SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Copy vFairs Used to Get 1,000+ G2 Reviews and $30M ARR without hiring any outbound sales team
07 Oct 2022
Chapter 1: What strategies did vFairs use to achieve $30 million in revenue?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
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Chapter 2: How did vFairs grow without an outbound sales team?
It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Please help me in welcoming to the stage Mohamed Younis, the CEO of vFairs.
Hello everyone, my name is Mohammad Yunus 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 20 minutes, I will walk you through how we have took vFares from $0 million in revenue to $30 million in revenue without having any outbound sales team.
I will share with you our secret tips and tricks of how do we typically go about SEO and SEM and direct and 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 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, Captera, and hundreds of video testimonials from our customers. So let's get started. Again, those of you who don't 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, mid-sized company, and then in most cases, an enterprise company, they would run a 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 of other products where we also now help companies do in-person events and hybrid events. 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 mentioned in his initial 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. So even though our competition has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in VC money, We take pride in running the business with the right unit economics. So at any point, 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 us have kind of an inbound funnel like this.
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Chapter 3: What role does SEO play in vFairs' marketing strategy?
For us, 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 750 to 800 inquiries that we get every single month.
The very first question we typically ask them, because it's inbound, is how did you hear about vFares? Where were you before, like which website were you visiting that drive the traffic to vFares? Or what exactly you entered on Google or Bing that drive the traffic to vFares? And we actually log that down in our HubSpot. We are very religious in this particular area.
So for every customer, we know exactly how they define about vFairs from a website, from a referral, from Google or from Bing. 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 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 we are here for the next 5-10 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 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 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 have 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 vFairs, 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 long-form guides, we also then go ahead and use those keywords to just revise our SEM campaigns. SEM is pretty expensive, specifically since a lot of our competition has raised 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 NCM.
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Chapter 4: How does customer feedback drive vFairs' growth?
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're being taken extremely seriously, not just as a SaaS vendor, but also as a, again, 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 that we don't just know about how technology plays a role in running a successful virtual event.
We want to 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 sell their virtual event 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 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 software and then defining 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 inspired by 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 ourselves for each one of those things that we are going to provide our customers? If we 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 onboard, get exhibitors onboard, get attendees onboard, what would they think about that experience? And if we can agree with them, okay, what is that end goal that they're trying to achieve?
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Chapter 5: What are the key metrics for measuring customer success at vFairs?
We'll make sure that we help you achieve those end goals. And at the end of it, all we want is is your transparent review in any of the social media channels. So literally from day one, we request them that. And again, it can go either way. 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 track the product NPS, and again, our Slack channel is pretty much like how the CEO of Pandora was showing. We track our product NPS every single second. And every time we get even a neutral or a detractor, 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 footer that says, rate my service.
And again, everything that gets documented over there, we track that. We see how the customer is feeling about the customer support that they are getting from vFairs. And at the end of the event, again, things become really easy. 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. 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 we want you to go ahead and share your experience with vFairs out there, wherever you like, whether it's on LinkedIn or G2 or Captera, 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 these social media sites.
So again, whether it's on G2 or Captera, 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 testimonials. Again, you know, we have 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.
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Chapter 6: How does vFairs ensure a flawless event experience for clients?
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 and whether you 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 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 hiring a single outbound sales person that's it