From Planner to Platform: The vFairs Origin Story
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Who is Muhammad Younas and how did his background lead to founding vFairs?
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Hello everybody and welcome along to the Event Industry News Podcast with me, James Dixon. Wishing you all a very good morning, afternoon, or evening, whenever or wherever you tune into today's podcast from. I'm in a slightly different setting today. Um we've been out on the road recording podcasts recently. Um I usually record them from my little home studio setup um uh more often than not. But today I find myself actually at the base of a client that I'm working with at the moment. So I've just found myself a nice quiet corner of their base in Yorkshire. To um to do uh today's podcast. And um my podcast guest today is going to take us into the world of event technology. Um and we're maybe I think we're gonna talk in some respects chronologically about a journey that they've had, um, how they started and where they find themselves today.
Because that journey sort of takes us back um in some respects to six years ago, to the COVID pandemic of twenty twenty. um and uh a technology platform provider that became integral and essential to many many event organizers who looked to pivot and turn very very quickly during that period of time to continue running their events and the story is gonna evolve then into where we find them today. I'm delighted to say that my guest today is Mohamed Yunus. Mohamed is the CEO and founder of VFairs and joins the event industry news podcast today. I believe from your base, is it in Toronto, uh Yunus? Absolutely, James. Thank you for having me on the podcast. No problem at all. Yeah, delighted that you could join us today.
And um Vfair is a name that, you know, many of our podcast uh followers will be familiar with. You know, if you run events, if you've encountered event technology of any description, the chances are you will have come across the Vfairs brand and um We we really sort of wanted to to to uh take this opportunity of haven't you on the podcast today to talk about that journey because in some respects compared to other technology providers, it has uh a unique uniqueness to it in terms of how and where your journey started, why the platform was originally developed and you know, effectively how it survived um up until this point today when many others have have fallen by the wayside. So Um yeah, welcome to the show.
Tell us a little bit about your background first of all, prior to to V Fares and how your own journey ended up with founding V Fares.
Absolutely. So I uh one of my initial jobs was to actually run online events, digital events. So I subscribed to one of the softwares to run an online event. I didn't like the technology, and most uh importantly, I didn't like the support that they were providing uh to me uh to help me run those digital events. Uh I come from a software engineering background, so I decided to just build the platform myself. myself uh to help me run those online events. And over the next almost six, seven years, I was just an event planner. My job was to run online events, my job was to sell sponsorship packages in those online events. And that was the bread and butter for the company. To the point where I started receiving uh multiple requests almost on a weekly basis saying that.
We have been a speaker on your online platform. We have been an exhibitor or a sponsor in your online platform. Or I have attended as an attendee one of your online uh events. Can we use your technology? to power our own events. So they were like, I I just want to rent your technology. And I was like, okay, maybe I'm in uh in in the wrong business. So that's when bought the domain vFairs.com and started offering um just vFares uh more as a software as a service as compared to just me running online events.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Who is Muhammad Younas and how did his background lead to founding vFairs?
0:01–6:01
2
Why did Muhammad decide to build his own event platform instead of using existing software?
6:01–13:19
3
How did vFairs grow during the COVID‑19 pandemic and what made it scale ten‑fold?
13:19–20:32
4
What role did stability and hands‑on customer support play in vFairs’ success?
20:32–24:11
5
How did vFairs transition from purely virtual events to hybrid and in‑person experiences?
24:11–27:53
6
What challenges do event organizers face when onboarding speakers and exhibitors online?
27:53–29:54
7
How is vFairs integrating AI to improve event operations and attendee engagement?
29:54–32:22
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Event Industry News Podcast
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