MFM x Trends - How Johnny Boufarhat Took Hopin from 0 to $1b+ in Less Than A Year

this next episode is kind of mind blowing because this guy his name's johnny started this business that went from zero to over a billion dollar valuation and something like ten or twelve months i think it's i think that's the fastest it's ever been done so let's get to the story or the the the background is basically this episode is an interview with johnny ba he's the ceo he's the founder of this company called hop and hop started before the pandemic and what they were trying to do is bring in person events online so just like to dumb it down a virtual event platform but covid hit so you can imagine that it just like took off so this company it it's it's just been astounding to watch these guys because one of some of their founding team wrote for trends and and we were friends with them at our company so we got a little bit of an inside track or an inside view how this business work but johnny is the ceo he's a founder he's in his mid twenties and he's got a very very very amazing story a very interesting outlook he was sick at a young age and that kinda changed how he started looking at the world and he looked me in the eye when we were doing this interview and he goes my goal is to make this a hundred billion dollar company that's all i wanna do and it's really weird and strange and odd to be around people who are so blunt with their ambitions ambitions and frankly it's quite inspiring and i don't think that that's the right move for everyone but i respect people who know what they want and they get after it so today's episode is with the ceo of hop he's gonna talk about how he grew the business from zero to something like i think three or four hundred employees and only twelve months how he's done it all remotely how he's handling just the personal weight about going about this at such a young age and it's very fascinating very interesting i asked him about some of the stuff that kinda seems boring but really important like how do you create a brand guideline document that your whole team can use and onboard them so quickly how do you even recruit that many people i mean if you recruit two hundred people in a year that means you're gonna talk to tens of thousands of people that's so hard so i talk to them all about that this is for trans members but the first bit is free if you want it the whole thing and a lot of other interviews like this so just go to trends dot c it's a dollar check it out so let's get to it honestly we know i was already saying in november we're we're gonna be the one of the fastest growing companies in the world next year because of how much demand there was for the product and basically what happened was february hits coronavirus happening we have tons of companies on the waitlist list that are like hey isn't funny anymore like we actually need to move our events online can you let us in sort of thing and we were like we're six people we've been very selective and i realized that you know probably the right thing to do not only from a business but also like in humanitarian was at the time you know was like let's try and launch this and go as fast as possible and that was my plan anyways but from november of that year so literally now we would have been launched which would funny but considering what's happened in that time so we've pushed out in february where and you know since then we've you know let's just say you know we're two hundred and thirty people now from an employee size perspective as sorry a size perspective and we have you know over fifty thousand p companies using the platform couple organizations using the platform almost three hundred employees in in six or well since like march right that's correct yeah so what's that like eight months nine months or whatever it is i mean that's pretty phenomenal in itself no i mean how earth does that even work how like so when when you started it was just like you and dave and a handful of other people that's right i'm imagine like it was small did you have any money before this or you get raised from ax xl ventures so we raised i think it was eight million dollars eight million dollars at a about thirty two million valuation or something like that and what month that was i mean we had agreed that in january or not in january in november but the time by the time the lawyers were done it was january and start of february wow and how what was your higher what's your hiring look like in order to make that happen did you just go out and hire like three recruiters or were using outside recruiters and how and earth you've been making org chart from nothing to well sam say there's quite a few parts to this i think nowadays is there's so much information online kinda like white universities have a hard time keeping up with online courses there's so much information online in so many ways to get knowledge on top of that the other benefit that we had is we're a fully remote company and when you're full a lot of the rules that were set beforehand and how fast you can scale were not the same as online if you're hiring sixty people in a month from four in an office you're gonna have to in in in in real in real life you're gonna have change offices is like ten times plus there's a limited pool of people that you could find plus the notice periods you kinda get people that can come within so all these variables go away when it's remote you could track amazing talent from across the world yeah but not like the biggest the biggest variable is the fact that if you're gonna hire two fifty people that means probably gonna need like ten thousand applicants or some thousands of applicants and then you're gonna have to to interview to hire two hundred people you're gonna have to interview like a a thousand plus people right and then you gotta figure out like what are these people even gonna do how do they know like how do they know like what our design our branding guidelines are health care like there's way more i mean yeah the the office they isn't it there but there's so much the the normal stuff i could go through each part with you i mean but it's it's deep and it's ugly like it's it's deep and it's ugly i mean you're talking about the health care and all those plans the us is the most complicated place i've ever seen getting that done coming from whatever we were at i was in the uk but you know there's more agencies so it's not nowadays when you know i would i would explain the example that'll you know you use a lot of cloud technologies you know if you have to build your own crm and not use salesforce it would take your company forever to start selling but we used a lot of things that pre existed that was the company mindset for this last at nine month anything that exists so if we can use an agency that allows that does that for us all the all that sort of stuff let's do it you know with applications were remote when you put something on online and you say we'll hire you wherever you are you get it to applicants from everywhere so we were kind of very lucky in that sense and that's why i think remote drove it i if you if you were if we were a physical office genuinely i said this quite a few times i i think there would have been no way that this would have been done no chance that we would have been able to scale this fast but what about so how did you set up your hiring so you did you get a recruiter and and then did you let leaders were you like alright you are responsible for five people you're responsible for filling this org chart i mean how's that look like referrals was key and and then so referrals was number one so it was like every single person in the company was expected to bring in three people and that was genuinely like it it wasn't like you had to do this or else it doesn't work but people did it and that's what we were pushing for we so you need to bring in three people as quick as possible and so three the best people you've ever worked with specifically but from there you know we hired engineering managers so i'll speak we hired managers and then as we got past sixty people you realize you new director you know i spoke with enough ceos who who've done this because i have no idea what i was doing and assault you know partially don't so you know then you hire directors and when you have enough directors you hire vp and then and then the system is built and you hire people that have done it before and then they make everything else work and yeah this is just pretty crazy to me like just because you know we're at thirty people and we're gonna grow we're gonna add we'll double but i'm like i gotta go and talk to all these people i gotta send all these cold emails on linkedin like it's a pain in the ass it's not i mean it's needed but it's hard it's really hard work absolutely and when i think of but then when i think so our company is four years old when i think of going in the first nine months i'm like what the fuck what is the application tracking system like you know what i mean like you know you don't know anything and so it's just hard to comprehend did you what were you doing you're young though you're really younger you're in your mid twenties right yeah what were you doing before this i was sick and before that i was in university i had a small app i i sold for a little bit of money in my second year and before that i was in high school but for about two two to three years i just sick building for free and for your freelance you're a no still i mean it's not like you're you've even had a job no just literally contract work for development essentially did you getting into so we have a lot of people who listen who have really awesome companies that do two or three million dollars a year with only two or three people and it's a very nice lifestyle and then we definitely have like the hubspot and look like i i've said them in like the vc funded folks our company we've never taken funding but i i'm in that world did you think from the beginning i'm gonna go hard and i'm willing to own a small piece of this and i'm gonna go hard for five or ten years and hope this blows up or like i'm willing to like risk it all in order to be big or where was your head when you were starting i mean did you make that decision early on i guess it's all it's still early on but yeah super interesting question i'll say that in november of last year when it was around time when i did the first when i decided i gonna so i had two two decisions in my mind i said do i wanna bootstrap this company and that was before november of last year when i saw that there was a high high growth potential it was do i wanna do i wanna bootstrap this company and the i realized that there was too high conversion rate between attendees to organizers too many attendees like attendees has a good experience say oh let me host an event we had a three percent well at the time it's was five percent now it's three three and three to four three to four percent conversion rate i said this is incredibly viral so if if i launch this and so that's conversion rate of of organizers who come to your event or organizers who land on your sales page and no host zac these who attend an event and then realize they wanna host an event themselves or over time decide to host an event themselves so three percent of people who attend someone else's event become hosts yeah and that was and so that's what that that that's that at that time was the thing that made me realized realize i need to get venture funding because i said this could explode in terms of if if it if if the product quality is higher so you know it could really really be fast so i that's at that moment i realized i wanted i wanted to push something out very quick and honestly the i know that they say things happen for a reason for me i sold a app after university in university and i kinda always wanted to live that remote work lifestyle of like i'm gonna go to bali work from there and just live a very comfortable life but because of after i was sick for two years so i kinda like and just kinda stay at home listen to podcast podcasts listen a red or the hustle you know stuff like that you know that you do you know i i came out of and i really it was the perfect time for me to get out of the sickness because when it went through the remission because i'm like i kinda felt like i needed to do something very quickly i i i honestly i'd i don't know the pace changed let's say in my life how much did you sell that out for around three hundred thousand dollars so that's really good money for a twenty something yeah i should i i should kept going but yeah it was it was a ton of money to be in university for why should you have kept going you know i had parents strict parents that were very like you know i want they weren't wanna i studied the mechanical engineering i they're were like try out you know normal life don't quit uni and i was like okay and that was about it that was the discussion so i i saw you think like look like guys i probably made more money than you did what are you talking about like i again very different person when i was in university then to before sickness after sickness you know the only thing i didn't change is my girlfriend and she will tell you that i'm completely utterly different person i was just thinking about you know how much alcohol that could buy me with my friends and stuff like that that was literally my thoughts what motivates you now and so i i'm really just fascinated it because i don't know if you view it this way but from an outsider point of view someone how much have how much money have you guys raised oh a total about one eighty i think total a hundred and eighty million dollars yes fuck so you've raised a hundred and eighty million dollars so this business the way that i think you'd have to run it is like it's gotta be huge or it's probably gonna die is that right i mean die is strong but yes see yes we we have to be i mean it's difficult to say because we're also saas so i don't saas i mean they can die but i i see it differently as i i don't see it as plan simple like you know apple came back from the dead but yes yes i'll maybe maybe maybe from the venture from the investments point of view and the type of biz like i would imagine you've gotta run it like this has to be a massive thing like people are betting that this is gonna be huge and they're not betting that it's gonna be a mild success and a mild success if you own the whole thing is like a huge deal like if you sold the company for fifty million dollars and you owned all of it that's just like massive mass massive if you sold your business for a hundred million dollars they'd be like off fuck that you really miss the mark right so one percent right that's what i mean do you think that i'm just fascinated by that the idea of the the the decision to what what motivates someone to make that decision to go that route particularly when you have options for me it was purely after i mean i would have probably not taken that decision and had it been me pretty illness post illness for sure it was that life is short and you know go at it at full speed and that was genuinely the mindset that i've taken an almost everything i try not to you know anything that doesn't need to be done sequentially i tried to do it at the same time and if you know if it doesn't have to be and and so that's really the mindset that i've taken after and who knows you know because focus isn't a key and you know you can burn and all that sort of stuff but i would just been super i don't know it was super exciting like i still live today i super excited about everything that just life is moving at this space it's it's fun and so that is definitely the key motivation for me was post illness are you tired at all it's only been nine months but it's been a crazy nine months for you are you worn out at all yet and what's your what's your work looking like okay i was hey when these questions are asked because every ceo says they work super hard and yes long long like yes like for me it usually starts because i work i've been working in london and european times but i have we a lot of people in san francisco so usually it's and customers and etcetera so usually i'll sleep it two wake up at wake up at eight nine and really but i like as soon as i wake up i'm i'm at work and i think a lot of people in coronavirus feel the same way it's like we could get up and get on your laptop and start answering slack messages and moving things and most of the day is filled with meetings don't get to code anymore which would that that's something that you used to have a lot of enjoyment from what else is there you asked about if i'm tired now i would say like physically sometimes yes mentally no yeah it it can be exhausting i think that like my friend i have a friend named jason lump who's this you know jason like sas guy he's awesome and he was all he's always like year five is when it hits you where you're like i need a like a three month vacation i'm worn out and i definitely ex well i i had experienced that as well was earlier than the year five but when i think of hiring two hundred and fifty people and doing it during two thousand twenty which has been a very hard month i just think like i would be exhausted if i were you and i wanted to hear how that how that has played out but you've answered it so at we we host events so we had this thing called hustle con where we would have like collectively about ten thousand people a year come to our trade show our event what do you think is gonna happen in the next two or three years for the event industry oh that's such a a really good question and i think the event industry is such a gigantic industry that it's i can't generalize it it's it's a giant it's like i think one of the world's biggest market markets if not it's it's huge i mean an event can be a conference it could be a fundraiser it could be a concert construct it can be a twenty people going for a a a a ceo dinner like it literally ranges as it could be a book club so and a wedding is also yeah point is there's tons of different types now if you're asking specifically about business and and conferences specifically let's i mean if that's what you'd wanna go into conferences and expert well what what what what do you think is the most interesting opportunities oh that's a that's a tough teaser isn't it i'm sorry but that's what we gotta do to pay bills around here so go to trends dot c if you wanna hear the rest of the episode we've got a bunch of interviews like this as well as a group with a bunch of ceos and founders similar to johnny so sign up to trends dot c it's a dollar if you don't like it just cancel and then join the group see our research it's awesome you're not fun it's a dollar change your life dollar easy see you there