How Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat grew 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 too much reach out uh to be able to handle and it's led to you can see it like i'm starting to see it on twitter where people will just be like how long does it take you guys to get back to us you know what i mean sort of thing and it's it it feels pretty shitty too so what's the process you get you get a thousand new leads today how do you know who to let in who to not so at the moment it's whoever bangs the door most so people will usually fill in the people who really needed it so for example uh i i got a call on friday from one of our sales leads saying hey there's this company that was planning an event for tuesday they needed to run the event uh it's they're in in person but they needed to move it online this was three weeks ago and so they were actively messaging every single person on linkedin this is the worst thing please don't do this because it's not but i mean it's kind of like it's genuinely obviously if there's a really um you know really really big companies reach out to our investors and then try and get an intro through there but majority of uh majority of people at the moment we're reaching out on a like we're trying to do it as fairly as possible we ask for the what is your budget do you need self-service if we realize it's a self-service person someone who doesn't need any custom support or near need to go near the enterprise plans then if it's under a certain amount of people they're expecting at their event and it won't affect our bandwidth or we need to look at it with extra support sort of thing we'll throw we'll let them in pretty uh pretty well pretty quickly if we can get back to them in email but at the moment there's no real way i would say other than waiting we're setting up a proper pipeline and we plan to launch publicly very very soon we're just getting the team in place yeah so okay so the funnel right now is i put in my name my email and if i want to be an organizer attendee or other and then it takes me to the website that says expect to hear from us in the next 48 hours with a link to go book a demo so and then that goes to the type form i believe right that's correct yeah okay so what you then take the type form and give it to your sales reps and if someone says i have a million dollar budget you can let them in quickly or if they say i'm gonna have ten thousand people at an event you let them in quickly that that's what was happening and then we realized the million dollar budget people were a lot of people that were agencies that run events for multiple companies and we didn't have the tools to work but we didn't have the contracts set up to work with agencies yet so in most cases if the budget's really really high yes we will uh try to move them forward but also we're being mindful of how much support that high budget company is going to need because we've noticed that a company that is running a once a one million dollar budget they're just not like hey we're willing to pay for the same software that everyone else is paying for for a million dollars they want like six people to be running their project for them yeah and so an event they want extra support they want all these things so we've now decided that we're kind of looking for the middle tier the people that we know you know this is a decent budget but also a lot of um basically don't need as much support and and those are the ones that we are trying to funnel through yeah i'm going into the type form now i mean these are great questions you're asking them like is this a conference a hackathon a workshop you're asking like what's their budget how many people do you expect to register these are all things that help you prioritize exactly yeah uh but even still i would say we're not doing a good enough job yeah and we're even qualifying that in clear bit after and we've tried so many things to basically uh nail it so what is the flow today in the middle of virus everyone's moving everything online there is no other option like yesterday how many new leads did you get throughout the type format how many people actually booked a demo using your notion integration after the type form submission um i mean i'm going to have to take a look at this but i think the number is close to the top the hubspot form sorry the website form gets a lot uh you know over a thousand whereas the um around a thousand a day and the type form gets about 130 to 180 a day 180 per day interesting and then how many demos get new demos get booked per day so now we've switched the system and that was very recently i should have mentioned that so if if the company if it looks like some someone that needs a one-to-one demo high budget big company big enterprise for example we'll send it over to a one-on-one demo with one of our team members which we've recently done everybody else gets to go to a group demo that we're starting to set up twice a week so the group demos basically where we show them the product etc there is a live q a it shows all of hopkins features and why we're amazing our demos because they're not just like a webinar it's like you get to experience everything there's live q and a's where you can put turn on your video ask questions to different people on the team and from there we're trying to push people to say like go do the self-service plan if you want you know what i mean yeah that's a very i mean look when you have an ac that's 99 bucks a seat and you don't know if it's going to be a 99 seat of a plan or you know they have 10 organizers you don't know it's hard to associate a sales rep with a 99 a month plan so doing the one-to-many approach actually helps you scale the sales team and do it profitably absolutely how many sales people do you have with quota uh at the moment we have uh 11 and four have joined in the lot of five of during the last two weeks okay got it so eleventh quota and then okay so let me ask you a different question how much new ar have you driven over the last three months one and a half months ago there was zero ar we were still in private beta we were very like i'm saying zero but it's like not we weren't pushing out the reason we pushed out is because of covet 19. at that time it was about an eight person company that was just mainly developers and myself just working on the product perfecting it waiting until september what happened was kovan 19 happened and we said oh my god you know we don't want this marketing because what's going to happen is people are going to use zoom zoom yeah typical things for their web for their virtual events and at the end of cover 19 i was worried that everyone just say oh my virtual events are not great they don't work and so actually there would be a negative experience of virtual events and it would be harder to switch the name positively so i in that that's why about three weeks ago i decided okay let's open it open up the gates let's show the product to people let's hope it doesn't uh you know hope it it it basically even with 20 less features than we wanted to have when we launched let's push it out and and we did and um you know it's been hard to manage it but in that time in about three weeks where i think we're at now 1.8 million are from i mean i think when i filled in the form with you it was one yep yep amazing okay so a couple other questions on that what was the waitlist size before covid like two months ago uh the weightless side before covid was around 80 000. and that was over nine months okay so like that's impressive like let's ignore the virus for a second how did you drive people to get on the wait list uh we're lucky that we had a very again viral product so even in our private beta someone would host an event you have a good experience about 1 800 people would show up to a private one of our early access or really deep early access events and we were noticing that about ten percent of people would go in and try and fill a form uh would fill the form so attendee to user yeah attendee the user so for us and that's what i what i meant by you know it was going to be hard for us not to be one of the fastest growing companies in the world and we need to have things in place because events are incredibly uh you know it's it's a it's a it's a great funnel uh you know it's same eventbrite had that a lot of these other event patterns have it but i think online events like the ones we're creating has have any way more about 10x 20x yep so um that's i already felt that way coming in and this is just kind of made it a little bit crazy did you have johnny a bunch of other what i'm trying to figure out is how are you able to get seven million raised pre-revenue you could point to the wait list and the barrel coefficient you could point to your back i don't know a lot about your background but what enabled you to just race i mean you had to raise seven million on at least a minimum 20 you're not going to sell more than 30 of the company before you have any revenue how did you get that kind of valuation pre-revenue uh so you know i had built the product as a one-person team i think it was it was a mix of things uh like there's a lot of it maybe to do with uh like how the platform was built so i built the product basically one myself over two years and it comes back a lot back to my story i i uh you know i was it may be a story for another time but basically in uh by the time the product came out i had already basically shown that the virality so i had i had data showing the virality of the product uh and so when i went to venture capital it was quite obvious that this product uh is gonna absolutely blow up and i was you know i'd love anyone who wants to know a little bit more should see a demo of the product because it's very similar to product now it's better designed but the initial one that i did the prototype let's say and that i released in about november september it's pretty clear that it was needed for the world uh it's a product that was you know the events market is a 1.1 trillion dollar market uh it's very rare that you're creating a new a new let's say segment of it and i i don't want to say it in that sort of way but you know 400 million of that is business events and that's the part that we're competing in directly immediately and we're more accessible uh we're better for the environment um we you know it's easier to collect the emails it's easier collect data there's so many reasons why it's better to do it online or even better to hybridize yeah so it was i think for a lot of vcs and there was a lot of excitement around our product and a lot of excitement especially being in london you know we had a lot of us uh and vcs you know very keen as well as the european so it was just i think it was a matter of you know hype by it's a wrong word but hype and excitement about the product johnny last couple questions here you raise money you have to invest aggressively in growth there are 38 people on the team today how much money are you burning every month to take advantage of this opportunity and grow as fast as you can so we're currently burning close to uh four hundred thousand total total yeah total this month was four hundred thousand okay then you subtract revenue off that so you're burning maybe 250-ish 260 grand a month that's right plenty of runway with seven million just raised and then what about churn is it too early to look at gross revenue churn past 30 days no i saw it i saw the numbers actually uh yesterday and it looked like it was around um it was around eleven percent okay a monthly yeah you probably expect that on the events that's really high for a traditional sas county but you probably expect that being in the events business i i expect that being in the events business being in a being in it right now i mean it's none of the numbers that are happening right now in our product are sustainable like i would be crazy to say that this is this is gonna it's gonna obviously continue growing we're gonna be incredibly viral but what i imagine is you know if we're growing at a 900 per week type thing now let's just say like you know a ridiculous amount the churn is also going to stabilize people are going to be like oh this is what i actually want to host events for and and the serious people that were always looking to host these events and create value are going to be the ones sticking with it but as koben who knows how long could the 90s i could be totally wrong but i believe that everything's just going to stabilize right now people are trying the product and just being like you know i can't get past the waitlist they don't have enough tutorials i just i'm going to pay for it just to figure out how it works yep and and jumping out so our data now is not complete data are you able to back into a cac for a new 99 a month plan sorry are you able to back into your current cac to get a new to 99 a month organizer uh yes currently we can what is it about like is your payback pretty quick you think i would i would say um it's about like three months probably oh wow okay so okay that's not so 270 bucks to get the customer where are you spending that money ads no we're we're not spending the money at all i mean it's basically on the video technologies because we assume that this person so it's not our custom uh i shouldn't have said it like that it's not our the cost of bringing the customer in it's the cost of how how many events the customer we expect them to host based on our basically formula how much our video costs are because currently we haven't built everything that we wanted to in-house and video streaming costs are very high and the amount of tests that they run so i i i took it in a different way but basically that's the amount of cost that we're uh uh running on a customer totally before they come in we're not running any ads yeah yeah no that's fine so yeah when they're just testing it in the beta they're spent there's you have to pay about 220 bucks your video hosting people to support them when they're free then they convert to paid literally we haven't and we haven't had time we haven't had time to negotiate our our contracts anything like there's this is you know by the time this interview is done everyone hopefully everyone's you know i don't know when this is going to be published or anything like that but uh we'd be in a better place but at this moment you know we've been thrown into this because of kova 19 completely all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book um i would say probably um the lean startup i'd probably say number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um at the moment i would say my i i put it down to two two or two or three people but i would say um i'd say i'd say it has to still be elon musk i don't want to sound like that person but all right number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company notion what tech stick are you built on by the way uh we're built on at the moment ruby on rails uh react um postgres amazon uh what you pretty much expect from uh a startup video tech stack is heavy on amazon too yeah yeah okay number four how many hours of sleep you're getting every night uh at the moment five and a half okay and situation married single kids single all right sorry sorry in a relationship i thought you were harder to look at me she's looking at you right across the table right now going what do you mean ten year relationship apologies for that there you go trick trick question all right but no kids running around yeah no kids running all right and how old are you johnny i am 25 years old 25. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um that uh you should probably uh focus on skills that matter most um earlier okay guys there you have it hop in seeing incredible growth going from zero to one point five million dollars in ar over the past basically two and a half months as cobot has hit they help you manage and run online events raised seven million uh and back in december because they were seeing a crazy virality rate between people using their free product and those attendees that you know use the free product converting into organizers of new events themselves are scaling nicely about 30 40 people hired over the very recent past 38 people today total they're seeing um pretty high churn numbers but again that's to be expected when they're growing so fast as well currently have a product flow where you put in the type form information you go into a group demo and then they close from there 99 a month for each organizer 100 free seats per organizer johnny thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much all right what'd you guys think you know a lot of people hate how strong i am in these 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