SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1289 Virtual Event Management Business Passes $2m in ARR Selling $30k ACV's
03 Feb 2019
Chapter 1: What inspired the guest to start a virtual event management company?
He worked at corporate and then said, you know what? I want to do my own thing. So he kind of spun out this company called V fairs, online virtual event management launched in 2016. Now 20 people for remote locations all around the world. They've got customers, 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 about 165,000 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 2017.
team scaling quickly 20% logo churn per year and their cohort, which pays kind of per event and 95% retention per year and the cohort paying on annual contracts, healthy payback period bootstrapped, which I love.
Chapter 2: How does vFairs generate revenue from virtual events?
This is the top entrepreneurs podcast where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode.
Chapter 3: What is the pricing structure for vFairs' services?
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 vFairs.
Muhammad, are you ready to take us to the top? Yep. All right. What's the company doing? How do you make money?
Chapter 4: What percentage of revenue comes from repeat customers?
So we provide a virtual event platform that companies use to run their online events. We have companies like Fortune 500 companies who use our platform to do virtual career fairs. Then we have universities who do virtual open days with us. We have government organizations who run virtual job fairs with us. And then we have trade 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 we have two pricing. We have a per event pricing, then we have an annual license. So per event pricing is $6,000.
Chapter 5: When was vFairs launched and what was the initial vision?
Annual license is close to $30,000 on average.
$30,000 or $20,000? $30,000. And where, I mean, the challenge I've seen with these kinds of companies is they're too seasonal. It's very hard to actually be a SaaS company with predictable revenue because too many people have one-off events and then cancel.
Yeah, 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 who have done one event with us, they keep on coming back to us to do repeat events. So right now, almost 60% of our revenue comes from repeat business, from our repeat customers.
So even though it's seasonal, but given the price tag is decent, $6,000 per 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 600, they'd have to run at least 50 events to make the annual pricing make sense, which seems highly unlikely.
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Chapter 6: How does vFairs acquire new customers?
So what percentage of your revenue is coming from the one time 600s?
I said 6,000. So one time is 6,000. So basically, any company who wants to do five events or more would go ahead with our annual license. So the likes of Nestle, T-Mobile, AT&T, all of these are our customers. They do annual license with us because they run 10 to 12 events a year. So for them, annual license works better.
Whereas other small, medium-sized companies who just want to do one event will pay $6,000 and do that one event with us.
Sorry, 600 or 6,000?
6,000, $6,000.
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Chapter 7: What are the challenges of maintaining predictable revenue in a SaaS model?
Okay.
And just to be clear, so what's the breakdown? Past 12 months, 80% is coming from annual contracts and 20% one time?
So it's close to 50-50. So 50% of that is coming from annual contracts and the remaining 50% is our single event license.
Okay. We'll talk more about that here in a second, but let's put on a timeline first. When did you launch the company? What year?
2016 is when we conceptualized this particular.
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Chapter 8: What is the current growth trajectory for vFairs?
And where were you kind of life-wise? Did you just exit one of your past companies? Where were you?
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 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, 2016, we started it off. Over the past two and a half years, it has been growing pretty well for us.
That's great.
And Navi Bootstrapped or Raised? No, no, no. It's all internally funded by our parent company.
Okay. So are they on the cap table?
So yeah, our parent company is Bait, and they are funded by Tiger Global Management. Sorry, who's it called? So the parent company is Bait, but the investor behind Bait is Tiger Global Management.
Sorry, spell the name of your parent company.
Okay.
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