SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
vFairs Breaks $30m ARR bootstrapped, turns down $500m Offer
02 Aug 2021
Chapter 1: What is vFairs and its current revenue status?
Right now, we are at a point where we should be hitting close to $40 million in 2021. You'll get the full interviews. Right now, you're only hearing partial interviews. And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
Chapter 2: How did vFairs grow from a small team to 250 employees?
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On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hey folks, my guest today is Mohamed Younis. He's the founder and CEO of VFairs, the leading virtual events hybrid platform in the world. He led the growth of the company from two people back in 2016 to 250 plus today in 2021. He's going to share revenue here in a second.
Mohamed, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. All right. What's revenue today?
So right now we are at a point where we should be hitting close to $40 million in 2021.
That's incredible. Now, where were you exactly a year ago? Where'd you finish 2020?
It was around $30 million.
How are you doing this when you have competitors like Hopin and Bizabo raising gobs of capital?
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Chapter 3: What challenges does vFairs face from competitors like Hopin?
You're bootstrapped, I believe.
Yeah, absolutely. So I think, see, in our case, with all respect to Hopin and Bizabo, within our customer base, we don't hear much about them. Again, we primarily deal with enterprise customers who really care about the visual look and feel of how their event should look like. They want their events to be memorable.
So we are a lot more in that 3D, highly visually appealing virtual platform, whereas many others are 2D enhanced networking tools. And we don't compete with those guys much within the enterprise sector.
I remember in March when you came on last year, I was shocked by your average ACV, which backs up the story you just told. What is your average ACV today? Is it still in the $14,000 to $30,000 range?
Yeah, actually, I think as of now, our average customer is paying us $33,000. So that's what they're paying us now for the past 12 months.
And what, so why are they paying so much more? You mentioned visual customization. Are there other things you're sort of upswing against that no one else is doing or they're doing a poor job at?
Sure. No, I think for us, the following is a key, right? So first for our platform looks visually appealing. It's one of the most beautiful platform out there. That's one.
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Chapter 4: What is the average contract value (ACV) for vFairs customers?
The second thing is our platform is also something that is end-to-end integrated. So again, when we work with these enterprise customers, they care about integrations with their CRM providers like Salesforce, HubSpot. They care about integration with the likes of Marketo, if it's an ATS company, whether it's a couple of others. So it's a fully end-to-end integrated system.
And third and last thing is that, see, we have been in the market for almost more than five years. So we have far more depth in terms of feature set. versus anyone else. So when a customer is coming to us, they get far more depth in terms of feature sets. If they're doing a trade show, they will have the ability to showcase their products, sell their products.
If they're doing a job fair, they can pull up their jobs, RSS feed, they can have candidates apply for jobs and so forth. So when it comes to that depth of feature set, we also have that versus a lot of other players out there.
And how many customers today?
Roughly close to 1250 plus active paying customers at this point.
1,250. That's true. Yeah. Well, that's up significantly. So you've come on the show twice. Back in 2018, you had broken about a $2 million. Do you remember this?
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Chapter 5: How does vFairs ensure customer satisfaction and support?
Back in 2018, you were floating with like a $1.7 million run rate. And then pre-COVID, so this was, I guess, very early last year. I think this is right, right? You were at about just a $3 million run rate. You almost 10x the
Yeah. I remember telling you that number and I was like, no, I, gosh, I wish like I really hit that number, but yeah, I was hoping to hit 3 million. Then we hit 30 million. So that's what happened.
Yeah. So where were you in early 2020 run rate wise? Do you remember?
It was close to 2.4 to 2.8 million dollars.
Yeah.
Wow. So, okay. So essentially what happened was you went from $2.5 million in run rate to 22 million or 20 million in terms of run rate in December of like this past December. So almost 10X growth during COVID. Yeah.
Yeah.
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Chapter 6: What strategies did vFairs use to scale its customer base during COVID?
Well, and so what drove that? I mean, there's hard, COVID is obviously important, but there's also a lot of hard work there.
Absolutely. See, there are two things, right? First of all, I think prior to COVID, you have to be a very forward-looking organization to try out virtual events. So you have to be one of those Fortune 500, Fortune 2000 companies in order to do something unique. Now with COVID, What has happened is that everyone is forced to learn about virtual events, to do virtual events.
And when they went out there trying to look for a platform, we were one of the most trusted platform out there. So if you go on G2, again, with all respect to all the other people who have raised tons of money, you will see us as number one when it comes to the highest rated platform. So no one, no one, and I say that with a lot of confidence, no one can beat us on customer support.
So as much as a soft replay, one thing where we just, you know, we are better than anyone else out there is, you know, how great our customer support is versus anyone else out there. That's one. Then again, you know, when they were researching who's the most, you know, trusted player, most, you know, the player with a lot of great reviews.
And then again, you know, player with a bit of a, you know, who can help you run an event that is highly memorable. We came out there at the top, right? So we were the one who got a lot of that influx of new business. We, in fact, had to turn away tons of business. You know, this 30 million could have easily been 60 million have I been not caring about customer support.
In many cases, we let the customers just, you know, we have to apologize to them that, you know, the kind of support that we aim to provide.
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Chapter 7: Why did vFairs turn down a $500 million acquisition offer?
Unfortunately, we feel that we may not be the right vendor exactly at that peak when we got tons of customers here.
You have 562 reviews on G2, which means you probably get a lot of organic traffic from there, maybe some paid as well. But the playbook you run to make sure when you impress a customer, they actually take the time to go leave a review is an important playbook. What does that sound like?
Yeah, I think, see, within the events industry, what happens is that anytime a customer is coming to any vendor, including us, I think they know that they're going to work for weeks, if not months, for that one day. That one day, that one day for a virtual event has to go just perfectly well. And they would always go ahead and do their research. So they want that social proof.
So they will see G2. They will ask us, can you give us social proof? They will ask us for references. And then once they are done doing a virtual event with vFairs, they know how much those reviews have helped them. So again, just by default, they go out there and post some of those reviews.
Of course, we encourage them as well that if you feel that you, whatever, whether it's good or bad service, we would love you to kind of go ahead and share that internally as well as externally with the world.
Talk to me about team today. How many folks full-time?
250 people.
And how many are in support?
So in support, we would have roughly around 120 plus people.
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Chapter 8: What are vFairs' future plans regarding partnerships and growth?
Okay. How did you scale that? So almost half your team is in support. Are they all based in the States or how'd you scale that team?
So they're based all over the world. So, you know, from US to Canada to Australia, Singapore, etc. But bulk of our support is based out of either Pakistan or out of some of the other Asian countries. Again, they work US time zone, they work UK, European time zone. So we kind of assign them based on wherever our customer base is.
This is also just an insane amount of, this must take a lot of your time. You had 45 people on the team about 16 months ago. You've hired over 200 people. I mean, how do you hire 200 people in 18 months?
You know, I think we have that brand recognition in most of these countries. So again, when we were hiring, we went to this online university drive. We went to the best universities out there in the world, and we literally hired any good candidate that was available at that time.
What did you do? You reached out to like the deans of the schools and said, send them our way? Or what was the playbook there?
We reached out to the career services team. So again, you know, in some of these universities, we're already well known. Some of them are our customers to begin with. So again, they would say that, by the way, we use the first platform they're hiring. Go ahead. You know, and they will recommend sometimes handpick candidates and give it to us.
Smart. How many engineers on the team?
Roughly around 50.
50. Okay. And last time we spoke, you were just scaling up your sales team. You had two quota carrying reps right before COVID hit and you had an annual quota of 500,000. What does that look like today?
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