12: Vaibhav Jain | Hubilo
Co-Founder at Hubilo | Digitizing the World of Events.
Ingredients for Success:
Leave no stone unturned. As Vaibhav spoke with US investors, he hired a voice coach to help with his accent, tone, and modulation. Without flinching at the price, he hired one of the best companies in the world to put together his pitch deck. And to source new clients, Vaibhav personally connected with over 7,000 potential partners on LinkedIn, understanding their interests through the platform, and then reaching out to win them over. These are just a few instances that define Vaibhav’s working style: not leaving anything to chance.
Agility, agility, agility. As I look back on Vaibhav’s journey at Hubilo, so much of the startup’s success has been defined by the team’s ability to move with agility and pace. With a previous focus on driving in-person event engagement, Hubilo was quickly marked with a dwindling bank balance at the inception of the pandemic. This led Vaibhav to take a risk and pivot towards a new business model in a matter of weeks. And even as things were moving in their favor, Hubilo continued to innovate by deploying product and R&D teams to launch new features at a rapid speed. Once Hubilo was off to the races, they never looked back; instead, maneuvering swiftly and jumping at every opportunity.
Understand a person’s limits and incentives. Self-awareness is a foundational trait for a great leader. Vaibhav – as told through his story – has this in spades. During Hubilo’s admirable pivot, he pushed his team to the limits. Upon reflection, a major learning for him was understanding the difference between incentives for founders and employees. While a founder simply has more on the line and this typically defines their passion, there remains a fine line between motivating and overworking an employee, which is fundamental to bringing out the best in them.
Golden Hour
Time flies, until you find moments when it suddenly pauses. Those moments when you’re rapt in the present, knowing very well that in that instant, a remarkable impression was left on you. And sure, these instances are usually serendipitous, but what if we could be more intentional about them? That’s the question Vaibhav asked himself after he faced that ‘wow’ moment at the most unexpected time and place. “The initial, offline version of Hubilo was an idea sparked by a chance encounter I had at a conference. I met someone who left me inspired, who gave me clarity in my career, and I wanted others to experience similar moments. So, I decided to launch the original idea for Hubilo – an attendee recommendation platform for events – in 2015.”
We see a trend across the most formidable founders, where a personal pain point leads them to build a solution. But with starting a company - adrenaline, inspiration, and intention can only go so far. There are other variables that play a role in making the entrepreneurial journey as smooth as one hopes for. “It turns out, we were wrong about the need for an attendee recommendation product. Nobody paid for it, so we shifted gears a bit and launched a back-end tool for organizers to manage events. There too, we peaked at $2MM annual revenue, and so we left it on autopilot.”
Caught with the bug of being a founder, in late 2019, Vaibhav and his team launched ‘Scrooge’ – an app designed to help millennials save money. As one usually feels, Vaibhav was filled with hope and excitement as he launched the new business. Regrettably, 2020 comes around and we know what comes next. In hindsight, the pandemic has impacted the lives of many and their loved ones. And looking back today, as it pertains to the macro technology environment, many trends have accelerated and led to progress. But in the early weeks of 2020, if we recall, the mood was filled with uncertainty, despair, and despondency.
It was during this time when the excitement that fueled Vaibhav’s days with building Scrooge came to a sudden halt. Hubilo – the predictable, $2MM ARR business – had suddenly incurred no revenue in March 2020. With things looking bleak and only five months of runway left, Vaibhav was left perplexed.
“I had no strategy at this point. Taking things by the hour, my main worry was taking care of my employees. I could not move them to Scrooge, as skill sets were not aligned. I was at a crossroads. I felt lost – but I knew that I had to stand my ground and lead our way out of this mess.”
Hail Mary!
As the impact of COVID proliferated across the world and communication moved virtual, face-to-face encounters were soon a memory of the past. This trend led to an ‘a-ha’ moment for Vaibhav. “With people moving their meetings online, I felt that eventually, companies would begin leveraging platforms like Zoom for events too. In line with Hubilo’s initial mission, I thought why not pivot to a digital-only event platform? It was a gutsy move, especially as we barely had any runway, but we viewed this as an opportunity to surprise ourselves.”
To put out a feeler on the need for such a product, Vaibhav sent a survey to Hubilo’s newsletter subscribers, soliciting a simple question: ‘Would you be interested in a digital events platform for your business?’. The response was overwhelmingly positive. “I felt a bit of uncertainty around the idea of pivoting initially, but the results from the survey put those feelings to rest”, exclaimed Vaibhav, grinning away.
With a dwindling cash balance and a weak market outlook, Vaibhav was grateful for his one ray of hope: validation from his customers to pivot and innovate around a digital product. Proof that hard work doesn’t go to waste, Vaibhav and the team started to work on the new-and-improved Hubilo with an ‘archaic’ asset: the code they used for the offline business, written in 2015. “This code, which we spent Rs. 70,000 ($1,000) on, gave us a head start over the competition. To triple down on this advantage, however, I knew we had to move quickly. I had my 30 employees around the table, and with an authoritarian mindset, asked everyone to strictly focus on the task at hand for the next month. It was time to build! We wrote e-books to bolster our content efforts, revamped the website, cut salaries by 25% for most staff and 75% for the leadership team, even furloughed a few employees temporarily. We were all-hands-on-deck – and honestly, the distinction between weekdays and weekends was blurry.” The commitment of the team during this period is succinctly exemplified in the name of the Hubilo WhatsApp Group: ‘1 day = 5 days’.
After an intense 26-day period, the results spoke for themselves. By closing their first client in just five days – a promising start – the efforts of the team compounded, and prospects were requesting a demo of the product, daily.
“We met our annual revenue target in just three months. The flywheel effect was created for customer acquisition – once companies were invited to attend an event, they were taken aback by how practical and seamless our solution was, which led them to eventually host their own events on Hubilo. Our hard work paid off.”
It sure did - this was a pivot like no other.
Reflections
In hindsight, it’s easy to dilute the creativity of thought and resilience of pursuit that went into making Hubilo what it is today. As of writing, the company is one of the fastest-growing SaaS businesses, globally. Yet just 17 months ago, Vaibhav hit rock bottom with the company – no revenue, no clients, and a demoralizing bank account. By coming out of the mess, Vaibhav took with him important lessons on company-building.
“It is difficult to distill down the learnings into bullet points, but I can try. The first takeaway for me is to stay agile. For example, as we were developing new features for the digital-events product, we specifically created product and R&D teams that had a singular responsibility: to develop features fast. After every event call, the product team would debrief and reflect on areas for improvement, and whenever a client had a request – granted it had to make sense – we built it immediately. A lot of good ideas came out of this and at times, innovatively created a whole new industry. Take, for example, the ‘leaderboard’ feature. It is our most widely-used function and that stemmed from the creativity of the product team.”
It is helpful to hear about strategies within the company that helped with the pivot, but it is also naïve for us to think that all changes during this period were just about the business. These hard-fought everyday battles change you as a person, too. “I learnt the importance of humility. Being humble enough to understand that you don’t know it all. Being humble enough to listen to your customers – and I mean really listen, not just letting their thoughts pass, but finding ways to incorporate it into the product. An exercise that I continue to do is add clients that I am looking to work with on LinkedIn – I have almost 7,000 of them. Every day, for an hour, I go through what these prospects are talking about and understand how Hubilo could best position itself to bring them on board. My learnings from this exercise surpass any blog out there.”
Even with such bountiful success today, Vaibhav is honest to say his journey has not all been filled with sunshine and rainbows. He is secure enough to look back and recognize that he has made mistakes. “For founders, building our business is all we think about. We have that fire within us that pushes us to the limit. My learning from the pivot is that sometimes, employees don’t have the same passion and incentives as the founders. And that’s okay – not everyone wants to work all the time. The key is figuring out a person’s capacity; understanding when they are going to tap out. There is a thin line between making an employee feel valued vs. being exploited. I have learnt to never cross that line.”
Globetrotters
Although being on Zoom for hours a day feels mundane, one thing is for sure – it’s been the great equalizer. Suddenly, an ambitious and visionary team from India can compete for the same clientele as the elite of Silicon Valley. And if you read between the lines, that’s what Hubilo is doing today.
But this playbook isn’t new. The US and Indian startup ecosystem have had a symbiotic relationship for years. While the US offers sales and go-to-market teams, India dominates with its robust technical talent. For Vaibhav, he’s never been more excited about this approach and the advantage that it poses for India.
“Indian founders have never had it better. We have relationships on the ground and can put together talented engineering, product, and customer service teams with ease. For a lot of Western companies, they struggle to spot talent - we don’t have any trouble doing that.”
Given the clear demarcation in roles that comes with this dual-building strategy across India and the US, there’s this natural boundary that gets built between teams. Having been aware of this from the start, Vaibhav has done what he can to bridge that gap. “We plan leadership sessions frequently, where teams across India and the US meet one another. There’s a difference in working culture between the two markets, but these sessions are a great way to build camaraderie and unity across the teams.” Although Vaibhav seems to have it all figured out with the global growth Hubilo has seen, it wasn’t always that way. It took work and not just to bridge the cultural gap across teams, but for raising funding for the company too.
The Indian Ascent
“Part of the pursuit of excellence involves eliminating as many surprises as possible, because life is full of the unexpected.” - Sir Alex Ferguson
As I spoke with Vaibhav, I started to learn more about what type of person he is. He strikes me as someone who has immense creativity and grit – as signaled by the pivot. But if there’s a defining characteristic, it’s that he doesn’t want to ever leave anything to chance. He’s prepared. Probably one of the most prepared entrepreneurs I’ve come across. “It’s a double-edged sword. Sometimes, I overdo it, but for Hubilo it has bode well. When I was looking for investors, this part of my personality really came to the fore. For the US funds, I hired a coach to help with voice modulation, accent, and tone. I hired the best company in the world to help with our pitch deck. We never shied away from working with experts to organize and structure our fundraising process. I mean, it worked! We have some of the best investors globally, and I couldn’t be prouder of the relationships we’ve built.”
And like Raghu, what drove Vaibhav’s decision to work with one investor over another is conviction. It’s the core belief in not only the team, but in understanding where the world of events is going. “It came down to which investor did the work and believed in the digitization of events. Again, it might seem obvious where we are heading today, but during our fundraise the future was blurry.”
Vaibhav’s ability to think quickly, take risks, and be prepared, has propelled Hubilo to new heights. Since the pivot, Hubilo has, on average, grown its revenue by 250% quarter-over-quarter. With that growth and demand, comes a larger team – from 30 employees at the start of the pandemic, to 300+ today. But as I emphasized this growth and pushed Vaibhav to acknowledge the success of Hubilo, he felt more impacted by a ‘simpler’ achievement. “When we furloughed our team initially and cut salaries – it hurt. I felt responsible for the livelihoods of many. Today, I am proud of the growth we’ve had, of course, but the fact that we’ve re-hired the team and paid back all the salaries…that makes me proudest.”
Wow !! Very inspiring & superb writing too .... Well done 👍