How vFairs Grew from $0 to $30M Revenue Without a Single Outbound Salesperson (Talk by CEO Muhammad Younas)

Introduction and Speaker Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Please help me in welcoming to the stage Muhammad Younas, the CEO of vFairs.

Muhammad Younas

00:04>> Hello,

00:07>> everyone. My name is Muhammad Younas, and I'm the Founder and CEO of vFairs. 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 vFairs, I was working with a company called pay.com in The Middle East, where I was a chief commercial officer and chief product officer over there. And then that's where I founded vFairs. Over the next twenty minutes,

Overview: $0 to $30M With No Outbound Sales

Muhammad Younas

00:35>> I will walk you through how we have took vFairs $0 in revenue to $30,000,000 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 SEM and direct and word-of-mouth referral. I'll 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

01:02>> 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, templates that we use to get hundreds and thousands of views socially across G2, Capterra, and hundreds of video testimonials from our customers. So let's get started. Again, you know, those of you who don't

vFairs Platform and Product Overview

Muhammad Younas

01:28>> know about vFairs, vFairs is all in one events platform. Up until pandemic, we have been helping companies out doing online events, doing virtual events. Companies of all sizes use vFairs. So again, whether it's a startup company, a mid sized company, and then in most cases, an enterprise company, They would run conference, a trade show, a job fair, an open day using a vFairs platform. And then, you know, post COVID this year, we also launched a couple

01:57>> of other products where we also now help companies do in person events and hybrid events.

Founding Story and Early Profitability

Muhammad Younas

02:04>> This is our journey. We started back in 2016. Within the first six months, we were profitable. And again, some of the things that Nathan kind of mentioned in his initial kind of slides, we take pride in just being a profitable company. So all of this revenue, at least 25% to 50% just goes back in profit. Even though our competition has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and VC money, We take pride in running the business

02:33>> 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 on the customers that we have and just using that to drive a lot more revenue. So let's get started. I think all of

Inbound Funnel: Sessions, Inquiries and Conversion

Muhammad Younas

02:58>> us have kind an inbound funnel like this. For us, our again, just we typically get around 80 to 90,000 sessions per month on our site. And once we get those sessions, roughly 1% 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 have a very detailed conversation with those on average seven fifty to 800 inquiries that we get every single month.

Tracking How Every Customer Found vFairs

Muhammad Younas

03:29>> The very first question we typically ask them because it's inbound is how did you hear about vFairs? You know, where were you before? Like, which website were you visiting that drive the traffic to vFairs? Or what exactly you entered on Google or Bing that drive the traffic to vFairs. And we actually log that down in our HubSpot. We are very religious in this particular area. So for every customer, we know exactly exactly how they define about

10,000 Keywords and Long-Tail SEO Strategy

Muhammad Younas

03:58>> vFairs from a website, from a referral, from Google, or from Bing. And we go and share that with our marketing team. Our marketing team 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 go for the long

04:28>> tail. We want to make sure that we still rank well. We'll rank among the top one, two or three in Google for the top ten, fifteen keywords that has the highest volume. But we also know that we are here for the long term. Are here for the next five ten years. We want to make sure that those long tail keywords are recognized today and we start producing content around those keywords today. And that has helped us

04:50>> get 60% of our traffic. So almost 58 to 60% of all of our traffic comes from those hundreds and thousands of keywords that we go and we research through the seven fifty plus inquiries that we do every single month. And again that has been the single biggest contributor to our growth over the years. Just because we have been doing this for the past five years. Know ever since we launched back in twenty sixteen-seventeen, the very first

First Customer Nestle and Building the Growth Engine

Muhammad Younas

05:16>> 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 vFairs, what were the keywords they were entering on Google, what are some of the other website that typically go and compare us. And then, you know, all of that from day one has fueled into our inbound traffic and in our growth engine. Not only

SEM Strategy and Keyword Bidding

Muhammad Younas

05:38>> we use those keywords for SEO purpose or for our you know long form guides, We also then go ahead and use those keywords to revise our SEM campaigns. SEM is pretty expensive, specifically since a lot of our competition has raised, 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

06:09>> 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 SEM. So again, researching every single customer and again, just being very detailed about it of how did they find out about vFairs 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 high growth

06:40>> in track from organic as well as just making sure that our SEM 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 purely on that. It's pretty simple. If you go ahead and just try to follow that one.

Events as Hospitality: Customer Success Philosophy

Muhammad Younas

07:06>> The second thing, again,

07:11>> an events business, what's tricky about events business, unlike any other software business, is that we say internally that a typical customer of vFairs 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 sure that those couple of days when

07:38>> 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 day, it cannot go wrong. So you want to make sure that you do whatever it

07:58>> 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 wanna 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

08:18>> 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, not just as a SaaS vendor, but also as a again, you know, just we just think of us being also in the hospitality industry. So what we

08:44>> 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 all and 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 sell their virtual event

09:11>> and make money out of it? And all of those things we documented it. We documented those emails that we actually sent to get sponsors, to bring exhibitors on board, to run really highly successful virtual events with hundreds and thousands of attendees, and we converted all of them into playbooks. And 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

09:39>> of those things that are needed? You know, how do we wanna 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 use your software and then defining

Defining Customer Success Metrics and End Goals

Muhammad Younas

10:04>> each one of those 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 just, again, how would we rate

10:32>> 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 rate 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 onboard, get exhibitors onboard, get attendees onboard, what would they think about that experience? And if we can agree

10:58>> with them, okay, what is that end goal that they're trying to achieve? Is it $1,000,000 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 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

Setting Review Expectations from Day One

Muhammad Younas

11:22>> 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 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

11:51>> customer is that, okay, you you have the software that you have signed up. We would go out of, you know, out of the legal contract, you know, just contractual services that that you have signed up for. We'll make sure that we help you achieve those end goals. 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,

12:17>> you know, it can go either way. 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 much we care about their review in the end. Again, the stakes go high and everyone in the company worked towards getting that positive review. We leading up to the event, we track everything. Not only we just

12:44>> 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 or detractor, we go ahead and we fall aggressively on that. But we also track it at an individual level. So every employee of the company, they have this footer that says rate my service. And again,

13:07>> everything that kind of gets documented over there, track that we see like how the customer is feeling about the customer support that they are getting from vFairs.

Post-Event Email Template and 90% Response Rate

Muhammad Younas

13:17>> And at the end of the event, again, things become really easy. You know, the customer already knew from day one that once the event is over, we just want them to document how their experience was with vFairs. Here's an email template that we use. We almost always get, like, again, you know, this email template has 90% response rate. Hardly anyone would not go ahead and not reply to this email. And again, it's less about this email

13:46>> template. It's really about the expectations that were set with the customer from day one that we want you to go ahead and share your experience with vFairs out there wherever you like, you know, whether it's on LinkedIn or G2 or Capterra, whatever whatever your preferred platform is. And as a result of that, even though our competition would have literally 100 times more money than what we have, we would consistently be ranked number one on most of

G2 and Capterra Rankings: 12 Quarters at Number One

Muhammad Younas

14:16>> these social media sites. So again, whether it's on G2 or Capterra, we'll be ranked number one for almost 12 quarters in a row now. And again, we beat everyone else by a huge margin. And again, primarily because from day one, we have been obsessed about customer support and our customers know that how much we care about their feedback once that particular event is over. Most of these customers then go ahead and would also give us video

14:45>> testimonials. Again, a template for that as well that we use. 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 vFairs, and here's what we're going to request you on this particular day once that event is done. You'll receive the emails

15:07>> like this one, and all we want is you just respond to that. Positive, negative, up to you, based on just working relationship with vFairs. And again, we 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 other places, which eventually then result in the inbound traffic that we were

15:32>> going through earlier. Again, the idea is to work backwards. 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 ask them that, you know what, all I would request you in the end is transparent feedback about our product, about our services, whether you

15:55>> were 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 salespeople 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 vFairs from $0 in revenue to $30,000,000 without hiring a single outbound salesperson. That's it.