How vFairs CEO Rabea Ataya grew to $30M revenue and 1.3K customers in 2024.

Introduction hello everyone uh my name is Muhammad yunus and I'm the founder and CEO of vfares vfares is uh an all-in-one event planning platform we help companies run virtual events in-person events and hybrid events uh and over the next 20 minutes what I'll be doing is that I'll walk you through just some of the learnings that I have had over the past six years uh in growing the company from zero million dollars to over 30 million dollars in Revenue Interview Prospects uh so let's get started see since yesterday I have heard a couple of times and I'm just going to double down on that one is that the best thing that you can do for your startup when you're growing from zero million dollars to one million dollars in Revenue is that you interview prospects and then somehow figure it out what you want to build for them and by the time you would have built your MVP you would already have some of those prospects who will convert into customers so again you know I'm something that you know you would have heard many times but one thing that I'm just going to add on top of that is that just think about if you yourself can become your own customer uh so in our case the very uh first MVP we built was we started helping companies uh do virtual job fairs uh but you know other than having those customers who were running virtual job fairs using our software what we did was we actually ran hundreds of virtual job fairs ourselves and actually made hundreds and thousands of dollars in Revenue by running those virtual job fairs so again you know in many cases it it might not be possible with your product but if somehow you are in that sweet spot where you can use your own product to actually achieve the ROI then you already have a case study from day one you would exactly know what it takes to achieve that success that you're trying to preach through your software so again step number one is that you know when you're building your MVP when you're building that first version of the product uh interview a lot of prospects see uh you know if they resonate with what you have uh you know with the version of that you have for your product and then again you know if if you can uh if it's applicable in your product try to use your own product try to see that Roi yourself because then you would be able to just have that conversation with the customer where you both can you know see things from the same from the same from the same angle now once you have done that uh again what has worked really well for us and I highly recommend to wherever it's applicable is that you validate fast uh and one way to do that is through paid media you know in our early stages we spent a lot of money uh on paid ads because we wanted to see that uh you know some of those keywords some of those pain points that we have in mind that we first is solving uh do a lot of other people resonate with that or not and again it's just a very quick way of validating it uh and you know again in our case it worked out really really well I you can do that through outbound you can do it through a lot of other places but again for us this this one worked out really well and few ways that you can do that is that you can you know focus on you know competitor keywords long kill keywords you know some of the some of the most expensive keywords that exist in your category but it will help you understand what that Prospect look for uh and again if you are in the right direction or not once you have done that once you have got that first lead or first couple of prospects you want to learn a bit more about your company the very first thing that you can do uh to impress impress that Prospect is to actually get in touch with them very very quickly see the prospect if someone is looking to solve their problem they're not just going to reach out to you they're going to reach out to you know tens of other companies as well but the company that wins most of the time is that who is able to connect with that Prospect earliest with the right solution if I'm a prospect if I'm trying to solve a particular problem for my company if I have seen that great product I'm going to stop my search so again you would be a small company in that zero to one or zero to ten million dollar uh you know stage but somehow figure it out how 24 7 if someone is going to knock on your door how can you make sure that you're the first one to connect with that Prospect because if you have done that and if you have a decent enough product you would see that you will have a much more higher conversion rate so again you know the very first things of getting started is that work with customers to create that mvp validate fast you know either through paid Media or through outbound Etc but the moment you get connected with the prospect try to be in touch with them very very quickly that can be the single biggest advantage that you can have in those initial initial years Customer Problems the next thing is that as you have had those initial 10 20 30 customers you want to see what are the problems you can solve for that particular Prospect for that particular customer in our case uh we used to get in touch with our customers we would ask them you know can you tell us a bit more about your job function what else do you do and some of these companies told us that other than doing virtual job fairs we also do in-person job fairs and again you know we use something called you know that starts with c and we are facing a lot of problems uh with them you know with the product with the customer support with the UI and everything and we're like you know what you know when is your next event that you're using that product for you know one of the companies told us that we're going to have our in-person job for in the next three months we told them that how about we build an MVP for you a product for you that you can use for your next in-person event in three months or less within a great set of functionalities really just by having that conversation there were already our customers they said you know what if you build in the next two months we're going to replace that other really you know again a high profile company with with your product so it's just by having the conversation with your customer how else you can solve their problem we went from a virtual job fair company to also starting supporting in-person job fairs so that's how we got our first 100K deal the next thing that you can do once you have proven yourself to a particular stakeholder to a business unit within a particular Department you just ask them you know can you recommend me to other people can you recommend to other departments where this product can be used and you will be surprised that if you have given someone a great product with an amazing customer support just by asking for a reference how many companies would be willing to do that I see often and often again that not many people ask for those references or ask for those testimonials or ask for those you know reviews we do that and we have seen that it has helped us expand from one Department in a global Fortune 500 company to over 50 plus departments across 100 plus countries just by asking for those internal referrals or external references so again do that you know ask them how else and who else can benefit from this particular product and you'll be surprised at how many of them will help you connect again internally with a lot of other departments or externally with other people who have a similar problem that your product is solving and the best way to keep on earning a customer trust is that you work with them to show them what's coming next and actually point out that this is the problem that you highlighted this is a timeline that by which I can deliver it to you and this is how it's going to look like the more you share your future roadmaps with the customer and you make them part of the process you build a kind of a customer Advisory Board ask them for what else should be happening in your product they will see uh they will see something in you that typically most of the other big companies would never be able to do you know this is where you can stand out you can stand out where you make those customers uh actually the CN makers of what should be coming in the product and again as far as that aligns with the vision of your product consistently share that customer Affairs and roadmap with your customers and again you will see that that will help you earn trust that will help you retain them and that will help you get a lot of other references from a lot of other departments Customer Support see you know by the time you would grow from 0 to 10 10 to 20 you will see that uh you know you start becoming a big company that end up might be having the same challenges that these customers were having with the big boys before they signed up with you and at that time you just have to go and you know just always stay true to your initial Vision animation of why you build that product and what help you grow from a zero million dollar company to a 10 or 20 million dollar company in our case when we build our product uh we knew that one of the things that has helped us Stand Out is that we then see our self just in a software as a service industry just in a tech industry we knew that we are helping companies do virtual events in-person events job fairs conferences trade shows open days so many you know complex type of events and one of the things that helped us Stand Out was our customer support so we as a company just always had this Vision that for us the success would be what do our customers say about us and by staying true to that Vision which is again will not consider ourselves just to be in the tech industry we'll consider that we are also in the hospitality industry we will will kind of be very close to our customers all the time it helps us just break that grid where you know just a couple of years back we were a new entrant in many of these industries but now we'll consistently rank number one both Universal events and the event management software category so just always stay close to your customer figure it out that why they liked you it might be because of the product it might be because of the customer support it might be a combination of two but whatever that initial Secret Sauce was you just have to make sure that you don't lose that site as you grow you know um again and for us that was a customer support and we made sure that any point if we have to make any decision of where we're going to make a compromise that's a part where we'll never make the compromise which is on the customer support if you want to make sure that we double down on that one because that's one of the reasons that you know initially our customer signed up with us and one of the ways to keep on doing that is that very early on start making sure that you're tracking The NPS both for your product and for your customer support both the things that's really important one is very different than the other specifically if you are an industry like ours you want to make sure that uh you're consistently tracking The NPS of the product anytime you are getting any detractor you reach out to that particular Prospect and a customer and ask them what would it take for them to become a promoter rather than a detractor and the same thing should happen with anyone who has a customer facing role if you have any AE any customer success any project manager anyone who's communicating with a prospect or uh with a customer you want to make sure that you have that you know kind of small line that says in the signature line you know but give me feedback or rate you know our customer support and consistently uh constantly track that for us anytime we get any of those surveys filled up by any of our customers within 10 minutes or less a either we thank them for giving us a 9 or 10 and BK promoter or if it's a neutral or a detractor you know kind of a feedback we get in touch with them and we ask them you know again thank you for your feedback can you elaborate a bit more of how and what we can do in order to kind of convert you from a detractor to promoter just again tracking that NPS both at a product level and at your team level is extremely important in order to make sure that you consistently deliver the customer support that you wanted to deliver ah so again you know just over the last 20 minutes I showed you that in order to build that initial MVP try to interview a lot of prospects work with them to build that initial MVP of the product I if you can become your own customer of the product there's nothing that can beat that validate fast and the way to evaluate fast is that you can spend it on Google on paid media you can do outbound but try to validate very very fast and get those initial set of customers uh who would sign up with you once they do sign up with you or once they show a bit of an interest in your product the very first impression that you can give them is that you connect with them early if a lead comes in try to connect with them in 10 minutes or less because the earlier you will connect with them the better chances you will have that you are the first one giving that demo and again you know if you can solve that problem they will sign up with you once you have done that just always make sure that you deliver an exceptional customer support to that particular company and as you have done that ask them how else you can solve what other problems you can solve for them ask them for references ask them to connect you with other companies or other organizations or other departments wherever they feel that your product can solve that problem and as you have done that make sure that you always keep your customers as part of the decision making process of your future roadmaps always track your NPS NPS for the product and PS for the individuals because that will help you consistently stand out thank you [Applause]

Introduction to Michael Burns and the topic of transforming sales playbooks. kind of interesting to have a really really deep tactical sales conversation on the finance stage but hopefully people will find this a little bit entertaining and and maybe a bit useful uh so my name is Michael Burns I'm Chief Revenue officer at a company called vfares um a little bit about if I could get the clicker to go yes no yep no okay I'll talk about myself and then we'll go into the next slide so uh so I've been in go to market leadership positions for years about 20 years uh I started uh early in my career as an individual contributor in sales and then did a startup in 2006 with a couple of colleagues business information and business services startup uh which was great uh and very relevant to today's topic because we grew super fast from 2006 to 2008 and then Super not fast uh for the next couple of years and that was a a great lesson uh in my career I've had a of it and deploy A playbook The journey from startup to scale-up and the importance of a sales playbook. over the the intervening years from my exit in that startup back in 2015 so today I've really focused more on scale-ups uh than startups so I uh uh was with a martech ad tech company that we took from 50 to 80 million in a year an event technology company that I took from 20 to about 100 in in two years litigation services company that we uh doubled Revenue uh within a quarter um so my my bag as it were is is kind of coming in uh rolling out a Playbook that's very practical uh and gets to repeatable revenue fast um uh so what I'm going to talk about today uh is some fairly tactical stuff right we're not going to really talk about the the total strategy of the Playbook and all the different dashboards that you need to use and the different acronyms that that I'll roll out but I wanted to focus on a few actionable things that I think are relevant to what's happening right now in the economy again this is you know a lot of lessons from uh 2008 2009 um so what we'll talk about is is how to Diagnosing gaps in your current sales playbook. diagnose uh the gaps in in your playbook uh if it exists right we'll talk a little bit about the data uh that I like to look at I'll look at one thing in particular uh strategy gaps around messaging uh and then process gaps from a selling process standpoint and then we'll talk a little bit about implementation um just a couple of quick hits on on things that I would prioritize from an implementation standpoint and then we'll talk about optimization right um uh and and really not boiling the ocean um so I'm at a company called vfares uh vfares is an end-to-end event management platform so we provide technology for uh events like this um and we really grew very very quickly during the pandemic uh so uh and there are a lot of uh parallels to what happened with the vfares business uh from 2019 through 2022 and what's happening to a lot of tech businesses today right a lot of high growth and then maybe a little bit of a correction uh and again you know similar to what you know many of us experienced back in the 2008 uh 2009 uh crisis um so just a little bit about vfares over the years uh so uh the company was originally a product of of our parent company called bait.com which is the largest job board in the Middle East we were a virtual event sorry a virtual job fair product that was being sold that people realized uh my founder Mohamed yunus spoke earlier today realized this is really a company not a product so it spun out um and they put the preseason into place to start growing right relative modest growth and then the pandemic hit and it was right place right time for vfares people were running events like this they couldn't do it in person anymore their hair is on fire and they had to go somewhere and vfares had the and this is not just my opinion asked G2 had the best virtual platform on the planet so the inbound just went off the charts which is fantastic until it's not fantastic anymore right and and things kind of come back to normal right I think a lot of us are experiencing this across a lot of different businesses that anybody in technology right now things are a little harder than they than they maybe used to be so so what I'm going to talk about is is is the elements of a Playbook that are important to get back on track right and produce sustainable and repeatable Revenue uh so we'll dig into the first section Implementing a practical sales methodology. here uh and I'll talk about the data uh first so so the first thing that I look at if I'm you know reimagining a Playbook and I I came into vfares in November uh and my remit my marching orders are you know we need to grow right if you saw the little bump there in q1 right we're starting to see some of the impact and I'll show some results uh early results uh now uh sorry at the end of the presentation that we're seeing now uh but the first thing I I said is okay well what am I dealing with right what what data do I have uh and I personally like to have a sensitivity analysis built where I could look at every single conversion rate from top of the funnel you know tofu lead acquisition branding all the way down to churn renewal expansion um and I get pretty micro on that and I actually do that which we'll talk about a bit on a rep by rep basis so I know what every single reps conversion rate is across my my organization not because I care how many calls they make right I'm not about you know the micro kpi eyes but I want them to know what a brute force approach would look like dude if they needed to take it in terms of conversions and I also need to be able to diagnose where in my process things are not completely optimized right and the best way to understand that is when you see breaks or aberrations in conversion rate um so the first question I asked was can I measure conversion at every single point the second thing that I asked is okay do we have you know in this new environment do we have product Market fit right uh are we strategically doing the right things to the right people the right number of times right so by that I mean do we have the right messaging right are we articulating our value proposition the right way for today uh are we uh really clear about our ICP right have we looked at our data have we looked at our churn data do we understand how we're performing from a marketing standpoint in different segments um and are we leaning into that and then finally uh our our repetitions enough right are we creating enough opportunities right is there enough activity and positive behavior that's leading to the outcomes that we want to drive to so that that for me there's data in there but that for me is strategy right uh do we have the right setup have we built the right motion and then finally process which for me is is really about in this context is about the selling process right do we have the right deal stages uh and yes I'm getting very tactical and and uh and specific on this but yeah did the deal stages uh The shift from selling pain points to selling objectives. represent the reality of what's happening in the field um and I'll give you a real life example so the deal stages at fee fairs uh when I came in were things like demo highly interested and I said okay where's the empirical data that could tell us that are we doing you know conversational intelligence or are we measuring sentiment it's like no no they really seemed interested and it's like okay so we're saying that we closed 40 of people that you think are interested that that's that I I and people are typically right you know there was a lot of unconscious competency there where people were pretty good at this but they couldn't really measure it and understand why and certainly couldn't repeat it um so that doesn't adequately adequately capture risk right so we need to really understand and be able to describe uh the selling process as it stands and then look for uh opportunities to optimize optimize so the the main thing though that I I looked at was close rate sorry close loss reasons um because this is kind of a a two birds with one stone uh uh type of process right so I'm understanding you know what our what our close rate is I you know layer on top of here you know sales cycle and and the ICP and so on and so forth but I'm getting good qualitative data here um uh and the most important piece of qualitative data that I have is that most of the time we don't know why we're losing um uh that no value uh I had many a night uh uh in the late days of Q4 uh scratching my head saying what is the no value why is it are we saying the wrong things is it bad messaging um are we just not capturing it is there no you know adherence to the process right is this more of an adoption problem uh so so you know you're kind of on the right track if those sort of second and third order questions start coming up around the data right um uh so this for me was was huge right I really dug into this uh and the first I think practical piece of advice for anyone that uh maybe you know had some boom time and maybe it's not as important to measure all your Messaging and strategic shifts at vFairs to address market changes. conversions and your your loss reasons because things are going really well and you're hitting your Revenue targets start looking at this like really really dive into it and there's no substitute for having conversations right so that the CRM is not going to tell you that the the you know the skinny right the CRM is going to tell you what the sales person bothered to put in uh or um you know in some cases luckily not at vfares but I've run into places where you know sales people will bring blame the product it's a bad product fit too expensive bad lead right um but when you dig into it you realize that there are actually some other you know reasons that are driving to loss uh so I needed to correct this right but it was also a pretty good uh indicator uh that we had some strategy issues right uh that our our messaging maybe wasn't Landing uh as as well as it could be uh so that again for me was the uh was the key right so what I've done now is I've looked at the data I've said okay our data is kind of all over the place right uh uh that big data point right of of lost reason uh is a little bit opaque right I I don't really understand you know what's driving most of the loss um uh I I need to really go in and do the work to understand at a deeper level what's happening right I'm listening to calls now listening to gone recordings um uh so what I need to do here is start to implement right and say okay what are the areas that I could change so for me uh uh in again in this economy right and with our the reality of our selling um I picked a couple of things that I thought would really move the needle right the first is a full conversion analysis for each rep right so I I prioritize that uh so I changed the the sales stages uh made them you know a little bit more aligned to what was happening in the field uh started getting really uh tight on on the measurement and the adoption across the CRM um plugged in obviously all of our other systems to understand what our email conversion rates were and our call conversions very old school I know but uh what that allowed me to do is go back to my wraps and say look you know you're facing adversity in the market right you know people are going back to in-person events we were virtual right we need to re-message and reposition um but until we figure that out here's the way to brute force it right so you could hit your Target and you could feed your family right so I was able to show them it's a lot more calls than we used to make but you know here's here's what the conversions are right so that the first uh uh benefit of that is it bought a lot of credibility for us as a management team with the Reps right the reps are saying okay they hover back they understand that that it's difficult out there and they're giving me a road map I have a plan right it's not a great plan right I'd rather you know be able to close at 40 40 clip but at least now I know what I need to do in order to to hit my numbers and then I rolled out a sales methodology I I see guy in the back I'm Pulling the right levers for growth: Focusing on ACV and close rates. going to steal one of the lines from his presentation which is it doesn't matter what your sales methodology is just roll one out right uh it which is absolutely true and I'll show you mine um uh but if it's I'm not a huge fan of band I think it's a little bit simplistic but you know use bands but it's better than nothing right uh use medic medpic whatever it is but you need a sales methodology all right because you need a common framework uh and a Common Language to be able to talk about deal risk with your reps right if you don't have that uh then you know you're really relying on a lot of um uh you know subjectivity uh and then validation is important right and I think this is probably the overarching uh tactic that I'll recommend is you know there's there's no substitute for getting in there right um You can't drive performance through spreadsheets uh you need to get in there and stress test the deals uh so I spent a lot of time with my line managers uh teaching them how to do stress testing against the the sales methodology uh and then sat in on a lot of pipeline meetings right so it became you know really you know a change management process that was super super Hands-On a lot of hearts and Minds conversations but there's you know no substitute in this economy right to really get in there and and move the needle with your reps and show them by example uh and and be a little bit prescriptive to be candid Building repeatability and scalability into the sales process. so some examples here uh so what you see here is a uh basically a reimagining of medpic uh called co-impact this is not genius this is nothing different than medpicker or or Medic or anything like that the reason that I roll this out is because it's a different acronym and it forces people to learn different words and therefore engages their critical thinking skills right if they use medpic at their old company and the adoption was poor they're going to be like hey I know it I know it or they use band yeah I've been doing band for 20 years that's fine no this is new this is new what's new about it well the letters are new but but we're gonna we're gonna position this a little bit differently right so so just the act of teaching something new does you know Drive the behaviors home um and I'll talk a little bit about the important things here so there's some things here that I really really care about right now and some things that I care less about the most important thing for me right now is identifying needs uh and I'll I'll stop and dive into this for a second um how many people have taught sales teams to sell to pain points identify the pain points and sell the pain points all right how many people here have asked for a new piece of software recently or had somebody asked them for an new piece of software and we said no deal with the pain because it's not the time to be spending I have for sure so yeah a guy has so pain points are nice to to solve right and when things are going well you look for you know a solving pain right and overcoming pain uh but you know in tough times you know you tell people to get tough right buck up deal with it right um I'm sorry it hurts work a little more right um uh you know not that I'm that blunt with with my team but uh you get the Results achieved by vFairs following the playbook transformation. concept so in in the identifying needs part of co-impact what I'm really getting my team to do is identify objectives and saying look you know no one's going to care about solving pain points right now but everybody needs to hit goals right and if we could identify their objectives and sell to objectives as opposed to pain certainly not features right because that doesn't matter people are going to trade features for for objectives all day long right right now but if we can understand their objectives right not just company objectives or vanity metrics but what's going to get that guy a bonus then we could we could create a business case right so so that's what we're focused on is get to the objectives and understand uh what it is that that we could sell to and that that's this bit up here the strategy tactics gaps right and the way I describe this to my teams is the Frog and boiling water concept right you know if you're asking about pain or what's going wrong do we know the frog in boiling water right if you have a pot of boiling water you take a frog and throw it in it's going to jump out it's hot it's it's gross but sorry uh but if you take a frog and you put the Frog into a pot of tepid water it's nice and comfortable you turn the heat on a little bit and it gets boiled before it knows it and not that I'm saying that we should manipulate our prospects and customers but from a conversational standpoint what we want to do is start slow right and we want to talk about things that they like which are themselves and good things and that's why I ask questions around their strategy right and then I start talking to them about the tactics that they're going to use to achieve their strategic goals and then I'm going to talk about gaps right in ways that we could help to de-risk their plan right and help them get to their goals either quicker or you know again with less risk and that's going to allow me to really build that trust and build that business case super super tactical right you know again this is not this is not about the model this is about some really really easy quick things that you can do with the team that that's going to drive the the or move the needle for you guys all right so sell to objectives and then a questioning framework that's gonna you know kind of be that inverted pyramid to drive down to some of the pain points so from a messaging standpoint right that's tactics right execution on the sales front uh when when it came to identifying strategic gaps uh we were a point solution right you know you looked at that Revenue uh curve you know we were the pandemic darling you know uh virtual platform best on the planet uh and when I really dug into loss reasons the real lost reason that we had was um uh we're going back to in-person events and you guys have branded yourself so well as a virtual platform that I do not even know that you could do anything but virtual right and and here is our messaging right this is the yv fairs right and and you know we talk Conclusion and key takeaways. a lot about you know 3D environments and features and that was amazing right and that grossed to 40 million in a heartbeat right um but it made us into a point solution so one of the other things that we did is we changed our messaging uh to and this is a busy slide but kind of on purpose uh to a platform play right and we it's not a product uh change right this is this is not you know me going to my CT to or my chief product officer and say we need to build new stuff and say okay let me understand how people could use our solution today in a different environment than they were previously right so we took what we are doing and said okay let's understand you know how this uh relates to a workflow right what's our customer's reality right now how do they use us and how can we package our solution up in a way that you know makes a lot more sense and allows us to have a proactive conversation with our customers about you know wider use right uh and that'll bring me to another Point um on levers right so once we identified you know the the application of our product given the current environment uh Insights on Adapting Sales Tactics in a Post-Pandemic Market. the levers that we wanted to pull to grow became pretty clear right um which costs more money platforms or Point Solutions right which do you do annual contracts with or multi-year contracts or you know embed as an Enterprise solution a platform or a point solution typically a platform so what we were selling previously was a discrete single event license if you will but you know people should and are now using us as a platform right so we went from you know discrete more service oriented deals to proper SAS annual multi-year deals uh so for me you know volume uh is not a lever I'm going to pull demand is is not what it was velocity is not a lever I'm going to pull because you know the the buying cycle is longer um size is right so I'm going to pull the lever on ACV because now I'm able to sell to an entire Enterprise it's not a discrete deal right I'm selling a workflow solution that has massive cost avoidance and revenue generation opportunities right so then I'm leading into those objectives and goals and close rate is the other area right when we're upskilling the team and selling to objectives we're not just increasing deal size we're actually driving higher close rates rep roadmaps I talked about The Importance of Data in Refining Sales Processes. right that was the other you know optimization piece right uh so you're taking that sensitivity analysis that you built right and you're you're coupling that with a qualitative diagnostic right you can't just say hey here's how many calls you got to make right um The Promise was here's how many calls you got to make until we have optimized messaging right and now we have you know good steel stress testing we have the right description of our sales process so we're able to really understand uh what the rep roadmap is and then repeatability right so what we're doing from a repeatability standpoint is building onboarding so where do we wind up that's us there on g2's event management platform right we took over the grid right that was over the past three months uh we weren't on the grid three months ago we have so far increased ACV by 60 percent and and this is literally all I rolled out was a couple of you know very very tactical there's more to it but the key things that I rolled out were these tactical things uh and we built out a 17-page eye chart which is our internal document to be able to repeat this right so so it conscious competency doesn't mean anything you know being good at something and knowing why you're good at it if you don't actually teach it uh and scale it right so now we have an onboarding process to be able to bring people in and turn them into very very effective sellers that's it thank you all right thanks Michael

Introduction please help me in welcoming to the stage Mohammed yunus the CEO of vfares um hello everyone my name is muhammadunus and uh I'm the founder and CEO of vfares I started my journey by graduating from University of Texas at Austin worked with IBM over there again here in Austin for a couple of years before founding vfares I was working with the company called pay.com in the Middle East where I was the chief commercial officer and chief product officer over there and then that's where I founded vfares or the next 20 minutes uh I will walk you through how we have took refills from zero million dollars in Revenue to 30 million dollars in Revenue without having any outbound sales team I will share with you our just you know secret tips and tricks of how do we typically go about SEO and SCM and Direct in Word of Mouth referral I will also walk you through the kind of attention that we play within our customer success team how do we handle our customers how do we use our customers to drive a lot of inbound traffic which eventually you know kind of drives that inbound SEO and sem traffic and then I will actually go ahead and share with you some of the actual playbooks some of the actual emails some of the actual uh templates that we use to get hundreds and thousands of views socially across G2 captura and hundreds of video testimonials from our customers so let's get started again you know those of you who don't know about vfares vfares is all in one events platform up until pandemic we have been helping companies out doing online events doing virtual events um companies of all sizes use V fair so again whether it's a startup company mid-sized company and then in most cases an Enterprise company they would run a conference or trade show a job fair an open day using a vfares platform and then you know post covet this year we also launched a couple of other products where we also now help companies do in-person events and Hardware events um this is our journey we started back in 2016 uh within the first six months we were profitable and again you know some of the things that Nathan you know kind of mentioned in his uh initial um you know kind of slides we take pride in just being a profitable company so you know all of this Revenue at least 25 to 50 just goes back and profit so even though our competition has raised hundreds and millions of dollars um you know in in VC money we take pride in running running the business with the right unit economics so at any point you know again we have always just doubled down on things that are working and again those are some of the tips and tricks I will be just walking you through so again all bootstrap primarily through things that are working for us primarily by just focusing you know focusing on the customers uh that we have and you know just using that to drive a lot more Revenue so let's get started I think you know The inbound funnel all of us have uh kind of a kind of a inbound funnel like this for us are again just we typically get around 80 to 90 000 sessions per month on our site and once we get those sessions roughly one percent of them translate into inquiries this is the part where we go ahead and we pay a lot of attention we actually then go ahead and uh you know have a very detailed conversation with those you know on average 750 to 800 inquiries that we get every single month the very first question we typically ask them because it's in Mount is how did you hear about vfares you know where were you before like which website were you visiting that drive the traffic to vfares or what exactly you entered on Google or bank that drive the traffic to vfares and we actually locked that down in our HubSpot we are very religious in this particular area so for every customer we know exactly how they did find about vfares from a website from a referral from Google or from bank and we go and share that with our marketing team our marketing then go ahead and keep on producing content around those keywords so while any other competition or any other business they will have their top 10 keywords their top 50 keywords their top 100 keywords we literally have internal sheets where we have our top 10 000 keywords that's and again we we go for the long tail you know we want to make sure that we're still rank well we'll rank among the you know top one two or three in Google for the top 10 15 keywords that has the highest volume but we also know that we are here for the long term you're here for the next five ten years we want to make sure that those long tail keywords are recognized today and we'll start producing content around those keywords today and that has helped us get 60 of our traffic so almost 58 to 60 percent of all of our traffic comes from those hundreds and thousands of keywords that we go and we research through the 750 plus interviews that we do every single month and again that has been the single biggest contributor to our growth over the years just because we had been doing this for the past five years you know ever since we launched back in 2016-17 the very first customer who came to us which you know again I think just pure luck it was Nestle who reached out to us the very first time we knew exactly how did they found about vfares what were the keywords they were entering on Google what are some of the other websites that typically go and compare us and then you know all of that from day one has fueled into our inbound traffic and our growth engine not only we use those keywords for SEO purpose or for our you know long uh you know long form guides we also then go ahead and use those keywords to just revise our sem campaigns SCM is pretty expensive you know specifically you know since a lot of our competition has raised uh you know hundreds of millions of dollars but the thing that we do pretty well is that you know we'll go ahead and we'll bid heavily on the keywords that we care about but then we have those hundreds and thousands of keywords that long tail that most of the competition won't have and we go ahead and we create those campaigns also on LCM so again researching every single customer and again just being very detailed about it of how did they find out about vfares and then having a very mechanical process of producing content that's meaningful for each one of those keywords has been the key for us to consistently keep on getting you know high growth interact from organic as well as just making sure that our SCM conversions are also giving us a great Roi because in the end we measure our own success of not just the revenue growth but also the profitability growth that we generate every single year so that's that's purely on that you know it's pretty simple um you know if you go ahead and you know just try to follow that one um the second thing uh again in a in a in a you know in an events business what's tricky about immense business unlike any other software businesses that we say internally that a typical customer of vfares or any event tech software will use the software for months primarily for those one day two days of the event so again we have this saying internally that you know we're not just only in the software industry we're also in the hospitality industry we want to make The hospitality industry sure that those couple of days when the customer is going to use our platform whether for a virtual event or for an in-person one just goes Flawless you want to make sure that leading up to that event you know they feel great about the software they feel comfortable that things are going to be great and you know on the day of the event it's like your wedding date cannot go wrong so you want to make sure that you do whatever it takes to make that event a highly successful one think of this as this particular event right you know like you know we are here for a couple of days people over here must be planning for months for these two days and again you want to make sure that in these two days are going to go well for everyone who's attending it and when it's virtual the stakes are even higher because then everything is happening online in your platform people are networking in your platform people are having fun on your platform the entertainment the sessions the exhibitors the speakers everything is on your platform so we knew from day one that we want to make sure that people who are using our platform they are being taken extremely seriously you know not just as a SAS vendor but also as a again you know just we just think of us being also in hospitality industry so what we did was from day one that when we built our software we used our own software to actually run hundreds of events so so that we don't just know about how technology plays a role in running a successful virtual event we want to also understand that what exactly is the role of an event manager how do they go about and try to get sponsors exhibitors attendees what are things that they need to really you know sell their virtual event and you know make money out of it and all of those things we documented it you know we documented those emails that we actually sent to get sponsors to bring exhibitors on board to you know run really highly successful you know virtual events with hundreds and thousands of 10 deals and we converted all of them into playbooks we also realized that you know what okay on the day of the event you know if things are required purely from a support perspective what are some of those things that are needed you know how do we want to offer customer support on that day because it's not like a typical software where you know again you know you take it and you can expect a response in the next day or two it is the event day you want to make sure that things are handled in seconds not even in minutes so just knowing about how the customer actually uses your software and then defining each one of those are success metrics okay what would be a success metric for a customer how would they rate you when they will get a service like this all of those have been just really really important for us we have always been again just you know inspired by you know Brian from Airbnb and what we did was at that particular time just really going and defining for everything that we do uh just uh you know again how would we rate ourselves for each one of those things that we are going to provide our customers if you just give them the technology and just let them play with it how would we do it ourselves but if we give that technology along with an amazing customer support or with a great onboarding with the right playbooks that will help them get sponsors on board get exhibitors on board get attendees on board what would you think about that experience and if we can agree with them okay what is that end goal that they're trying to achieve is it one million dollars in sales of their in-person event or virtual event is it X number of attendees what is that the core kpi that they're trying to achieve using our software can we help them achieve that end metric uh so that you know not only they just love that software but they also see that the software helps them be successful in whatever they're trying to do we actually documented each one of those things and every time we work with any customer we agree with what is their end goal of why they're they have signed up with the software and then throughout the relationship they know from day one in every part of our relationship with them that we are going to request them for very transparent review at the end of the event so the very first call that we have with our customer is that okay you know you have the software that you have signed up we would go out of you know out of the legal contract uh you know uh just uh contractual services that that you have signed up for will make sure that we help you achieve those end goals uh and at the end of it all we want is your transparent review in any of the social media channels so literally from day one we request them that and again you know it can go either way you know you know they might not like the software they might not like the service and that's totally fine but the moment you actually make yourself commit to that you make the customer understand that how how much we care about their review in the end uh again you know the stakes go high and everyone in the company work towards getting that positive review V leading up to the event we track everything you know not only we just track the product NPS and again our slack channel is pretty much like how the the CEO of Pandora was showing you know we track our product NPS you know every single second and you know every time we get even a neutral already tractor we go ahead and we follow aggressively on that but we also track it at an individual level so every employee of the company they have this footage that sales rate my service and again you know everything that that kind of gets documented over there we track that we see like how the customer is feeling about the customer support that they are getting from vfares and at the end of the event again Things become really easy you know the customer already knew from day one that uh once event is over we just want them to document how their experience was with vfares here's an email template that we use we almost always get like again you know this email template has 90 response rate so hardly anyone would not go ahead and you know not reply to this email and again it's less about this email template it's really about the expectations that were set with the customer from day one that you know we want you to go ahead and share your experience with vfares out there wherever you like you know whether it's on LinkedIn or G2 or capture or whatever whatever your preferred platform is and as a result of that even though our competition would have literally you know 100 times more money than than what what we have we would consistently be ranked number one on most of these social media sites you know so again you know whether it's on G2 or keptera it will be ranked number one for almost 12 quarters in a row now uh and again we beat everyone else by a huge margin um and again primarily because from day one we have been obsessed about customer support and our customers know that how much we care about uh their their feedback once once that particle event is over most of these customers then go ahead and would also give us video testimonials again you know we have we have a template for that as well that we use uh but you know with time what we have seen is that even without us asking them for that just because from day one in the very first onboarding call we would tell them that you know what okay here are things that you're trying to achieve with vfares and here's what we're going to request you on this particular day once that event is done you'll receive the email like this one and all we want is just don't just respond to that positive negative up to you you know based on your based on your you know just working relationship with Weavers and again we uh get hundreds of video testimonials from our customers and then these customers then would also go ahead and share those video testimonials also on social media site they'll post it on LinkedIn they'll post it on a couple of Work backwards other places which eventually then result in the inbound traffic that we were going through earlier again the idea is to work backwards you know you have certain customers you have to take extremely good care of them you have to make sure that they not only like your software but they achieve the end result that they were trying to get through that software and from day one just you know ask them that you know what all I would request you in the end is transparent feedback about our product about our services and whether you're able to achieve that end goal or not and again if you do that you know you will see that you don't need to hire hundreds of outbound sales people to help Drive traffic for you your own customers will act as the biggest engine of growth for you and this is how we have grown V fares from zero million dollars in Revenue to 30 million dollars without having a single outbound salesperson that's it [Applause] [Music]

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 also scaled have you increased quota target or is it still about half a million uh no each one of them have roughly around anywhere from one million to two million depending on the stack size how do they respond when you said hey guys when i increase quota from half a million to a million each one of them have hit at least uh three million or above last year so again in most cases this is almost uh there's no one who have not hit a target in most cases they affected their targets within a quarter or two quarters that's what happened so if i was one of those sales rep that joined you during cobit and i hit my quota like what are you probably paying me base and what are you paying me in comp a commission yeah it's roughly a hundred and hundred so you will get uh around yeah 200 plus yep yeah that's that's right in line with what we see 200 000 and then above a million dollar quota five to one ratio your sales people are profit centers right yeah exactly that's for any challenges i mean it sounds like it's all working any challenges scaling that sales team this is a the challenge i think at that time was really we we strive in being extremely transparent and when there's a lot of money coming to you you want to be make sure that you know as much as you want to win the customer you also sometimes wanna just be careful of what you're signing up with right because the way we have been able to scale is that we have been absolutely clear what our platform does how we can support you how we can help you right uh during the covert times a lot of customers would just want to sign up with you without even telling what they're looking for you know and again we were very careful of again not having sales people who are just out of the out there for money we care about just again we don't we don't want to get a customer for first year we want to get a customer for the next three to five years and we just want to make sure that we are signing up with the right customer so just having that transparency having that like extreme honesty within within sales people that's what we typically look for when you're trying to hire someone if you sign up no new customers over the past 12 months which we know won't happen but let's just assume it for a second how much will you grow revenue just because of the power of your expansion team yeah so uh historically speaking it has been close to 140 percent so our network innovation historically was 140 percent we have to see because in 2020 of course we got a lot of these customers who were trying to do a physical one now they did a virtual one as of now we are seeing that uh we will have at least a close like anywhere from 70 to 80 uh customer retention and hopefully 100 plus revenue retention so we'll see what will happen this year uh but uh historian's beginning has been anywhere from 140 to 150 revenue just to be clear 80 retention would be 20 churn and then 60 expansion for 140 net is that right that's historical numbers we'll see what will happen in 2021 but that's exactly what happened let's talk let's talk money you have you must be turning down vc emails every single day what's the highest offer you've gotten uh so uh yep i think we all have seen uh valuations for for visible etc but uh you know again we we have seen anywhere from 10 times or 20 times revenue so minimum 10 times all the way up to 20 times so far revenue is what we have seen so far so you've seen basically sort of soft offers above 600 million offer offers you know let us write a check and brad that valuation yeah roughly around 500 plus yeah yeah interesting um you've obviously chosen not to take into those offers correct as of no yeah what would change your mind yeah i think for us it says about the money it's really about finding the right partner uh you know we are here for the long term so we are not a company who is just an afterthought of covet we feel that uh we always knew that you know there would come a time that similar to any company they have uh microsoft teams they have some et cetera there would come a time where every company will need a virtual event license so we're here for the long term i think at this point uh there's a there's a lot of there's a lot of money being spent for this industry and i think there are a lot of people who are looking for that short-term gain short-term confirmation none of us knows what will happen over the next 12 to 14 months 12 to 24 months given people are going back to normal so again just anyone who is there for a bit long term you know five to seven years is what you're looking for primarily rather than someone who's just there for the short term and current captive i mean are you sole founder of co-founders uh so yeah i'm the founder of the company and then of course this company is uh there's a there's a parent company who own v fares uh then that's pay.com but yeah do you own the majority of the equity though or does the parent company own the majority parent company owns the majority okay so i didn't know this so this is makes it more difficult probably for you to move uh you know raise capital exit etc i imagine who is that parent company it's bathe.com bayt.com um and again they act as just we see so as such as such yep i think they are they're pretty awesome in a way that you know pretty much all the decisions are done and taken by me so i think on that front you know we have completely yeah that's nice so how much equity do you own today uh yeah i'm just unfortunately not allowed to disclose that whenever i've told you okay that's okay all right so got it that makes sense um i guess a couple other questions here right uh you know johnny has to figure out a way to validate his validation uh his valuation at hop and he does things like buy stream yard which is 30 million in revenue for 250. are you right now in acquisition talks with anybody uh we are in discussion uh with uh yeah within within within a sector where you know again we are moving towards hybrid so anyone who has been doing physical events before like physical element mobile apps we are in discussion with a couple of people do you think you would exit before december or no uh no got it so it'd be a longer term play there yeah would you look it for a full exit or would you have them like write a small equity check and businesses stay close and scale that way yeah i i i would love to i think we feel that we we have the team and we have that vision to kind of run this company for the long term so we're not trying to really uh you know just kind of fix it at this point and are you more interested in those kinds of partners that are direct competitors hop in visibo et cetera or adjacent categories it's more adjacent categories so we're looking for people you know who have done physical events before and as you know physical events are moving towards hybrid we're also moving towards hybrid just trying to find the right partner you know who you know together we can work with them to build a stronger company very good muhammad on that note let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book uh the favorite business book have been uh yeah just zero to one like that uh is always our favorite one yeah well you've you've certainly done that uh number two is there a c a ceo you're following or studying i have always appreciated uh steve jobs but uh nowadays it's uh you know satya from microsoft yep yeah is microsoft one of the folks you would potentially exit to uh they have never reached out to us so yeah i have no idea number three what's your favorite online tool for building b fares uh i'm a big fan of pop spot so again you know uh with with this influx of uh new leads hubspot have helped us a lot so you know pretty kind of them yeah are using any sort of these new tools you know remote.com pilot any of these uh we are primarily again yeah i think just sticking with hubspot with uh slack you know those regular channels no no none of the other fancy ones as of now number three how many hours of sleep are number four how many hours of sleep every night yeah i think hardly for four to five hours max at this point what a thought muhammad that's how do you survive on four to five hours yeah i think with uh yeah i think when you keep on hitting those great numbers you know you know you have this at least rush you hardly get to sleep even in those four to five hours you have you know again a deal or something in your mind yeah how old are you i'm 37 30. okay you got plenty energy then and what's your situation married single kids married with two kids two kids okay last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. yeah i think uh yeah uh again the earlier you start your business early you get into things that you're passionate about the better it is you know i think you know the longer you delay you're just missing out on tons of those great energy years that you have are you the largest player in this virtual event space that is still bootstrapped uh i yeah i would i would like to believe that yeah i think i don't think so you know when i look at others like introduce sex connects hop in i think you know each one of them is no longer bootstrapped so i would like to believe that yeah all right that's the headline biggest bootstrap company virtual event space grew 10x over the past 12 months flirting with 30 million bucks in terms of run rate today hoping to break 40 million by the end of the year over 1 250 customers up from 170 just about a year and a half ago we've hired 200 people over the past 18 months now 250 full-time on the team they've turned down valuations in the 500 million dollar range they want to find a long-term partner in acquisition talks now but might not pull the trigger we will see what happens muhammad thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan one more thing before you go we 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hello everyone my guest today is Muhammad Yunus he's an Internet executive with over 10 years of experience including general management of small to mid-sized organizations product development business operations and strategy he's conceptualized and grown multiple businesses from zero to multi-million dollars in North America and in the Middle East he's now building a V Ferris Muhammad are you ready to take it to the top yep all right what's the company do and how do you make money so we provide worship and platform that companies used to run their online events um they yeah we have companies like fortune 500 companies who use our debt from to virtual career fairs and we have universities who do virtual openlayers with us we have government organizations you know who run virtual job fairs with us and then we have create show providers who do virtual trade shows with us so it's primarily a software-as-a-service virtual event platform and what's the average one of these customers pay you per month would you say so it's a we have to pricing we have a bereavement pricing then we have an annual license so our event pricing is six thousand dollars annually since it's close to thirty thousand dollars on average thirty thousand or twenty thirty thirty thirty thousand and we're I mean the challenge I've seen with these kinds of companies is there to seasonal it's very hard to actually be a SAS company with predictable revenue because too many people have one-off events and then cancel sure yep so I think that's what we initially thought also but I think the way it has worked for us ever since we have started a couple of years back is that those companies were spent who have done one event with us they keep on coming back to us to do repeat event so right now almost sixty percent of our revenue comes from repeat business from our repeat customers so even though a seasonal but given the price tag is defend a six on the whole event over the over the whole year it just works better than any other software as a service company where does more of your so if someone pays 30 grand for the year divided by your per event price of six hundred it have to run at least fifty events to make the annual pricing make sense which seems highly unlikely so what percentage of your revenue is coming from the one-time six hundreds it's not I said six thousand so one time is six huh yeah so so basically any company who wants to do five events or more would go ahead with our animal essence so the likes of Nestle a t-mobile AT&T all of these are customers they do annual essence with us because they keep did they run ten to twelve events a year for them annual essence works better whereas other small mediums companies who just want to do one event will pay $6,000 and do that one event with us sorry six hundred or six thousand six thousand six thousand dollars okay and and just to be clear you get what's the breakdown past twelve months eighty percent is coming from annual contracts and twenty percent one time it's close to 50/50 so fifty percent of that is coming from a newa contracts and remaining 50 percent is our single license okay we'll talk more about that here in a second but let's promise on a timeline first when did you launch the company what year our team is when we conceptualize this particular and and where were you kind of life wise did you just exit when your past company is where were you no no so I have been working with our parent company for the past 11 years so my job over there is more like an internal entrepreneur we come up with new products and services so yeah three years back four years back I moved to North America here in Canada so yeah at that point I saw that just kind of niche you know kind of industry where we believe that we can easily kind of pull it off so yeah 200 scene we started it off over the past two and a half years has been growing pretty well for us that's great and now we bootstrapped arrays no no no it's all internally funded by our parent company okay so are they on a cap table so yep our pian company is bait and they are funded by Tiger global management sorry who is it home so the parent company is bait but the investor behind bait is Tiger global management so I spell the name of your parent company ba whitey be a white bait okay interesting where they oh the job site in the Middle East yeah they are the number one drops like in the Middle East yeah god this is like indeed calm for the Middle East basically like like long story indeed of the Middle East yeah yeah yeah interesting okay good but but they allow you to operate with enough kind of control that you kind of your bait um and you're the CEO founder you can take the company wherever you want yeah yeah internal CEO for this protocol company um we primarily run this business in North America almost sixty to seventy percent our business comes from US and Canada remaining 30 percent from all over the world but yeah I have full control in terms of day-to-day operations and that's for a second ignore the one-off folks people on an air how many how many customers do you have on an annual basis today so uh see we have over 160 to 170 so close to 60 to 70 of them at least our annual contracts those who do one-time events with us I have to say that you can even think of them as more a good 80 percent of them they have seasonal events with us so you know someone who took runs a benefits fair with us will always run average the benefits vary with us in October right it runs for a month it's over they will come back next year October time again to run another virtual benefit to pray with us so so yeah so so almost 40 to 50 percent our annual which is a again close to 60 70 customers and then we have around a hundred plus for single events who comes seasonally got it okay good so 65 folks paying that on your annual plans 30 grand a year that's about 2500 each pays per month so that means you're doing just on that Chum about 160 grand per month and you said that's 50% of your total revenue so if you add back on the one-time on top of that it takes you to somewhere called around 320 or something like that per month is that generally accurate a lot of them came this year so so we are still kind of accruing it right now we are at a at a at an annual run rate of two million dollars so we'll hit 2 million dollars is here oh that's great okay what are you are right now though so right now as of now we are so that's it for this year we close to 1.6 million so you know we expect yeah I think believes across 2 million dollars by the end of the year okay so when you say one point six nine are you saying if you take last month's revenue in multiplied by 12 its 1.6 million yeah basically last 12 months revenue it's close to 1.6 but yeah we're we're increasing every revenue on a monthly basis so we'll be close to 2 million dollars by the end of the year okay that's great and that's 50-50 split between one-timers and annuals yeah that's great and what's the end and so what is that the past 12 months you've been 1.6 but taking back one full year so if you're at 1.6 million in ARR after sorry give me forward-looking so we did this wrong you're last month's revenue whatever that was multiply forward by 12 and then I'm curious what are you growing at year over here so as of now we agree 100 percent year on year so basically whatever our 2016-17 revenue was infused by a hundred percent you know with the past 12 months we keep on increasing hundred percent you know over here over here you know right now so that's so that would mean if you if you're doing calling like 133 right now per month which would put you at you know the 1.6 million you just said that means a year ago you're doing what 70 grand a month something like that so as of now as of now we are close to 165 to 170 thousand dollars a month as of now but yeah so we expect that yeah that's why my another year will be close to two million dollars but yeah I think over the next 12 months it will close it will be close to three million dollars so sorry just to be clear if you're doing 165 right now per month you're a our run rate is already past 2 million yeah you're giving me on a cash flow basis you're saying you're gonna collect 2 million in cash over the by the end of the year yeah okay but your run right you already you already beat 2 million yep yeah that's great talk to me about talked about how you're driving this growth how are you signing up these new paid accounts meetings or big deals so most of them are their incoming leaves I have to say I think in our case we have an extremely lucky we have had some great customers you know who has been really happy with our services and as you know they kind of speak with other HR executives you know people who wants to do virtual events with us they eventually keep on knocking on our doors and ask us you know how we can have something similar to let's say what AT&T is doing or what t-mobile is doing or what necessary is doing right so almost 80 percent our business is purely incoming you know so so people call as people reach out to us people come to our website to ask us our services 20% is outbound where we reach out to other customers and ok and so when you look at your fully weighted cap to get one of these new $30,000 your customers what are you spending to acquire that customer so so did there two aspects where one of them is purely in terms of lead generation um there's pretty minimal hums you know we spend close to $10,000 on Google Adwords so that's what we come on any what month yeah people come online search for yeah you know virtual career fair virtual job fairs image to come to our site and then then then I think just to retain them you know we kind of spend a bit of yeah I think we we do some customizations we prepare nice which a lot beads sound so there's a kind of concentrating and deliver that service okay but yeah you didn't answer my question so a cost to acquire new 30,000 our customer is about what see right now we're we're getting around at least 10 to 12 customers new customers a month so and so you talking about you know roughly thousand dollar per customer but that's just the ad spend you must have some people doing sales so we do we just started outbound literally to once back so as of now it's like you know you can say like all the customers as of now I had up until two months back for purely incoming they were never outgoing but yeah now we have two salespeople yeah you can say lie better what's the total team size 20 people 20 okay so 2 out of the 20 are of sales people album sales people then they're - who just handed incoming leads and closed them yes sorry just to be clear I'm curious when you calculate a fully weighted CAC it is a matter of his inbound outbound if they're out whatever if you have two people closing these leads that you're getting from ten grand a month and Google spend your fully weighted kak would include they're not just the pace then but also like their salaries any onboarding costs and customers all that stuff you don't calculate you don't include those though no we don't we don't count them something that has such an edge leads in each like online lead span or lead generation expense in separate which is ten thousand dollars then you have salaries and commissions and like those things are separate so you can add another two hundred thousand dollars for the whole year for those kind of salaries if you want to I see so Jay do you break it down on a per customer bases in other words do you get that $30,000 customer did that payback period less than 12 months would you say absolutely I think just to give you a rough number we would say like on average one customer would cause us at this point I think I know close to four to five thousand dollars in terms of fully weighted you have fully weighted yeah yes you're getting paid back there pretty quick less than six months easily yeah that's great and what about churn obviously it's critical in a SAS business what's your turn so uh see justjust because we have these two models right there's one who's only signing for one event you know it's hard to kind of calculation for that and then you have these annual contracts with us so so what we have seen is that for those who do just one event with us at least eighty percent of them are doing repeat business with us so are here late join as twenty percent those who are doing annual essence with us are our enumerators close to ninety five percent so you don't we hardly lose any customer on the on the end well as since as of now for the past three years that's great and where's the whole team based so we have like the team spread across four different locations out just because we get clients from all over the world um you know so we have team in Dallas we have team here in Toronto we have in Dubai and then we have in Pakistan so we have spread across four different countries very good any plans to raise capital soon Mohammed or no so I love no we don't need as such you know I think we have been turned like we are already a profitable business but yeah I think as we as we scale this a bit forward harm yeah we might be looking for external funding would you sell the company say if the right deal came along I actually have no idea you know I think this is more with the shareholders but yeah as of now I think we are pretty happy where we are going and um we'll see like when when the right deal comes do you any deal like that would you have to approve it with with the other shareholders or do you own more than 50 percent where you would control it no no it has to go to whether she'll yeah all right very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book it's I have to face the recent book by item was pretty sorry what's it called the original got it yeah number two is their CEO you're following or studying right now so uh I studied Steve Jobs for a long time and I think yeah I think that's that's who I focused on primarily but now I know it is I'm following Satya you know some Microsoft pretty aggressively so number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business hop sport yeah I pretty like that party number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night I think on average four to five hours it's pretty good in which situation married single kids married with two kids two cool hands are full how old are you I'm 35 35 last question Mohammed what do you is your 20 year old self new I think my 22 yourself would new that you know get into our dimension as soon as you can I think this is where the fun is this is where you control your own destiny and the highly encourage entrepreneurship to anyone guys start a company faster he worked at corporate intensity know what I want to do my own thing so he kind of spun out this company called V fairs online virtual event management launch in 2016 now 20 people for remote locations all around the world they've got customers a 65 customers paying annual contracts call it 30 grand then another call it 60 70 customers that pay per event fees of about $6,000 per event they're currently doing 165 thousand bucks per month that's up about a hundred percent year-over-year so 80 grand per month just a year ago in September of 27 teen scaling quickly 20% logo turn per year and their code which pays kind of per event and 95 percent retention per year and a cohort paying on annual contracts healthy K payback period bootstrapped which I love Mohammed thank you for taking us to the top thanks I think