← SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
GTM Fund gets better deal flow than you because they think like a Growth Team
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You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to gitlatka.com We've published thousands of these interviews and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn CAC valuation or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now@getladka.com our next speaker. I just want you guys imagine something. Imagine going from 1.9 million bucks of ARR to 17.9 million dollars of ARR in under 12 months. Please help me welcome to the stage Mr. Muhammad Yunus from VFairs. Is Covid baby the right word? Yeah, kind of, sort of.
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It was born a lot more earlier than that, but yeah, boomed.
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Coach us up competitive space. Can't wait to learn.
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Perfect. Hello everyone. My name is Mohammad Yunus. I'm the founder and CEO of VFairs. And over the next 20 minutes, I'll just walk you through our journey of how we reached to $30 million in ARR over the last seven years. Before I do that, I just want to show a raise of hand. Have you guys ever been disappointed by a vendor or frustrated by a vendor? Anyone? Yeah. Now I just want you to imagine the extent of that disappointment and frustration if it involves all of your life savings or a very critical business event. So just about when I was starting VFairs, I was also the chief revenue officer of this company. One day I wake up, I was traveling with my family. One day I wake up, I see this email from like an automated email from the bank that all of my life savings has been transferred to an unknown bank account in a different country called the bank. This is almost seven years back. So call the bank figured out that what they call SIM swap fraud. So when you're traveling, someone can go and if they can fool the telecom provider, they can change your SIM card under their name. They can go to a bank, they don't have a checkbook, nothing. They can just ask for a wire transfer copy for your signature. And when the bank calls, they call on that number. You're traveling now, the call is going to that guy and they can just answer some basic questions of what's your date of birth, etc. And then they will transfer the money. I used to go to the bank every single day, ask them, you know, I trusted you with my money, you know, where is it? And then over the next several months, I had to just fight that battle between the bank and the police and everyone else. But that was a time when I was also starting VFairs. And again, I promised to myself that never, ever I want to be in a position where I, as a vendor, the customer would tell me that, by the way, I trusted you with my event. I trusted you with our critical event, you're disappointed, and so forth. So I just want you to guys remember that because a lot of what we have achieved really just comes from that philosophy. So 2017, we started as purely a point solution. We were only doing virtual job fairs. Only doing virtual job fairs. Our customers then helped us figured out a lot of other use cases. We'll go through that in detail in the next section. But by the time Covid came, we were already doing everything virtual. We had some of the biggest customers using us for all use cases, whether it was conferences, trade shows, job fairs, open days and so forth. So when the COVID came, we were in a perfect position to pretty much handle all the inbound that was coming our way. But again, more than that, more than going from less than $2 million in revenue to 10x of that in one year. As Nathan mentioned, what I'm most proud of is that when Covid was finishing, we knew what's about to come. And again, everyone within our industry went from boom to burst, but we were able to still sustain the revenue and, and again going from there. So we'll walk you through how we went from a point solution to an all in one event management solution where we now provide event tech for virtual events, but also for in person events, batch printing solution, mobile app lead capture, app abstract management, and so forth. So I'm just gonna walk you through that. But before I do that, I just want you to know where we stand today. Gartner, for the first ever time last year, did their research on the event tech category. This is a category 20 years old, but again, they just picked up now. And in a very competitive landscape, in a very competitive environment, we won the Customer's choice award. Our customers mentioned that they love and trust VFairs more than anyone else within that category. And even in their magic quadrant, we were the top in the visionary category. So this is where we are now again. Whenever third parties are researching platforms, we win most of the awards. Again, if you look us up on G2 Captera, you pick up any third party software, you pick up any third party research. We Are, if not the leader, among the top three, four leaders within that category. I'm just gonna walk you through that journey, how we did it. First of all, again, I come from job site space, so I knew the job fair space pretty well. I've spent almost 10 years within that industry and I knew the pain. The pain was that when employers go ahead and post a job on any job site, whether it's indeed or monster, et cetera, tons of job seekers apply for those jobs. They never get a chance to talk to a recruiter. So I started by doing virtual job fairs myself, ran hundreds of job fairs. And then as I was running those customers would come to us and they would say, I want to use your software, but to run my own career fair. And one thing led to another. They were like, you know what, we like your software. But rather than doing just a career fair, I want to do an onboarding fair, I want to do an open day, I want to do a trade show. So they led us to a lot of other use cases within that category that even we didn't know about. And this thing is called just a beachhead segment strategy. You have to become expert in one thing and then you have to be very, very close to your customer. And if you're close to your customer and ask them what are some of the other events that your company as a whole would do, they will guide you on the next steps. And that's what helped us going from just purely from a job fair player to a virtual event solution provider. And in 2020, 2021, all of these customers that we were very close with, they were telling us already that, by the way, when the COVID will be over, we will be going back to in person. We love your virtual solution. A lot of us are still our customers, but those are the ones who knew that they have to go back to the in person category. They were like, how about we work with you guys over the next six to 12 months and we helped you build the software that we actually want. So it was our customers who helped us figure it out how the batch printing app works, how the mobile app works, how the lead capture app works, and they co created all of those things with us. So by the time our product was launched, we already had 200 plus paid customers who already were going to shift their virtual event contracts to in person event contracts just because they want to go back to that space. So we started with just virtual piece, that first quadrant. But over the last two years we built the other three quadrants and all of them, all of them were co created with customers who already paid us for all of that upfront. So just one of the things that I want you guys to know about is that if you are so we all get excited, including me to close a new deal. But I am of the opinion that more important is that if you are including yourself and C level players with what happens after the sale is done, if you keep on talking to your customers, if you keep on asking them what, what are some of the other areas where they need help in, they will guide you on the next steps. And that's what helped us from there. These are just some of the screenshots 2017 just doing virtual events to again now providing that all in one end to end event management platform. And these are, this is a kind of a screenshot from our HubSpot just recently where everything was virtual events. It was pretty much 85 to 90% all virtual events as of now, 55% of our business is in person events now. And again, had we had not made that shift almost 12 to 18 months back, we would have been like many other companies who went from boom to bust literally within the 12 to 18 months. That's one. The second thing I just want you guys to know that what has worked really well for us is just when you have solved a problem in a particular country and again US is where we have the largest amount of customers, you just have to reach out to those customers and see if you can kind of give the same solution to the same again if you're in enterprise space, these companies have departments in other countries, et cetera to other departments as well. So what we did was after being the leader within the US Geo, we started playing with some of the experiments in other countries. So we wanted to go into Europe, we wanted to be a bit more stronger there in Canada. So we just converted our most visited pages within our website into the local languages. We did that in French, we did that in Arabic, we did that in Spanish. And just by doing that we started getting a lot of inbound interest from a lot of those countries. So that's something that has again has virtuous magic for us. We never knew that this strategy would work, tried it out and overnight it helps us grow our revenue by an extra 10 to 15%. Again we are a company again that's very, very close to our customers and we would always go ahead and ask them that can you connect us with other stakeholders within your company? We are solving conference for you. But every company has recruitment, they have Trade shows, they have benefits, fee, et cetera. So we kept going to these companies and they have helped us find out a lot of other use cases that otherwise we didn't know about. Once you have got initial set of customers, you should also look into the different industries they all map into. And again, in our case what happened was that we went really deep into where our ICP is coming from and once we did that, we co created a lot of just social proof with those customers. So one of our favorite customers is University of Maryland. They were one of our initial customers and what we did was we worked with them to get a case study, a video testimonial, tons of social media posts from them on LinkedIn of how much they like vfairs. And just by doing that, and just by having them introduce us to a lot of their other colleagues in other universities and it helped US capture almost 40 to 50 of the top 150 universities in the world right now. So again, I just want you to think of your customers also as your salespeople. If you're serving them really well, they would go out of the way to become a reference to go ahead and share their work experience with you with a lot of other colleagues. So just see if you can always make use of that strategy, create tons of marketing content in collaboration with them. Whether these are case studies, whether these are video testimonials, whether it's requesting them to go ahead and share their experience on third party review sites. Some of these case studies, some of these case studies helped helped us capture an account worth half a million dollar. So we did a food show win of one of the biggest companies out here in the US and just that case study, once it was published, gave us inbound leads from other competitors within the same industry of how this company has achieved their objectives. So make sure that not only you're producing these case studies, you're producing those video testimonials, but your marketing team and your sales team are actively making use of those in every sales opportunity as well as the outbound opportunity. I also want you to understand there's a lot of money that can be captured from existing customers. Once you have served your customers really well, once you have a decent amount of social proof out there, one of the things that has worked really well is just going deep with our customers. So if I go and look at some of our top accounts, some of these customers started with us with literally four or $5,000 for a point solution. And just because we have been engaged with them over the last six, seven years. Now a lot of those accounts are worth half a million dollars. They started with a single point solution in a single department in a single country. And now some of these customers are using us across 100 countries and across 30 different departments. So just always try to see if you have got a big logo and if you have got a big logo, you should know that these things have just tons of power to expand that. We work with the largest FMCG company out there. We work with one of the biggest leader within the healthcare industry. And whether it's them, whether it's a lot of others, almost 20 to 30% of our revenue of our new sales revenue is driven by our existing customers. So one thing that I just want you guys to just start with is that if you would serve your customers really well, if they would see you as someone, as a vendor, that will not disappointment them, that will make sure they stand with them through thick and thin, that is truly serving them to the best of their ability. I just want you to understand the power of those customers. Those customers will help you pivot at different times, it will help you grow your revenue and it will help you retain the existing revenue that you have. That's it. From my side. Thank you guys.