Host: Harry Stebbings
Guest: Johnny Boufarhat, Founder & CEO, Hopin
Category: Biz & Tech | 🚀 Startups
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[5:02] “Remote has really changed the game. […] If I went from 10 to 235 people over nine months as we did in a physical office, […] we would have been restrained on recruitment, […] the amount of offices we would have need to change, […] all these complication[…]. I don’t think it would have been possible two to three years ago and if weren’t a remote business.”
[13:38] “I think there is like three or four phases [of startup scaling]. So, for me it was 0-20 people, I was managing absolutely everything. I knew every line of code someone pushed […]. To 50 people, I was only aware of those one layer under me, so it was around eight people, and then to 150, it was about four people. So, that shrinks and you have to build trust. I don’t think you can scale an organization doing it all yourself and I think that […] the biggest blocker for growth are founders themselves.”
[14:59] “I believe in data driven decisions, however I think they are quite limited. Looking at it from a product perspective, you can use data to optimize product and a lot of the time you can’t use data to create a new product. Hopin was purely intuition. There was no data from someone else, or other someone from the webinar industry would have probably built Hopin.”
[18:53] “If you got preempted and you weren’t aware you were gonna get preempted, then you shouldn’t take the money. If you were preempted, aware that you were gonna get preempted and you built the preemption strategy, then […] it’s a consideration [to take capital].”
[23:06] “[The] big physical events, the ones that need […] you to pay $600 and that’s their revenue thing, they are probably gonna move back to physical with a light hybrid approach. But all the rest, the ones that are now getting more leads at their events, now that they moved virtually, they are getting more engagement from their customers, they are getting 10-20 times cheaper to host […] - we think all of those companies are gonna stay online.”
[24:13] “Today, Hopin is mainly virtual events, but I’ve always had a multi-product approach to things. Expect next year, Hopin wouldn’t have just one product. We’d be moving into a quite a few different markets, based on what we’ve already built and markets that make sense to be either online or even hybrid or physical. So, it’s no secret that we are building a hybrid mobile app etcetera.”
[25:00] “Hopin itself as a product, I’m pursuing more of an Atlassian or Salesforce model in the type of products that we have. So, we have adjacencies from community, we have adjacencies that are workshops, […]. I think next year you are gonna see two products at Hopin that are equally as big in space [as virtual events].”
[28:16] “The broader vision of the company is to connect people. So, whatever the best way to do that or the best products that we need to build to enable that to happen, is where we’re gonna be. So, in five years, hopefully we have a big company that is doing very well […] and connecting people all around the globe.”
Rating: 🍎🍎🍎🍎
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 30 min | 🗓️ 12/10/2020
✅ Time saved: 28 min
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