Scaling Smarter: Lessons Learned From Scaling to Over $30M & Pivoting At Different Growth Phases

our next speaker I just want you guys imagine something imagine going from 1.9 million bucks of ARR to $ 17.9 million of AR in Under 12 months please help me welcome to the stage Mr Muhammad Eunice from V [Applause] Paris is is co baby the right word yeah kind of sort of it was born a lot more earlier than that but yeah it boomed that coach us up competitive space can't wait to learn

perfect um hello everyone my name is Mohammad junus I'm the founder and CEO of V fairs um and over the next 20 minutes I'll just walk you through our our journey of how we reached to $30 million in AR uh over the last um s years uh before I do that um I just want to show a raise of hand have you guys ever been um disappointed by a vendor or frustrated by a vendor

anyone yeah now I just want you to imagine the extent of that disappointment and frustration if it involves all of your life savings or a very critical business event so just about when I was starting V fars I was also the chief Revenue officer of this company uh one day I wake up I was traveling with my family when I wake up I see this email from uh like an automated email from the bank that all of my life savings has been transferred to an unknown bank account in a

different country called the bank this is almost 7even years back so call the the bank figured out that uh what they call same swap frauds when you're traveling someone can go and if they can fool the Telecom provider they can change your same card under their name they can go to a bank they don't have a checkbook nothing they can just ask for a vir transfer copy for your signature and when the bank calls they call on that number you're traveling now the call is going to that guy and they can just answer some basic questions of what's your date of birth Etc and then

they will transfer the money so I used to go to the bank every single day ask them you know I trusted you with my money uh you know where is it and then over the next several months I had to just fight that battle between the bank and and and the police and everyone else but that was a time when I was also starting Weirs and again I promised to myself that never ever I want to be in a position where I as a vendor you know the customer would tell me that by the way I trusted you with my event I trusted you with our critical event you know you disappointed and so forth so I

just want you to guys remember that because a lot of what we have achieved really just comes from that philosophy um so 2017 we started as purely a point solution we were only doing virtual job fairs only doing virtual job faires our customers then helped us figured out a lot of other use cases we'll go through that in detail in the next section but by the time covid came we were already doing everything virtual we had some of the biggest customers using us for all

use cases whether it was conferences trade shows job fairs open days and so forth when the covid came we were in a perfect position um to pretty much you know handle all the inbound that was coming our way but again more than that more than going from you know less than $2 million in Revenue to 10x of that in one year um as L I mentioned what I'm most proud of is that when Co was finishing we knew what's about to come and again everyone within our industry

went from boom to burst but we were able to still sustain the revenue and again growing from there so we'll walk you through how we went from a point solution to an all-in-one event management solution where we now provide event tech for virtual events but also for even person events badge printing solution mobile app lead capture app abstract management and so forth so I'm just going to walk you through that but before I do that I just want you to know where we stand today Gartner for the first ever time

last here did uh their research on the event Tech category uh this is the c 20 years old but again they just picked up now and in a very competitive scape uh landscape in a very competitive environment we won the customer Choice Award you know our customers um mentioned that they love and Trust wears more than anyone else within that category and even in the magic quandrant we were the top in the Visionary

category so this is where we are now uh again whenever third parties are you know researching platforms we win most of the awards um again if you look us up on G2 kep you pick up any third party software you pick up any third party research we are if not the leader among the top three four leaders uh within that category so I'm just going to walk you through that Journey like how how we did it right first of all again I come from jobsite space so I knew the job

fair space pretty well I've spent almost 10 years within that um within that industry and I knew the pain the pain was that when employers go ahead and post a job on any job site whether it's indeed or Monster Etc tons of job Seekers apply for those jobs they never get a chance to talk to a recruiter so I started by doing virtual job fairs myself um ran hundreds of job fairs and then as I was running those customers would come to us and they would say I

want to use your software but to run my own career fair and one thing led to another they were like you know what we like your software but rather than doing just a career affair I want to do an onboarding fair I want to do an open day I want to do a trade show so they led us to a lot of other use cases within that category that even we didn't know about and this thing is called like just a beach head uh segment strategy you have to become expert in one thing and then you have to be very very close to your

customer and if you're close to your customer and ask them what are some of the other events that your company as a whole would do they will guide you on the next steps and that's what helped us uh going from just purely from a job fair uh player to a virtual event solution provider and in 2020 2021 all of these customers that we were very close with they were telling us already that by the way when the co will be over we will be going back to iners now we love your virtual event solution a lot

of us are still our customers but those of the ones who knew that they have to go back to the inperson category they were like how about we work with you guys over the next 6 to 12 months and we helped you build the software that we actually want so it was our customers who helped us figure it out how the badge printing app works how the mobile app works how the lead capture airworks and they co-created all of those things with us so by the time our product was launched we already had 200 plus paid

customers who already were going to shift their virtual event contracts to inperson event contracts just because they want to go back uh to that space so we started with just virtual piece that first quadrant but over the last two years we buil the other three quadrants and all of them all of them were co-created with customers who already paid us for all of that upfront so just one of the things that I want you guys to know about is that if you are so we

all get excited including me to close a new deal but I am of the opinion that more important is that if you are including yourself and C Level players uh with what happens after the sale is done if you keep on talking to your customers if you keep on asking them what are some of the other areas where uh they need help in they will guide you on the next steps and and that's what helped us uh from there these are just some of the screenshots 2017 just doing

virtual events to um again now providing that all-in-one endtoend event management platform and these are this is a kind of a screenshot from our HubSpot just recently where everything was virtual events it was pretty much 85 to 90 % all virtual events as of now uh 55% of our business is in person events now and again have we had not made that shift almost 12 to 18 months back we would have been like many other companies who went from boom to bust

literally within the 12 to 18 months that's one the second thing I just want you guys to know that what has worked really well for us is just when you have solved a problem in a particular country and again us is where we have the largest amount of customers you just have to reach out to those customers and see if you can kind of give the same solution to the same again if you're in Enterprise space these companies have departments in other countries Etc to other departments as well so what we did

was after being the leader within the US um you know goo we started playing with some of the experiments in other countries so we wanted to go into Europe we wanted to be a bit more stronger player in Canada uh so we just converted our most um visited um Pages within our website into the local languages we did that in French we did that in Arabic we did that in Spanish and just by doing that we started getting a lot of inbound

interest from a lot of those countries so that's something that has again has was just magic for us we never knew that this strategy would work tried it out and overnight it helps us grow our Revenue by nextra 10 to 15% um again we would we we we company again that's very very close to our customers and we would always go ahead and ask them that um can you connect us with other stakeholders within your company we are solving conference for

you but every company has recruitment they has trade shows they have benefits feere Etc so we kept going to these companies and they have helped us find out a lot of other use cases that otherwise we didn't know about once you get once you have got initial set of customers you should also look into the different Industries they all map into and again in our case what happened was that we went really deep into where our ICP is coming from and

once we did that we uh co-created a lot of u a lot of just social proof with those customers so one of our favorite customers is University of Maryland they were one of our initial customers and what we did was we worked with them to get a case study a video testimonial tons of social media post from them on LinkedIn of how much they like V fars and just by doing that and just by having them introduce us to a lot of

their other colleagues in other universities it helped us capture almost 40 to 50 of the top 150 universities in the world right now so again I just want you to think of your customers also as uh as your sales people you know if you're serving them really well they would go out of the way to become um a reference to go ahead and share their working experience with you with a lot of other colleagues so just see if you

can always make use of that uh strategy create tons of marketing content in collaboration with them whether these are case studies whether these are video testimonials whether it's requesting them to go ahead and share their experience on thirdparty uh review sites some of these case studies some of these case studies helped helped us capture an account worth half a million dollar so we did uh a food show wi of one of the biggest companies out here in the US and just that case study once it was

published uh gave us inbound leads from other competitors within the same industry of how this company has achieved their uh you know objectives so make sure that not only you're producing these case studies you're producing those video testimonials but your marketing team and your sales team are actively making use of those in every sales opportunity as well as um the outbound opportunity I also want you to um

understand like there's a lot of money that can be uh that can be captured from existing customers um once you have served your customers really well once uh you have a decent amount of social proof out there uh one of the things that has worked really well is just going deep with our customers so if if I go and look at some of our top accounts

um some of these customers started with us with literally 45,000 for a point solution and just because we have been engaged with them over the last six seven years now a lot of those accounts are worth half a million dollars they started with a single point solution in a single Department in a single country and now some of these customers are using us across 100 countries and across 30 different departments so just always

try to see if you have got a big logo and if you have got a big logo you should know that these things have just tons of uh just tons of power to expand expand that uh we work with the largest fmcg company out there we work with the one of the biggest leader within the healthcare industry and whether it's them whether it's a lot of others uh almost 20 to 30% of our revenue of our new says revenue is driven by our

existing customers so one thing that I just want you guys to uh just just start with us that if you would serve your customers really well if uh they would see you as someone as a vendor that will not disappointment them that will make sure that they stand with them uh you know through thick and thin that is truly serving them to the best of their ability uh I just want you to understand the power of those customers those

customers will help you pivot at different times it will help you grow your revenue and it will help you retain the existing Revenue that you have um that's it from my side thank you guys [Applause]