Founder Interview
How Hopin Reached $1.8M ARR and 1,200 Customers in Weeks After Launch (Interview with CEO Johnny Boufarhat)
- Interview Date
- April 21, 2020
- Interviewee
- Johnny BoufarhatCEO and Founder
Company Metrics at Interview Time
ARR (April 2020)
$1.8M
Customers (April 2020)
1,200
Total Funding
About $7M (£5M)
Team Size (April 2020)
38
Gross Revenue Churn, Past 30 Days (April 2020)
11%
Historical Snapshot
These numbers were reported by Johnny Boufarhat during the interview recorded on April 21, 2020, and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See Hopin’s current numbers.

Key Takeaways
- 01Hopin was at about $1.8M ARR in April 2020, roughly three weeks after opening up early access and up from zero ARR a month and a half earlier
- 02The platform had around 1,200 paying customers at the time of the interview
- 03Hopin raised approximately $7M (GBP 5M) from Accel before COVID-19 hit
- 04The team grew to 38 people, including 23 full-time engineers
- 05Gross revenue churn over the prior 30 days was 11%, expected given the events business model
- 06The waitlist grew to approximately 180,000 people, with about 2,000 onboarded
- 07Pricing started at $99 per organizer seat per month, with 100 free registrations included
- 08CAC payback was approximately 3 months, driven by video streaming costs rather than paid ads
- 09Virality was the core growth engine: at its private-beta events, about 10% of attendees filled in Hopin's sign-up form
- 10Gross burn was close to 400,000 a month (he named no currency) with 38 people on the team
Company Metrics at Time of Interview
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| ARR (April 2020) | $1.8M | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Customers (April 2020) | 1,200 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Engineers (April 2020) | 23 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Team Size (April 2020) | 38 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Total Funding Raised | About $7M (£5M) | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Gross Revenue Churn, Past 30 Days (April 2020) | 11% | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Waitlist Size (April 2020) | 180,000 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Waitlist Size (pre-COVID) | 80,000 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Waitlist Sign-ups Onboarded (April 2020) | 2,000 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Starting Price per Organizer Seat (April 2020) | $99 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Free Registrations per Organizer (April 2020) | 100 per month | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Per-Attendee Overage Price (April 2020) | $0.50 per head | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| CAC Payback on Video Streaming Costs, No Ads (April 2020) | About 3 months | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Gross Monthly Burn, Currency Not Stated (April 2020) | Close to 400,000 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Salespeople with Quota (April 2020) | 11 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Typeform Leads per Day (April 2020) | 130 to 180 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Website Form Leads per Day (April 2020) | around 1,000 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Attendees Who Filled the Sign-up Form (private beta) | 10% | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
| Founder Age | 25 | Founder interview, Apr 2020 |
Growth Breakdown
Revenue
Hopin had zero ARR a month and a half before the interview, while it was still in private beta and waiting until September to push out. COVID-19 changed the plan: about three weeks before the interview, Johnny opened up early access with 20% fewer features than he wanted, and in that time ARR reached about $1.8M by his estimate ("I think we're at now 1,800,000 ARR"). Pricing started at $99 per organizer seat per month, with additional per-attendee fees of $0.50 after the included 100 registrations.
Customers
At the time of the interview, Hopin had approximately 1,200 paying customers and a waitlist of around 180,000 people, of whom about 2,000 had been onboarded. Before COVID-19, the waitlist had grown organically to around 80,000 over nine months, driven almost entirely by product virality.
Team
The team grew to 38 people, including 23 full-time engineers, in a short period after the raise from Accel. Five of the eleven quota-carrying salespeople had joined in the two weeks prior to the interview. Gross burn was close to 400,000 a month; Johnny named no currency.
Funding
Hopin raised £5M, around $7M by Johnny's conversion, from Accel about two or three months before the interview. The process began in December 2019, before the virus had hit. Johnny credited the raise to data he already had showing the product's virality and to the excitement among VCs, with a lot of US firms keen as well as European ones.
Growth Strategy
Product Virality as the Primary Growth Engine
Johnny credited the waitlist's growth to the product's virality. In the private beta, about 10% of the people at an event filled in Hopin's sign-up form ("Attendee to user"), and he expected attendees who had a good experience to set up events of their own, which takes ten minutes on Hopin. He compared this to Eventbrite's model but argued online events amplified the effect by 10 to 20 times.
Waitlist and Controlled Onboarding
Hopin used a Typeform-based waitlist enriched with Clearbit data to qualify and prioritize inbound demand. The team triaged leads by budget, expected attendee count, and support needs, routing high-value prospects to one-on-one demos and everyone else to group demos held twice a week.
Group Demos as a Scalable Sales Motion
Rather than assigning individual sales reps to every $99 seat prospect, Hopin introduced group demos that let attendees experience the full product interactively, including live Q and A. Nathan noted that it is hard to put a sales rep on a $99-a-month plan and that the one-to-many approach helps scale the sales team profitably; Johnny agreed: "Absolutely."
Investor Network for Enterprise Leads
Johnny said really big companies reached out through Hopin's investors to try to get an introduction, while for everyone else the team was trying to work through the inbound queue as fairly as possible.
No Paid Advertising
Hopin ran no paid ads at the time of the interview. The approximately 3-month CAC payback period reflected video streaming costs incurred while prospects tested the platform in beta, not marketing spend. Inbound demand came from the product's virality, with event attendees filling in the sign-up form.
Best Quotes
“We're a virtual events platform that really focuses on engagement and networking. You know, most of you guys have heard of virtual events before or or been to them. And I I feel like, you know, you you kinda shrug in general. You know, there's been... Virtual events have existed for twelve years. It kind of always sucks.”
“We have a new website coming out that shows all our functionality. I mean, we're in early access early access, but we have so many users now. But we do have a really big wait list. We just don't have a big enough team to basically handle the support and the customer success.”
“I 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 ten minutes to set up an an event on Hopin.”
“Even with 20% less features than we wanted to have when we launched, let's push it out. And and we did, and, you know, it's been hard to manage it. But in that time, in about three weeks, where I think we're at now 1,800,000 ARR”
“And that's a serious problem because we don't have proper support for those on the early access plan, so we're trying to even slow down. We have this waitlist now close to a 180,000, and we've probably onboarded about 2,000 of it.”
“So even in our private beta, someone would host an event. You have a good experience. About a 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 10% of people would go in and try and fill a form... Would fill the form.”
“So we're currently burning close to 400,000.”
“No. And I saw it. I saw the numbers actually yesterday, and it looked like it was around it was around 11%.”
What Happened Next
At the time of this April 2020 interview, Hopin had opened early access about three weeks earlier and was struggling to keep up with inbound demand, with a team of 38 and a waitlist of close to 180,000. Johnny Boufarhat said the company was setting up a proper pipeline, getting the team in place to handle support and customer success, and planned to launch publicly very soon. Visit the Hopin company profile on GetLatka for data on what came next.
View Hopin’s current profile and metricsFull Transcript
Chapters
- 0:00Host intro and context
- 1:19What Hopin does
- 2:27Product, waitlist, and team size
- 3:11Funding raise from Accel
- 3:55Virality and growth philosophy
- 5:50Pricing and customer count
- 7:11Waitlist management and sales funnel
- 13:26ARR growth from zero to $1.8M
- 14:48Pre-COVID waitlist and virality data
- 16:08Virality data and VC excitement behind the raise
- 18:01Monthly burn and runway
- 18:23Churn and CAC payback
- 20:59Famous Five rapid-fire questions
Host intro and context
Nathan Latka
00:00Guys, I'm going a little crazy here. It's the week of May 11, and I'm fighting like heck not to be a degenerate and download TikTok. Anyways, I hope you're safe and happy and healthy. Quick reminder about today's interview. I timestamped the interview below in the first comment. 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
00:19week goes to Deepankar Alwat 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 thirty minutes to engage with any questions or comments that you guys leave. Alright. Here we go. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Johnny Boufarhat. He is the CEO and founder of Hopin, the online events platform. The company has grown from one person to a 40 person remote company
00:40in five months and grew in revenue from zero to a million bucks in ARR in three weeks. Johnny, you ready to take us to the top?
Johnny Boufarhat
00:40Absolutely.
Nathan Latka
00:40So some more context around this. We are recording here on April 21. 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 wanna talk to
01:02him right now because your business must be going through all kinds of growth.
Johnny Boufarhat
01:06Yeah. Absolutely. It's been a it's been a pretty crazy period.
Nathan Latka
01:11So tell us how crazy. Right? So if people wanna follow along, the site's hopin.to, hopin.to, what do you guys do, Johnny?
What Hopin does
Johnny Boufarhat
01:19So we're a virtual events platform that really focuses on engagement and networking. You know, most of you guys have heard of virtual events before or or been to them. And I I feel like, you know, you you kinda shrug in general. You know, there's been... Virtual events have existed for twelve years. It kind of always sucks. And and so what we've tried to do is bring them online, not make them look too animated or too cheesy
01:44in 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.
Nathan Latka
02:00Yep. This is a... Those of you that are only listening on iTunes right now or Google podcasts, 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 or go into one on one meetings via kind of a meetings icon. There's a lot of other stuff built in. What... I mean, is there
02:22anything else besides the features I just mentioned, Johnny, that you see a lot of your customers using today?
Product, waitlist, and team size
Johnny Boufarhat
02:27Oh, absolutely. And if you're looking at the website on April 21 as we are on today Today.
Nathan Latka
02:32Yeah.
Johnny Boufarhat
02:32That is... We have a new website coming out that shows all our functionality. I mean, we're in early access early access, but we have so many users now. But we do have a really big wait list. We just don't have a big enough team to basically handle the support and the customer success. But in terms of the product itself, that website is about nine months outdated. It was just me on the team when the website was
02:54pushed out. We didn't have 23 engineers almost every image that you see there.
Nathan Latka
02:54So you have
03:00you have 23 full time engineers right now?
Johnny Boufarhat
03:03Yeah.
Nathan Latka
03:04And what's the total team size?
Johnny Boufarhat
03:0738.
Nathan Latka
03:0738. Okay.
03:08So did you raise... You must have raised capital to scale that quick.
Funding raise from Accel
Johnny Boufarhat
03:11Yeah. We raised capital about three months ago or two months ago from Accel.
Nathan Latka
03:16Okay. And how much did you raise?
Johnny Boufarhat
03:18We raised a £5,000,000 around $7,000,000.
Nathan Latka
03:22And 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 and the diligence?
Johnny Boufarhat
03:33No. There was nothing. There was... The virus hadn't hit yet. I mean, the process began in December. Yeah. And so I... That was a... 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 could see it with, like, Eventbrite. Right? You invite you invite a thousand
Virality and growth philosophy
Johnny Boufarhat
03:55people 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 on the other end of the funnel though, going to a physical event is complicated. It's not very accessible. It's not easy to to bring people in, basically. It's not easy to plan it. Whereas with Hopin, I I always said
04:17we'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 ten minutes to set up an an event on Hopin. You know? And and you can engage your entire... And this is what
04:34we're seeing, you know, because we have virtual gym nights people do. We 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 wanna 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 I was saying it in November, you know, always
04:56to the people around me that, hey. When we launch, we better have a team because we're gonna be in a lot of trouble to to scale this basically, functionally.
Nathan Latka
05:05So I wanna talk more about the virality and scaling. Put this on a timeline though for us first. When did you write the first line of code for the platform?
Johnny Boufarhat
05:12Two years ago.
Nathan Latka
05:13Okay. So that would have 2018. And then when was your first dollar of revenue?
Johnny Boufarhat
05:18So our first dollar of revenue... Oh, there was a few stages in that, but probably mid twenty nineteen, but we were in private beta. We've been in private beta for a long, long time.
Nathan Latka
05:29But 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. It sounds like eight to ten months.
Johnny Boufarhat
05:37Yeah. Yeah. It was it was a a speed dating company using our events for a for speed dating event. So, yes, I remember very
Nathan Latka
05:44That's funny. Okay. And today, what's the average customer pay per month or per year to use you guys?
Pricing and customer count
Johnny Boufarhat
05:50So we have a self-service early early access plan, and the average, I mean, the starting cost is $99 per user per seat, basically.
Nathan Latka
06:00Now what does that mean, though? Is that per per organizer of the event or per attendee of the events?
Johnny Boufarhat
06:05That's per organizer of the event.
Nathan Latka
06:05Okay. So it's definitely not per per
06:09It'd be very it'd be very expensive.
Johnny Boufarhat
06:11Yeah. Very, very expensive. It'd be like a luxury venue. No. We're we're not that expensive as a venue. So it's $99 per organ... Per organizer, so per seat, and that organiser allows you to moderate, to do things in the event basically as you expect with any other per seat product. But it also allows... It also gives you a 100 registrations included per organiser. So this is how we thought about it, that you have 10 organizers, for
06:35example, in your account, then you'd pro... You would have 1,000 free tickets to use every month to get people to come to your events.
Nathan Latka
06:35Yep.
Johnny Boufarhat
06:35And then after that, you pay 50¢ per head. And that's our free plan... Or sorry. That's our early access plan. And then we have a a enterprise plan that be... Begins much higher.
Nathan Latka
06:53Okay. And how many customers are you working with today monthly?
Johnny Boufarhat
06:57How many customers? I think close to 1,200 now.
Nathan Latka
07:01So walk me through the transition of the waitlist you have. Even on the website right now, there's no, like, wait. Doesn't look like... It just says join waitlist. Join 10,000. How are you moving people from the waitlist over to paid?
Waitlist management and sales funnel
Johnny Boufarhat
07:11Yeah. It's really difficult. Right now, it's... We begin... We we started the pipeline with a Typeform, basically. The Typeform got overrun, and we couldn't track it. And then we decided to send it through to Clearbit to to send... Enrich the data. And then what we realize now is that because coronavirus happened or COVID nineteen, we've actually had just too much inbound. Too much inbound to... And this is like... It sounds incredibly bad because it
07:36would have been my dream in November for that. But too much inbound to proper... To do things properly. And that's a serious problem because we don't have proper support for those on the early access plan, so we're trying to even slow down. We have this waitlist now close to a 180,000, and we've probably onboarded about 2,000 of it.
Nathan Latka
07:56Does that 180,000, that's just people that put in their email that said, I wanna try Hopin.
Johnny Boufarhat
08:00Well, it asks you if if you wanna be an organizer or not, and so most of them select organizer. So it's about 95% organizer.
Nathan Latka
08:09Okay.
Johnny Boufarhat
08:09So potential organizer. Because, again, Hopin 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 it's across the spectrum. So we've had almost too much reach out to be able to handle, and it's led to... You can see it. Like, I'm starting to see it on
08:32Twitter where people will just be like, how 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
08:39to be
Nathan Latka
08:39So what's the process? You get you get a thousand new leads today. How do you know who to let in, who to not?
Johnny Boufarhat
08:44So 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, 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. It's... They're in in person, but they need to move it online. This was three weeks ago. And so they were actively messaging every
09:06single person on LinkedIn. This is the worst thing. Please don't do this because it's not... But, I mean, it... It's kinda like... It's genuinely... Obviously, if they're a really, you know, really, really big companies reach out through our investors and then try and get an intro through there. But majority of 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
09:29your 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 out... We'll we'll let them in pretty pretty well... Pretty quickly if we can get back
09:50to them in the 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.
Nathan Latka
10:00Yeah. So... Okay. So the funnel right now is I put in my name, my email, and if I wanna be an organizer, attendee, or other. And then it takes me to the website. It says expect to hear from us in the next forty eight hours with a link to go book a demo. So have you... And then that goes to the Typeform, I believe. Right?
Johnny Boufarhat
10:14That's correct.
Nathan Latka
10:15Yeah. Okay. So what? You didn't take the Typeform and give it to your sales reps. And if someone says I have a million dollar budget, you let them in quickly. Or if they say I'm gonna have 10,000 people at our event, you let them in quickly.
Johnny Boufarhat
10:24That... 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 try to move them forward. But, also, we're being mindful of how much support that high budget company
10:44is gonna need. Because we've noticed that a company that is running a 1 to $1,000,000 budget, they're just not like, hey. We're willing to pay for the same software that everyone else paying for for a million dollars. They want, like, six people to be running their project for them.
Nathan Latka
10:44Yeah.
Johnny Boufarhat
10:44And so in event, they want extra support. They want all these things. So we've now decided that we're kinda looking for the middle tier, the people that
11:04we know, you know, this is a decent budget, but also a lot of basically, don't need as much support, and and those are the ones that we are trying to funnel through.
Nathan Latka
11:13Yeah. I'm going on a Typeform 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.
Johnny Boufarhat
11:23Exactly. Yeah. But even still, I would say we're not doing a good enough job.
Nathan Latka
11:27Yeah.
Johnny Boufarhat
11:28And they were even qualifying that in Clearbit after, and we've tried so many things to basically nail it.
Nathan Latka
11:35So 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 fill up the Typeform, and how many people actually booked a demo using your Notion integration after the Typeform submission?
Johnny Boufarhat
11:47I mean, I'm gonna have to take a look at this, but I think the number is close to the... The HubSpot form... Sorry. The the website form gets a lot, you know, over a thousand, whereas the... Around a thousand a day, and the Typeform gets about 130 to 180 a day.
Nathan Latka
12:05One eighty per day. Interesting. And then how many demos get... New demos get booked per day?
Johnny Boufarhat
12:10So 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.
12:29So the group demo is basically where we show them the product, etcetera. There is a live q and a. It shows all of Hopin's 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
12:49the self-service plan if you want.
Nathan Latka
12:51Yep.
Johnny Boufarhat
12:51You know what I mean?
Nathan Latka
12:51Yep. That's a very... I mean, look. When you have an AC that's $99 a seat and you don't know if it's gonna 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 month plan. So doing the one to many approach actually helps you scale the sales team and do it profitably.
Johnny Boufarhat
13:07Absolutely.
Nathan Latka
13:08How many salespeople do you have with quota?
Johnny Boufarhat
13:11At the moment we have eleven and four have joined in the last... Five have joined in the last two weeks.
Nathan Latka
13:17Okay. Got it. So 11 with quota and then... Okay. So let me ask you a different How much new ARR have you driven over the last three months?
ARR growth from zero to $1.8M
Johnny Boufarhat
13:26One and a half month ago, there was zero ARR. We were still in private beta. We were very... Like, I... I'm saying zero, but it's like not... We weren't pushing out. The reason we pushed out is because of COVID nineteen. 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 till September. What happened was COVID nineteen happened, and we said, oh my
13:49god. You know, we don't want this marketing... Because what's gonna happen is people are gonna use Zoom or Zoom. Yeah. Typical things for their for their virtual events. And at the end of COVID nineteen, was worried that everyone would 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, it would be harder to switch the name positively. So I... And that... That's why
14:11about 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... 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, you know, it's been hard to manage it. But in that time, in about three weeks, where I think we're at now 1,800,000 ARR from the I
14:34mean, I... When I filled in the form with you, it was one.
Nathan Latka
14:37Yep. Yep. Amazing. Okay. So a couple other questions on that. What was the waitlist size before COVID, like, two months ago?
Pre-COVID waitlist and virality data
Johnny Boufarhat
14:48The wait list side before COVID was around 80,000, and that was over nine months.
Nathan Latka
14:53Okay. 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?
Johnny Boufarhat
14:59We'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 a 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 10% of people would go in and try and fill a form... Would fill the form.
Nathan Latka
15:18So Attendee to user.
Johnny Boufarhat
15:20Yeah. Attendee to user. So for us... And that's what I what I meant by, you know, it was gonna 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... You know, it's it's a it's a it's a great funnel. You know? Same Eventbrite had that. A lot of these other event patterns have it, but I think online events like
15:39the ones we're creating has... Have it way more, about 10 x, 20 x.
Nathan Latka
15:39Yep.
Johnny Boufarhat
15:39So that's... I already felt that way coming in, and this has just kinda made it a little bit crazy.
Nathan Latka
15:50Did you have, Johnny, a bunch of other... What I'm trying to figure out is how were you able to get 7,000,000 raised pre revenue? You could point to the wait list and the viral coefficient. You could point to your back. I don't know a lot about your background, but what enabled you guys to raise? I mean, you had to raise 7,000,000 on at least a minimum 20 per... You're not gonna have somewhere than 30% of the
16:04company before you have any revenue. How'd you get that kind of valuation pre revenue?
Virality data and VC excitement behind the raise
Johnny Boufarhat
16:08So, you know, I had built the product as a one person team. I think it was it was a mix of things. Like, there's a lot of that maybe to do with, like, the platform was built. So I've built the product basically on myself over two years, and it comes back a lot back to my story. I I, you know, I was... And maybe a story for another time, but basically, in... By the time the product
16:31came out, I had already basically shown that the virality. So I had I had data showing the virality of the product. And so when I went to venture capital, it was quite obvious that this product is gonna absolutely blow up. And I was... You know, I... I'd love... You know, anyone who wants to know a little bit more should see a demo of the product because it's very similar to the product now. It's better designed. But
16:54the initial one that I did the prototype, let's say, in in... That I released in about November, September, it's pretty clear that it was needed for the world. It's a product that was... You know, the events market is a $1,100,000,000,000 market. It's very rare that you're creating a new a new, let's say, segment of it. And I I I don't wanna say it in that sort of way, but, you know, 400,000,000 of that is business events,
17:16and and that's the part that we're competing in directly, immediately. And we're more accessible. We're better for the environment. We... You know, it's easier to collect emails. It's easier to collect data. There's so many reasons why it's better to do it online or even better to hybridize.
Nathan Latka
17:16Yep.
Johnny Boufarhat
17:16So it was... I think for a lot of VCs, there was a lot of excitement around our product and a lot of excitement, especially being in London. You know,
17:38we had a lot of US VCs, you know, very keen as well as the European. So it was just... I think it was a matter of, you know, hype. I... It's a word... Wrong word, but hype and excitement about the product.
Nathan Latka
17:51Johnny, 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?
Monthly burn and runway
Johnny Boufarhat
18:01So we're currently burning close to 400,000.
Nathan Latka
18:07Total total?
Johnny Boufarhat
18:09Yeah. Total this month was 400,000.
Nathan Latka
18:09Okay.
18:11And then you subtract revenue off that. So you're burning maybe $250,000 ish, $260,000 a month.
Johnny Boufarhat
18:16That's right.
Nathan Latka
18:17Plenty of runway with 7,000,000 just raised. And then what about churn? Is it too early to look at gross revenue churn past thirty days?
Churn and CAC payback
Johnny Boufarhat
18:23No. And I saw it. I saw the numbers actually yesterday, and it looked like it was around it was around 11%.
Nathan Latka
18:30Okay. A monthly?
Johnny Boufarhat
18:30Yep.
Nathan Latka
18:30You probably expect it on the events because that's really high for a traditional SaaS company, but you probably expect that being in the events business.
Johnny Boufarhat
18:38I 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 are sustainable. Like, I'd 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
18:58know, a ridiculous amount, the churn is also gonna stabilize. People are gonna be like, oh, this is what I actually wanna host events for. And the and the serious people that were always looking to host these events and create value are gonna be the ones sticking with it, but as COVID, who knows how long COVID nineteen's not. I could be totally wrong. But I believe that everything's just gonna stabilize right now. People are trying the product
19:18and just being like, you know, I can't get past the wait list. They don't have enough tutorials. I just... I'm gonna pay for it just to figure out how it works
Nathan Latka
19:18Yep.
Johnny Boufarhat
19:18And and jumping out. So And our data now is not complete data.
Nathan Latka
19:18Are you able
19:30to back into a CAC for a new $99 a month plan?
Johnny Boufarhat
19:33Sorry?
Nathan Latka
19:33Are you able to back into your current CAC to get a new $99 a month organizer?
Johnny Boufarhat
19:40Yes. Currently, we can.
Nathan Latka
19:41What what is it about? Like, is your payback pretty quick, you think?
Johnny Boufarhat
19:44I would I would say, it's about, like, three months probably.
Nathan Latka
19:49Oh, wow. Okay. So, okay, that's not bad. So $270 to get the customer. Where are you spending that money? Ads?
Johnny Boufarhat
19:54No. We're we're not spending the money at all. I mean, it's mainly on the video technologies because we assume that this person... It's not our cost... 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
20:14in 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 costs that we're running on a customer totally before they before they come in. We're not running any ads.
Nathan Latka
20:29Yeah. Yeah. No. That's fine. So, yeah, when they're just testing it in the beta, they're they're spent... You have to pay about $270 to your video hosting people to support them when they're free, then they convert to paid.
Johnny Boufarhat
20:38Literally. We haven't we haven't had time we haven't had time to negotiate our our contracts or 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 gonna be published or anything like that, but we'd be in a better place. But at this moment, you know, we've been thrown into this because of COVID nineteen.
Nathan Latka
20:38Yep.
Johnny Boufarhat
20:38Complete.
Famous Five rapid-fire questions
Nathan Latka
20:59Alright. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.
Johnny Boufarhat
21:03I would say probably
21:07the lean startup, I'd probably say.
Nathan Latka
21:09Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Johnny Boufarhat
21:12At the moment, I would say my... I I put it down to two two or three people, but I would say
21:23I'd say I'd say it has to still be Elon Musk. I don't wanna sound like that person, but it's definitely Elon Musk.
Nathan Latka
21:28Alright, Fred. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the company?
Johnny Boufarhat
21:32Notion.
Nathan Latka
21:33What tech stack are you built on by by the way?
Johnny Boufarhat
21:36We're built on, at the moment, Ruby on Rails, React, Postgres, Amazon, what you'd pretty much expect from a a startup.
Nathan Latka
21:45A video tech stack is heavy on Amazon too?
Johnny Boufarhat
21:48Yeah.
21:48Yeah.
Nathan Latka
21:49Okay. Number four, how many hours of sleep you're getting every night?
Johnny Boufarhat
21:52At the moment, five and a half.
Nathan Latka
21:54Okay. And situation, married, single, kids?
Johnny Boufarhat
21:57Single.
Nathan Latka
21:58Alright.
Johnny Boufarhat
21:58Sorry. Sorry.
21:59In a relationship, I thought you were married or a thing. She just took a look at me.
Nathan Latka
22:03She's looking at you right across across the table right now going, what do you mean?
Johnny Boufarhat
22:07Ten year relationship. Apologies for that.
Nathan Latka
22:09There you go.
22:10Trick trick question. Alright.
Johnny Boufarhat
22:11But no kids running around.
22:13Yeah. No kids running around.
Nathan Latka
22:14Alright. And how old are you, Johnny?
Johnny Boufarhat
22:16I am 25 years old.
Nathan Latka
22:1725.
22:18Last question. What do you wish your 20 year old self knew?
Johnny Boufarhat
22:22That I... You should probably focus on skills that matter most earlier.
Nathan Latka
22:31Okay. Guys, there we have it. Hopin seeing incredible growth going from 0 to $1,500,000 in ARR over the past, basically, two and a half months as COVID has hit. They help you manage and run online events, raised 7,000,000 back in December because they were seeing an 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. They're scaling nicely about 30, 40
22:54people hired over the very recent past 38 people today total. They're seeing 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 Typeform information, you go into a group demo, and then they close from there. $99 a month for each organizer, a 100 free seats per organizer. Johnny, thanks for taking us to the top.
Johnny Boufarhat
23:13Thank you so much.