We were six people this time a year ago. No revenue. Now we’re 300 people, we’re profitable, and we just made a $250 million acquisition.
My startup journey began in December 2018. I was interviewing community builder David Markovich for an article and he insisted I introduce myself to a London-based founder named Johnny Bourfarhat.
I was working at an online events company, then known as “Hopiin,” with a completely new way of hosting online events. Over the course of 2019, we met remotely while I was across the pond in Virginia. I hosted one of Hopin’s first major events through my Medium publication, Entrepreneur’s Handbook.
My first event at Hopin was the simplest and most valuable initiative I had ever done for my publication’s community. Hundreds of people showed up. The AWS startup team spoke. Venture capitalists came. Attendees loved the networking and the connection. By the end, I knew Hopin was going to be big. My eyes were opened to the future of community engagement, the future of events, the future of social media, the future of human gathering and interaction.
So I joined Johnny to work on building Hopin full time on September 8th, 2019.
Seedcamp, along with other great angels, invested pre-seed in Hopin in Q4 2019 and a team of engineers started working to take Johnny’s MVP to the next level. Meanwhile, our calendars started to stack up from morning to night taking calls, doing demos, supporting events, and closing deals.
I remember walking around the Startup Alley exhibitor floor at the Moscone Center at TechCrunch Disrupt 2019 holding my open laptop in my hands, showing Hopin to any vendor who was willing to sit down with me (which is how we landed our first enterprise customer, Dell). The ironic thing is that no one knew that Disrupt 2020 would later be hosted at Hopin.
Fast forward to January 2020: We’re a handful of people, pre-COVID, and we’re well into establishing product-market fit. Our main competitor wasn’t another video platform, it was offline events.
In February, we raised a $6.5 million seed round of funding led by Accel.
I had just returned from my second visit to London to work with Johnny and the team when suddenly… COVID hits.
The pandemic is accelerating demand for Hopin, at a speed unlike anything I’ve read about in startup history. Venture capitalists agree.
The global events industry is crushing Hopin. We’re getting hammered. If we thought we were busy before, we had no idea: weekends turned into workdays as we communicated closely with key clients, built product, and hired as quickly as possible.
In June, we announced our $40M Series A funding round, led by IVP. Some of the world’s best organizations choose Hopin for their events, including TechCrunch, The Atlantic, Figma, American Heart Association, Notre Dame, UCLA, Cornell, Girl Scouts, Target, Pepsi, Miro, NATO, Twitch Spotify, Salesforce, and more.
On November 10, 2020, closely following the US election news cycle, we announced our $125 million Series B. The announcement garnered significant media attention and elevated Hopin to double unicorn status.
Thanks to the tireless work of our recruiting team, Hopin is surpassing the 300-person milestone in January. It’s surreal to know that we were only six people at this time last year.
On January 7, 2021, we announced Hopin’s acquisition of StreamYard, a video streaming platform that served over nine million streams in 2020, for $250 million.
StreamYard’s growth story mirrored Hopin’s: Founders Geige and Dan led StreamYard to $12 million in annual revenue on their own. In 2020, they grew their team to 19 contributors to meet demand and grew to over $30 million in annual revenue. Their customers love them, to the point of getting a tattoo of the brand.
A startup buying another startup at this early stage is unprecedented. But Hopin has exceptionally aggressive growth goals, and Johnny is not your typical visionary.
I have had the honor of watching my startup grow from within week after week. A week is a day and a day is an hour at Hopin. It feels like I am working at a different company every month. It is a great place to work if you enjoy broad and diverse challenges. I learn from amazing people every day.
Now seems like an appropriate time to pause and reflect on some of the lessons I’ve learned at Hopin over the course of over a year. Going from pre-investment and pre-revenue to a $2.1 billion valuation and making acquisitions in such a condensed time window has been a masterclass in growth. So I’d like to share a few takeaways – some that may seem obvious, but which I hope will nonetheless be helpful to you on your journey in 2021.
There is no room for egos on a rocket. You get things done faster when no one overvalues their own personal opinion. It’s something Johnny has always said from the beginning and it continues to shape our company culture today and has helped Hopin scale quickly without losing our original spirit. #noego
Time is money but speed is free. The most cost-effective strategy for attracting the right talent, keeping customers engaged, and outpacing the competition is to embrace a fast-paced culture. It’s free. Josh Collison, co-founder of Stripe, said: “Speed is a really defensible trait in companies… Employees find it much more enjoyable to work at a company that moves quickly rather than working for IBM. So we really think of speed as a quality of life, an enhancement of working with Stripe.”Johnny has done a great job of leading by example, instilling a bias toward action in every aspect of my startup culture.
Study those before youWhat you’re doing has literally never been done before, but a version of it has. There are people further down the same path. Talk to them, study their habits, style, and goals. Emulate them iteratively. One of the people I’ve studied from afar and appreciated is Todd Barr, CMO of GitLab.
Outsource as much as possible. This is from Armando Mann, Hopin’s commercial director. He told me that it’s much easier to engage and adjust a supplier than it is to hire and fire an employee.
Send praise on Slack, get a critique call. Black and white text lacks nuance.
Over-communicating internally. Visibility is key in a remote company.
When good managers receive praise, they always turn it around. A Hopin angel investor showed me this: Good managers deflect, object, or redirect compliments toward their team or others.
Initial sales means never saying no to a target customerThere is always a yes, you just have to find it. It may be a “not yet,” but never say no. As a result, you will keep the conversation moving forward until the product catches up.
In the early stages, optimize for growth, not revenue. Get happy customers in the door, worry about monetization later. Those first happy customers are the most important members of your initial sales team.
Your intuition as a marketer is only as good as your interactions with customers. In the early stages of a startup’s life, you’re working with incomplete data and many, many unknowns. The more customer interactions you have, the better your instinctive judgment will become.
Never underestimate the power of a user survey. I like HotJar.
Stories are worth exponentially more than dollars. Invest in customer stories and logos. Potential customers want to know who else is using your product. Work closely with key customers to ensure a good experience, and then massively amplify that story (with permission).
For content and design, never compromise on high volume standards. When you’re building a brand from scratch, you have to protect it jealously, sometimes from yourself, so that it doesn’t become a meaningless factory.
Speed is a differentiator. A reputation for delivering quickly (your product, features, or service) is one reason customers stay engaged and potential customers keep coming back.
The product always wins. If you don’t have a good product, you don’t stand a chance. You can shape and massage marketing language to make it look and sound “smooth, engaging, immersive,” but in the end, the product is all that matters. Content is empty without the code that delivers it. Engineers are your growth team from the start. The product is what ultimately sells itself.
It’s been a unique experience watching the Hopin team grow from less than a handful of people to 300 professionals in a year. I’m not sure if I’ll ever see it happen again. But one lesson I know for sure, perhaps the most important one, is that without a great team, absolutely none of this is possible. It’s what keeps you up late at night and wakes you up on rough mornings. So thank you, Team Hopin 💙. Grateful to be able to work with you every day.
The story and pace of my startup Hopin isn’t slowing down anytime soon. In fact, when we look at what’s coming up in 2021, the work is only going to get faster and more interesting. Keep watching.