SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Will Bizzabo Announce A Major Acquisition Next Month? (Flashback)
14 Jul 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of Bizzabo as an event success platform?
So we look at it by different cohorts. We have three different cohorts, but I would say across the board, the average is 25K.
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 getlatka.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 of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Eran Ben-Shushan.
He is the CEO and co-founder of Abizabo, an all-in-one event success platform and one of the fastest-growing event tech companies in the world.
Chapter 2: How does Bizzabo leverage data to enhance event experiences?
He's led the company in winning the People's Choice Award at the Event Tech Awards for three years in a row. Before this company, he was an event marketer and served as the CEO of the Rashpina Media Convention. He also was a team leader and systems engineer at Elbit Systems.
He graduated cum laude from the Interdisciplinary Center School where he studied business and participated in the prestigious Zell Entrepreneurship Program, often considered the Y Combinator of Israel. Aran, are you ready to take us to the top? I am ready. Hey, is that program by Sam Zell, the real estate mogul? Yes. Very good. We've studied the heck out of him.
Chapter 3: What are the different customer cohorts Bizzabo serves?
And that guy seems like a genius. Did you get to spend meaningful time with him?
I wouldn't say meaningful, but spent enough time to leave a mark.
Very good enough so that you can use it to make this visible. You know, $100 million company, right? Indeed. All right. Very good. All right. Talk to us about the company.
Chapter 4: How does Bizzabo define and measure churn in their business model?
What does the company do? And how do you guys make money?
Yeah, you know, Visible is a company that is trying to take events to the modern era, which means we all go to those events, professional events, whether they are internal, external, big or small. events. There are a lot of inefficiencies at events, and it's not only about functionality.
It's also about the data aspect and how can you really leverage the data at events to make them measurable, automated, and personalized. This is what Visible does. We do it by building an end-to-end platform, which is extremely robust. So we take care of everything from your website registration, email marketing, agenda management, mobile app, analytics, You name it.
Chapter 5: What strategies does Bizzabo use to expand within existing customer accounts?
So we kind of build 15 different startups into one startup, which is a very powerful tool and is today the system of record for organizations to manage their events. We sell it under a SaaS annual subscription model, usually multi-year. And that's how we make money. And that's what, in essence, Visible does.
And just because we don't have time to go to every customer cohort, on average, what would you consider an annual contract to come in or out? Like 10 grand, 100 grand, a million?
Yeah. So we look at it by different cohorts. We have three different cohorts, but I would say across the board, the average is 25K. 25,000 bucks.
Chapter 6: What significant milestones has Bizzabo achieved since its launch?
Okay, very good. So call it maybe 2000 bucks a month or something like that. Let me ask you a question. Most other event applications like this I've had on the show, with the exception of maybe like Reggie at Cvent and Dan at Social Tables, there's always major churn issues because
people will have an event in january then they will cancel when they don't need your software then they will re-sign up next january like when they need it again so my question to you is how do you how do you which by the way i don't actually consider that churn because they're still paying every year it's just they cancel in between how do you measure churn and how do you keep your you know however you measure it low we measure churn just like it like any other company
Uh, I think what you're referring to really depends on the type of customer you're thinking of. We sell to customers. So think about corporations that run dozens of events at minimum annually. And in this case, sometimes we even have customers that run a thousand events a year, right? Those would be customers that have three business events or professional events every business day.
Chapter 7: How much capital has Bizzabo raised and what are their future plans?
They think about Bizabo or their event platform as something that is recurring, constant, a part of their life cycle and blood circle in their organization. So we think about churn just like any other company that has annual subscriptions.
Okay. So when you look at trailing 12 months, what is, before you add back expansion revenue, what does gross churn come in at about?
Gross churn. So we went through a process in the past year and a half of really identifying what is the sweet spot for us in terms of the right customers that visible would be also the right fit for them, right? It's not about what's the right customer for us. It's what for what kind of organization Visible is the right tool and not an overkill or too much and not too little.
So we had to go through a process
Chapter 8: What insights does the guest share about entrepreneurship and business growth?
of deciding and making some difficult decisions about some cohorts of customers that we will need to split ways if they cannot get to a certain level of criteria. And obviously doing it with the utmost respect and being a super customer-centric company, this is something we always believe in. So in terms of gross churn, that would be around, I would say, 80%. And in the past, you know,
Six months or so, negative net churn, so overall pretty healthy.
So just to be clear, 80% of your revenue over the past 12 months churned?
No, no, no, retention.
I was about to say, that'd be not a good position. So 20% churned, 80% retained. Now, the way to get to net negative is you obviously make up that 20% churn with expansion. So what's total expansion been? Something above 20%, I assume? Yep. What is it, like 30% or just barely above 20%?
It's, uh, between 20 to 25. Oh, okay.
Fair enough. Good. So that puts your, you know, said differently net net revenue retention is above a hundred percent, maybe up as high as 105%.
Correct. And that's, you know, and, and obviously when you look at it, by different segments between, uh, you know, uh, SMB to mid-market to enterprise, you would see different ratios, obviously. Typical to a SaaS business.
Of course. Yeah, yeah, of course. That's the nice thing, though, about net revenue retention is it equalizes ARPU differences, right? It's just, it doesn't matter if someone's paying you a buck or 100 million bucks. If the dollar turns, it's no big deal. If the 100 million dollar turns, it's a really big deal. Talk to me about how you've structured your kind of use cases around expansion.
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