to try hop in well it asks you if you want to be an organizer or not and so most of them select organizers so i i i it it's about 95 organizer okay so potential organizer because again hopkin is a venue we we have people that are just looking for us for meetups and on the other side it's for people that are looking for like conferences or or or you know hackathons whatever it is that they're doing it's across the spectrum so um we've had almost...