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From Planner to Platform: The vFairs Origin Story · Event Industry News Podcast

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  The Event Industry News podcast is sponsored by Present Communications.
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  Hello, everybody, and welcome along to the Event Industry News podcast with me,
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  James Dixon, wishing all a very good morning, afternoon or evening,
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  whenever or wherever you tune into today's podcast from.
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  I'm in a slightly different setting today.
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  We've been out on the road recording podcasts recently.
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  I usually record them from my little home studio set up more often than not.
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  But today, I find myself actually in a studio.
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  More often than not.
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  But today, I find myself actually at the base of a client that I'm working with at the moment.
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  So I've just found myself a nice quiet corner of their base in Yorkshire to do today's podcast.
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  And my podcast guest today is going to take us into the world of event technology.
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  And I think we're going to talk in some respects chronologically about a journey that they've had,
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  how they started and where they find themselves today,
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  because that journey sort of takes us back in some respects to six years ago to the COVID pandemic of 2020.
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  And a technology platform provider that became integral and essential to many,
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  many event organizers who looked to pivot and turn very, very quickly during that period of time to continue running their events.
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  And the story is going to evolve then into where we find them today.
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  I'm delighted to say that my guest today is Mohammed Yunus.
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  Mohammed is the CEO and founder of VeeFairs and joins the Event Industry News podcast today.
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  I believe from your base, is it in Toronto, Yunus?
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  Absolutely, James. Thank you for having me on the podcast.
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  No problem at all. Yeah, delighted that you could join us today.
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  And VeeFairs is a name that, you know, many of our podcast followers will be familiar with.
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  You know, if you run events, if you've encountered event technology of any description,
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  the chances are you will have come across the VeeFairs brand.
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  And we really sort of wanted to take this opportunity of having you on the podcast today to talk about that journey,
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  because in some respects, compared to other technology providers,
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  it has a unique uniqueness to it in terms of how and where your journey started,
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  why the platform was originally developed and, you know,
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  effectively how it survived up into this point today when many others have fallen by the wayside.
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  So, yeah, welcome to the show.
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  Tell us a little bit about your background, first of all, prior to VeeFairs
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  and how your own journey ended up with founding VeeFairs.
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  Absolutely. So I, one of my initial job was to actually run online events, digital events.
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  So I subscribed to one of the softwares to run an online event.
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  I didn't like the technology and most importantly,
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  I didn't like the support that they were providing to me to help me run those digital events.
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  I come from a software engineering background.
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  So I decided to just build the platform myself to help me run those online events.
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  And over the next almost six, seven years, I was just an event planner.
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  My job was to run online events.
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  My job was to sell sponsorship packages in those online events.
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  And that was the bread and butter for the for the company to a point where I started receiving multiple requests,
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  almost on a weekly basis, saying that we have been a speaker on your online platform.
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  We have been an exhibitor or sponsor in your online platform, or I have attended as an attendee,
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  one of your online events. Can we use your technology to power our own events?
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  So they were like, I just want to rent your technology.
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  And I was like, OK, maybe I'm in the wrong business.
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  So that's why I bought the domain vfairs.com and started offering just vfairs more as a software service as compared to just me running online events.
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  And that's a fascinating sort of start to your career, if I may, as vfairs, because I don't know of any.
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  I don't recall having spoken to any other sort of technology founder who came into it,
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  effectively having the platform built and working and used by clients prior to the company even starting.
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  Usually it's completely the other way around. Absolutely.
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  I have to say, I think that has been an edge that I have had for many, many years now,
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  primarily because every single time I'm trying to make a decision within the company about the support I want to provide,
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  about the kind of product I want to build, I just think of myself as a user first,
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  because I have ran almost more than 100 plus of these events myself.
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  I feel the pain just because I have gone through that journey.
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  And, you know, it has helped make just many decisions where I would always prioritize the support part over profitability at any particular point.
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  Again, it's it is unique, maybe not unique.
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  I'm sure people will be shouting and saying, oh, no, another company did this, another company that.
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  But for me, it is very unusual.
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  And you would certainly be in the minority to have a platform built before the company was even launched and then used,
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  but be actually be an event organiser, utilising that platform,
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  because so often we've encountered platforms that have been built by very good coders and very good programmers.
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  But maybe people who have had no actual hands on experience, if you can call it that, of running the event itself.
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  So yours was designed from the ground up to be able to effectively deliver the events that you were running.
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  Absolutely. I was my own very first customer.
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  And that was the intention of like my intention was that I will be the only customer that I will ever have up until,
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  you know, I started receiving just many, many requests to kind of pivot the business model.
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  Excellent. And that brings us, I suppose, to the crux of what I mentioned in the introduction,
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  which is that vFairs was designed, you know, primarily, well, initially as virtual events, online virtual events.
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  And I mentioned a reference in my introduction that during the pandemic,
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  this was critical and essential to organisers globally being able to continue running events of some description.
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  Now, we saw a lot of technology companies who were platform providers, registration providers, organisation providers,
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  whatever the tech platform was, they were pivoting desperately to try and offer a virtual events online solution.
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  You didn't have to do that pivot. So suddenly you're presented with this situation in 2020, presumably,
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  where almost overnight demand must have skyrocketed.
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  Absolutely. We grew almost tenfold within six months.
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  And like that was a time where having a stable technology mattered a lot.
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  That's number one. Having a company, being a company who have done this with hundreds of customers,
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  have absolutely amazing, great references that one can point to a prospect, have very, you know, just socially.
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  If someone would go on G2, Captera, you know, any of these social,
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  any of these third party review sites would see that we are the leader within this particular category.
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  So that helped a lot. That helped a lot with any prospect that we were getting in touch with during the COVID times.
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  In that particular time, just remembering, we used to work almost seven days a week, 18 hours a day.
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  Primarily, my job at that point was to pick the right customer who I can serve.
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  We grew tenfold. We could have easily grew 50 fold if we wanted to.
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  But again, for me, it was not about just giving technology and walking away.
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  It was always about, can I be an absolutely amazing vendor to this particular customer?
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  Is this customer the right customer for the company in the long term?
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  So that was more of the decision making exercise that was required at that time.
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  And of course, stability in the platform must have been essential during that period of time,
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  because it's OK, you know, bringing on the extra staff or the extra support team that you need in order to facilitate those clients.
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  But having the actual stability within the platform when you will have multiple users using it simultaneously
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  must have been critical in terms of the actual infrastructure.
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  A hundred percent. Many of the customers at that point used to ask us and I'm sure many other vendors,
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  do you have experience running events with 10,000 concurrent users, 20,000, 30,000?
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  To date, you know, when people come and ask us, they say that, you know,
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  you are the only few providers who kind of have this checkbox checked that, you know,
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  your platform can support more than 10 to 20,000 concurrent users.
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  From day one, just because we were ready to do online events,
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  the very first thing that we always looked for was, can this platform sustain all the way to 100,000 users or not?
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  And again, we have many, many pen tests and stress tests and so forth and have run many successful events,
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  even leading up to pandemic with that kind of traffic.
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  Yeah. And it was a huge shift.
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  And obviously we saw people were so desperate to use, you know, they had to move quickly.
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  And if you were running an event early in 2020 in spring or even summer,
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  you had a very short period of time to have to adapt and either cancel your event
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  and hope that you could resurrect it the following year or do something in the virtual space to allow it to continue and exist during that period of time.
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  And a lot of event organizers, they did get it wrong, didn't they?
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  Because, you know, sadly, they would go to maybe a platform that was themselves adapting very, very quickly.
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  And we saw examples of them not being able to sustain and allow those concurrent users or, you know,
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  just flaws in systems that sadly led to a lot of events not running as well as they might have hoped they could have done.
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  I remember, James, there were two issues at that time. One of them was many of these technology providers,
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  of course, they were trying to just build on the fly and sell also on the go.
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  And again, that's why, you know, I would like, yeah, I don't think so many of those events would have gone successfully.
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  Second thing, I think the thing that people don't realize and where we did really, really well was
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  all of these event planners were running the virtual event the very first time.
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  They have had a great experience of running in-person events.
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  But when you're trying to shift from that in-person experience to a virtual one,
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  you need to bounce off ideas with someone who has done it many, many times.
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  You know, you need to figure out what should be now my marketing strategy, my sponsorship strategy,
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  my engagement strategy and so forth. Pretty much none of those other providers could provide that
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  consultancy experience on top of their technology the way vFares could.
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  So with vFares, as I mentioned, the reason that we picked up X amount of customers versus 5X amount of customers was
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  we not only wanted to provide a great technology, we wanted to run a great event with our customers.
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  And that's where we stood out as compared to anyone else who was out there,
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  because our customers not only got a stable technology, they were also able to run successful online events.
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  Now, there was a lack of education because people had never had to do it before.
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  And there was an underestimation as well of what was required of a platform
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  and what was required, like you said, to sustain the financial element of it.
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  It's OK being able to connect two people on video or have somebody present to 10,000 people via video link
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  and share their PowerPoint presentation on a screen.
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  It's another thing to be able to incorporate branding, sponsorship elements in there to give the financial,
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  excuse me, to have the economic benefit that you want your event to have and be able to integrate that into your platform.
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  So I'm curious, what were the sort of the biggest issues at the time that people were underestimating?
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  And I suppose in some respects, what do people still underestimate today?
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  Yeah, so especially at that time, onboarding speakers would become a very different experience, right?
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  Because onboarding speakers in an actual in-person event is, you know,
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  they show up on an actual in-person event and then there's someone who's helping them with their mic and so forth.
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  Just imagine like onboarding hundreds and thousands of speakers in an online platform on how to use whatever technology,
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  you know, Zoom or Restream or StreamYard and so forth. That's a different experience.
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  And then do you have that kind of manpower to really, you know, onboard all of them in one go?
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  And again, we first always provided not only the technology, but the added support that was required to onboard speakers.
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  Same thing with onboarding an exhibitor, you know, you know, even up into like in-person events.
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  OK, you know, there's someone who's building your booth and building your staff and so forth.
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  But in this case, trying to have them, you know, fill up their online exhibitor profile, upload documents, upload videos, etc.
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  It requires a very different type of, you know, human touch and follow ups as compared to trying to do that for an in-person event.
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  So, again, we have had all of those playbooks ready. We had the technology ready.
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  But more importantly, we were also giving support to help customers achieve all of that,
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  because it's one thing to give an amazing technology, but unless you use the technology in the right way and onboard people in an amazing way,
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  you know, that's where I just feel that a lot of the customers, you know, kind of struggled.
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  And just answering the other question, that's still something that people don't just think about when they're selecting an event technology.
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  So implementation and support matters a lot. It matters a lot. And many companies still rely on just a feature checklist.
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  You know, does the software have X, Y and Z? But events are always high pressure environments with hard deadlines.
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  What matters is whether your technology partner can help you execute successfully or not.
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  And that's why more than our technology, which is absolutely amazing, our support model matters so much.
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  Where we provide always a dedicated person who knows your event setup, the stakeholders and the history.
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  And it reduces stress significantly for event organisers. And that's where we kind of stand out significantly.
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  And I think that in answer to my question about what do people underestimate, it is underestimating just how difficult it is by comparison to a live event.
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  I remember speaking to people during the pandemic and people thinking, oh, it's fine.
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  It's just basically we'll just do a video. It's like a video meeting and people share their content, et cetera, et cetera.
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  When I was responsible for working on a team that was delivering a five day virtual event, we realised that the checklists were very different.
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  The organisation was very different, but it was no less intense in terms of the amount of work that had to be done and the amount of boxes that had to be ticked in order to facilitate that.
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  I think a lot of people thought, well, it's just quite an easy thing to do. We'll throw it up onto a video call.
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  And it wasn't at all. And I think that's where more so than even the technology platforms themselves, maybe not being able to be suitable or provide what they wanted.
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  More so than anything, I think a lot of events failed because people just underestimated what was required.
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  And taking it out of there, which is where I wanted to lead to, is that taking it out of there, we then entered this period where a lot of events became hybrid events because they saw the impact of their online events.
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  And what they didn't then do is split and create two teams, one to manage the in-person, one to manage the online.
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  And there was a huge underestimation there, I think, from my view, that people didn't realise once live events came back, how much work would be required to sustain it as a hybrid event.
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  Absolutely. People always underestimated the amount of effort that goes into running a successful online event as well as a successful hybrid event.
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  As you mentioned, they just thought it's kind of a link where you would go and it would be like a Google Meet or Skype or any of these webinar platforms.
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  But running an online event is very, very different. In many cases, it requires a lot more work by the technology vendor and by the event organiser than running an in-person event.
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  In-person event, you're able to really give different pieces to different people, whether it's the food and beverage, whether it's the venue, whether it's an AV company and so forth.
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  But when you're running an online event, it's you and your event technology vendor.
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  It's really these two parties that have 90% of the work, if not more, and that's where you just have to coordinate a lot more better than an in-person event.
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  How has vFairs changed in its essence as a business since the pandemic? How have you adapted and evolved?
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  Are you still primarily focused on just delivering virtual events or have you evolved and pivoted in the same way that other tech platforms during that period had to go in your direction?
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  So vFairs, even before pandemic, we were already doing in-person events as well.
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  So even though we started as an online event company, those online events customers were already using us for in-person events also.
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  So that's why when the pivot also changed from purely virtual events back to in-person events, the great thing that vFairs had in edge versus only the virtual events platform provided out there is that we had the landing page builder.
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  We had the edge form builder because both of those things were needed for online events anyways.
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  We have the whole email marketing module.
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  We have the mobile apps. Even back then, the mobile apps can be used for an online event, for an in-person event, because it's the same way that you are trying to access the content for any event, whether it's an online one or the in-person one.
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  We eventually also launched the badge printing software, the lead capture software, and so forth.
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  So at this point, just to kind of answer your question, our business model is primarily 70-30, which is 70% or more of all the events that run on vFairs are in-person events or events, and then the 30% is virtual events.
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  We manage the end-to-end event spectrum.
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  And again, just because of how the customers are using it, 70% or more is more towards in-person events and the remaining virtual.
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  One thing that we probably overlooked a little bit is not just the scale in which you've got to adapt the platform itself in order to cope with the increase in business that you had six years ago, but that will have attracted, because of how and what they are in their essence, you will have attracted new clients, presumably from many overseas territories and international clients.
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  So then post-pandemic, you're then suddenly dealing with not just more clients, but more clients on presumably a much wider international basis geographically.
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  How has it been to try and adapt the business in order to maintain and look after clients on a global level?
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  We just have to hire globally.
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  At this point, we have employees across 10 plus different countries, primarily because we have to serve customers both for in-person events and online events across those categories.
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  And from day one, our business model has always been that we'll give you the self-serve technology, but you'll always get a named customer support person who can help you if you ever need to help configure that technology, take a bit of stress from you, and so forth.
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  Because our platform is used both by enterprise customers as well as that one, two, three person event company who sometimes don't have the luxury of spending too much time on the technology itself.
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  They have hundreds of other things to do.
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  And again, I was that event planner myself.
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  And for me, I know that as an event planner, you have to market the event, you have to sell the event, and there's so many things that comes across.
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  So at this point, we serve over 1,000 plus customers across 50 plus different countries through our team members to 80 plus team members who are spread across 10 plus different countries across all time zones.
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  Wow.
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  And it's one thing that I learned, again, from firsthand experience is even if you're dealing with technology, there's loads of communication that you can have by email and by shared folders.
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  We're so connected now digitally.
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  It's great.
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  The closer you get to an event, the quicker the responses need to be between stakeholders, which is why it's so critical to have people operating on the same time zone.
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  That's something I learned when I worked internationally for the first time a few years ago with an eight hour time difference.
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  You can't afford to wait eight, seven or eight hours for a response from a stakeholder because they're in a completely different time zone.
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  You need everybody to be locked into that same time zone, even if you're still just working remotely via laptops.
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  The time zone thing, I think, is something that, again, is overlooked from a support perspective.
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  Absolutely.
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  See, with vPairs, and again, if you're running an event with anyone, it has to be one minute or less, primarily because, see, as you get closer to the event, you cannot wait for eight hours.
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  You know, you sometimes cannot even wait for 30 minutes.
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  You know, you have the speaker that has changed.
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  You want to change that on the website.
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  Either do it yourself or have the support team do it for you.
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  You know, events are like, you know, your wedding day.
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  It cannot go wrong.
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  You don't have the luxury of time.
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  And again, one just mistake here or there can just, you know, ruin the work that you have spent like months leading up to that particular event.
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  So, you know, we take that extremely seriously.
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  I don't know how you feel about this, but the last six years have absolutely flown by for me.
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  And in some respects, it feels like that period of 2020 was a couple of months ago.
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  In other periods, it feels like a different lifetime ago.
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  How have the demands from your clients changed in the last six years?
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  What are they asking for today, you know, based on their up-to-date requirements?
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  And how much has the platform shifted and evolved in that period of time?
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  Yeah, so the great thing is that today's buyers are much more sophisticated and educated.
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  You know, they have learned from, you know, we all have learned a lot over the last six years.
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  Five years ago, many conversations were feature driven.
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  Today, especially the enterprise customers ask deeper questions around security, scalability, integrations, analytics, compliance, AI capabilities, and the global support.
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  They know what we all have gone through, which is that, you know, we cannot wait for two hours.
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  We cannot wait for six hours. We cannot wait for us. Like, where are you? Where is the team?
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  They also want strategic partnerships.
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  Customers increasingly expect vendors to bring in best practices, recommendations, and operational guidance, not just a software license.
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  So that shift aligns very well with how we operate at vFairs, because for us, it has never been that, okay, here's the technology and we walk away.
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  We have never treated this business as a pure software business.
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  We treat this business as a hospitality business, which is that we are in the business of making sure that we overestimate expectations as compared to just purely a software vendor.
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  It would be foolish of me to have you on as a guest today and not ask the AI question.
• 24:18
  And I think as an observation to offer you before you respond, I see a lot of people still thinking that AI is a separate tool.
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  So they would use a platform like vFairs, and then perhaps they would get their analytical data post-event.
• 24:37
  And then they would use an AI tool in order to look at that data and ask it to generate maybe some meaningful outcomes by analyzing that data.
• 24:47
  Where do you stand on this? Are you integrating AI within vFairs at the moment so that people don't have to go to a separate place in order to do those sort of jobs?
• 24:57
  Absolutely. See, AI, we have absolutely no doubt that AI is going to fundamentally change event planning and attendee engagement.
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  As an event planner, you do so many things that are administrative, that is more like a checklist and so forth.
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  So you want to make sure that you help these event planners be far more productive.
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  We're already seeing value in areas like AI-powered matchmaking, session recommendation, content summaries, chat assistance, better analytics.
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  Internally, within the company, we're focused on how AI can improve productivity, as you mentioned, for event organizers themselves,
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  which is that we have to reduce their manual work around setup, around communication, and around reporting.
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  And for that, they never have to go to a chat GPT or a Gemini or a Cloud.
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  All of that has to be within the system itself.
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  We have no doubt that the winners in event tech will be companies that use AI to simplify that within the platform itself,
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  as compared to pushing the customer to use a different platform.
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  Yeah, and it's in the same way that we had this explosion of event technology platforms,
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  and after years of it being a kind of a niche sector of the events industry,
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  2020 saw event technology providers and platforms of any description really become
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  and finally be seen as an integral part to an organizer's toolbox, if you can use a toolkit.
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  And in the same way, I think I felt in the last 18 months, that same kind of shift in AI and that same kind of acknowledgement that,
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  we've used the phrase artificial intelligence for decades now, but really in the last 18 months,
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  people are actually seeing what is possible with it and how it manifests itself in real life.
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  And now that we have so many people who have experienced it firsthand,
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  whether that be adapting a document or generating a goofy image or something like that,
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  we're starting to actually, until something manifests itself in a way that we can really identify with it,
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  we can't really start to explore its capabilities.
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  And I feel that that's where we really leapt on in the last 12 to 18 months.
• 27:10
  Absolutely, James, a great thing that AI has done now is that events have become an integral piece of every marketer's strategy.
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  Before that, it would be okay, one of one big event, a user conference or a customer dinner and so forth.
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  But now, events are more integrated into kind of this year round community and content strategy rather than standalone moments.
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  And event tech, now the CMOs and the CTOs, they're trying to connect these events with market automation,
• 27:47
  the CRM systems, the sales workflows and so forth.
• 27:50
  Before that, we really used to get those requests.
• 27:53
  But now, as soon as an enterprise customer sign up, the very first set of questions that we are asked is that how this can be connected to their salesforce,
• 28:02
  to their HubSpot, and not just purely pushing the registration from one system to the other.
• 28:07
  It's really about looking at all of those signals, which attendee have attended which particular session, who have met whom, etc.
• 28:14
  So that as part of their marketing and sales strategy, they can make use of that data to really kind of go ahead and better serve that customer or close that prospect.
• 28:22
  So in that regard, I just feel that events have finally got the respect that they deserve.
• 28:29
  And the attribution also, they're always a successful way of connecting people.
• 28:34
  But now, CMOs and CTOs and sales have realized that we have to attribute properly these events just as a way to close sales or increase the expansion within the customer.
• 28:47
  And just as a way of kind of bringing this, I guess, to some form of conclusion today is that it's platforms like vFares that have helped prompt that shift in attitude.
• 29:00
  Because CMOs, CTOs, CFOs, marketers, teams, they're actually being it.
• 29:07
  The event technology is what's given people data to actually see if they're running successful events.
• 29:12
  That's not based purely on simple metrics like how many people walked through the door or how many people clicked the link.
• 29:18
  We're actually seeing data now that provides actual meaningful outcomes and analysis for organizers.
• 29:25
  And it's only because of that data, I feel, that we're in a position now where they really do look at it as part of their overall strategies because they can see for the first time in decades how valuable these events are.
• 29:35
  Absolutely. And vice versa. I would say as much as we have educated the customers, it's the customers who also educated us that these things really matter.
• 29:46
  And I would say, at least within vFares, some of our best product decisions have come directly from customer conversations.
• 29:54
  We work very closely with event organizers. We get very technical feedback about the operational pinpoints.
• 30:00
  So again, whether it's our customer success team, etc., or myself, I would spend at least a good 25% of my day-to-day job just trying to get customer feedback of what's important now,
• 30:13
  how these events can become just more meaningful, can help you make more impact as part of your strategy.
• 30:19
  So we have learned a lot from our customers and vice versa.
• 30:24
  Absolutely. I'm delighted that we've had the opportunity today on the podcast to speak to Mohamed Younis, the CEO and founder of vFares, coming to us from their base in Toronto, over in Canada.
• 30:35
  Younis, it's been great to speak to you today. Thanks for offering a little bit of an insight.
• 30:39
  That is probably a very, very condensed version of the story that has evolved in vFares over the last decade or so.
• 30:47
  So we really appreciate you taking the time to come and have a chat with us today.
• 30:51
  Thank you, James. Thanks for having me.
• 30:53
  If anybody wants to get in touch with you, following the podcast, if they've listened to you, how do they do that? How do they find you?
• 31:01
  The best place is to reach out to me on LinkedIn. So you can go on LinkedIn, search for Mohamed Younis vFares.
• 31:07
  You should be able to find me. If you want to learn a bit more about vFares, go to vFares.com.
• 31:12
  Our website has all the information that you would need.
• 31:15
  Fantastic. Thanks very much. And a couple of shout outs, of course, for our own links and things like that before we wrap up today's podcast.
• 31:22
  If you're listening to today's podcast via your podcast platform provider, thank you very much for doing so.
• 31:27
  Please do make sure that you are subscribed and you like it so that you can get the up-to-date episodes whenever they drop.
• 31:33
  And of course, when you finish listening to today's podcast, make sure that you head over to eventsindustrynews.com,
• 31:38
  where you can watch video versions of all of our podcasts as well as access all the news features and special supplements that are available on the website,
• 31:46
  including, of course, the supplier directory.
• 31:48
  If you work in the events industry and you are looking for a product service, a supplier, a technology platform, indeed,
• 31:53
  chances are you will find it within the supplier directory on the eventsindustrynews.com website.
• 31:59
  If you have started your journey there today by watching the video version of the podcast via the website,
• 32:04
  thank you very much for doing so. Please do make sure that you go in the opposite direction.
• 32:08
  Find the Events Industry News podcast wherever you get your podcasts from and make sure that you like and subscribe to get all of those latest episodes.
• 32:15
  Thanks again to my guest today, Mohamed Younis from vFares, and we'll see you on the next edition of the Events Industry News podcast.
• 32:21
  Goodbye, everybody.