How we used System-Driven Word of Mouth to Break $30m Revenue

please help me in welcoming to the stage Mohammed yunus the CEO of vfares um hello everyone my name is muhammadunus and uh I'm the founder and CEO of vfares 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 vfares I was working with the company called pay.com in the Middle East where I was the chief commercial officer and chief product

officer over there and then that's where I founded vfares or the next 20 minutes uh I will walk you through how we have took refills from zero million dollars in Revenue to 30 million dollars in Revenue without having any outbound sales team I will share with you our just you know secret tips and tricks of how do we typically go about SEO and SCM and Direct in 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 you know 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 uh templates that we use to get hundreds and thousands of views socially across G2 captura and hundreds of video testimonials from our customers so let's get started again you know

those of you who don't know about vfares vfares is all in one events platform up until pandemic we have been helping companies out doing online events doing virtual events um companies of all sizes use V fair so again whether it's a startup company mid-sized company and then in most cases an Enterprise company they would run a conference or trade show a job fair an open day using a vfares platform and then you know post covet this year we also launched a couple of other

products where we also now help companies do in-person events and Hardware events um this is our journey we started back in 2016 uh within the first six months we were profitable and again you know some of the things that Nathan you know kind of mentioned in his uh initial um you know kind of slides we take pride in just being a profitable company so you know all of this Revenue at least 25 to 50 just goes back and profit so even

though our competition has raised hundreds and millions of dollars um you know in in VC money we take pride in running running the business with the right unit economics so at any point you know 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 you know focusing on the customers uh that we have and you know just using that to drive a lot more Revenue

so let's get started I think you know all of us have uh kind of a kind of a inbound funnel like this for us are again just we typically get around 80 to 90 000 sessions per month on our site and once we get those sessions roughly one percent 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 uh you know have a very detailed conversation

with those you know on average 750 to 800 inquiries that we get every single month the very first question we typically ask them because it's in Mount is how did you hear about vfares you know where were you before like which website were you visiting that drive the traffic to vfares or what exactly you entered on Google or bank that drive the traffic to vfares and we actually locked that down in our HubSpot we are very

religious in this particular area so for every customer we know exactly how they did find about vfares from a website from a referral from Google or from bank 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're 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 you're here for the next five ten years we want to make sure that those long tail keywords are recognized today and we'll start producing content around those keywords today

and that has helped us get 60 of our traffic so almost 58 to 60 percent 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 had 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 vfares 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 you know long uh you know long form guides we also then go

ahead and use those keywords to just revise our sem campaigns SCM is pretty expensive you know specifically you know since a lot of our competition has raised uh you know 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 LCM so again researching every single customer and again just being very detailed about it of how did they find out about vfares and then having a very mechanical process of producing content that's meaningful for each one of those keywords has been the key for us to consistently keep on getting you know high growth interact from organic as well as just making sure that our SCM

conversions are also giving us a great Roi because in the end we measure our own success of not just the revenue growth but also the profitability growth that we generate every single year so that's that's purely on that you know it's pretty simple um you know if you go ahead and you know just try to follow that one um the second thing uh again in a in a in a you know in an events business what's tricky about immense business

unlike any other software businesses that we say internally that a typical customer of vfares or any event tech software will use the software for months primarily for those one day two days of the event so again we have this saying internally that you know we're not just only in the software industry we're also in the hospitality industry we want to make sure that those couple of days when the customer is going to use our platform whether for a virtual event or for an

in-person one just goes Flawless you want to make sure that leading up to that event you know they feel great about the software they feel comfortable that things are going to be great and you know on the day of the event it's like your wedding date cannot go wrong 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 are being taken extremely seriously you know not just as a SAS vendor but also as a again you know just 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 so that we don't just know about how technology plays a role in running a successful virtual event we want to also 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 you know sell

their virtual event and you know make money out of it and all of those things we documented it you know we documented those emails that we actually sent to get sponsors to bring exhibitors on board to you know run really highly successful you know virtual events with hundreds and thousands of 10 deals and we converted all of them into playbooks 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 your software and then defining each one of those are 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 you know inspired by you know Brian from Airbnb and what we did was at that particular time just really going and defining for everything that we do uh just uh you know again how would we rate ourselves for each one of those things that we are

going to provide our customers if you 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 on board get exhibitors on board get attendees on board what would you think about that experience and if we can agree with them okay what is that end goal that they're trying to achieve is it one million dollars in sales of their in-person event or

virtual event is it X number of attendees what is that the core kpi that they're trying to achieve using our software can we help them achieve that end metric uh so that you know not only they just love that software but they also see that the software helps them be successful in whatever they're trying to do we actually documented each one of those things and every time we work with any customer we agree with what is their end goal of why they're they have signed up with the software

and then throughout the relationship they know from day one in every part of our relationship with them that we are going to request them for very transparent review at the end of the event so the very first call that we have with our customer is that okay you know you have the software that you have signed up we would go out of you know out of the legal contract uh you know uh just uh contractual services that that you have signed up for will make sure that we

help you achieve those end goals uh and at the end of it all we want is your transparent review in any of the social media channels so literally from day one we request them that and again you know it can go either way you know you know 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 how much we care about their review in the end

uh again you know the stakes go high and everyone in the company work towards getting that positive review V leading up to the event we track everything you know not only we just track the product NPS and again our slack channel is pretty much like how the the CEO of Pandora was showing you know we track our product NPS you know every single second and you know every time we get even a neutral already tractor 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 footage that sales rate my service and again you know everything that that kind of gets documented over there we track that we see like how the customer is feeling about the customer support that they are getting from vfares and at the end of the event again Things become really easy you know the customer already knew from day one that uh once event is over we just want them to document how their experience was with vfares 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 you know we want you to go ahead and share your experience with vfares out there wherever you like you know whether it's on LinkedIn or G2 or capture or whatever whatever your preferred

platform is and as a result of that even though our competition would have literally you know 100 times more money than than what what we have we would consistently be ranked number one on most of these social media sites you know so again you know whether it's on G2 or keptera it will be ranked number one for almost 12 quarters in a row now uh and again we beat everyone else by a huge margin um and again primarily because from day

one we have been obsessed about customer support and our customers know that how much we care about uh their their feedback once once that particle event is over most of these customers then go ahead and would also give us video testimonials again you know we have we have a template for that as well that we use uh 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 vfares and here's what we're going to request you on this particular day once that event is done you'll receive the email like this one and all we want is just don't just respond to that positive negative up to you you know based on your based on your you know just working relationship with Weavers and again we uh get hundreds of video testimonials from our customers and then these customers then would also go ahead and share those video testimonials also on social media site they'll post it on LinkedIn they'll post it on a couple of other places which eventually then

result in the inbound traffic that we were going through earlier again the idea is to work backwards you know you have certain customers you have to take extremely good care of them you have to make sure that they not only like your software but they achieve the end result that they were trying to get through that software and from day one just you know 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're 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 having a single outbound salesperson that's it [Applause] [Music]