Virtual events are here to stay and the pandemic has only accelerated its adoption. The segment is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of 23.2 percent from 2020 to 2027. Homegrown virtual event platform along with international video conferencing brands such as Zoom, Microsoft are expected to hugely benefit from this massive adoption and growth.
Hubilo Founder and CEO Vaibhav Jain in an exclusive conversation with YS Founder and CEO Shradha Sharma at the inaugural edition of Creator Inc. Conference says, “We have made a ton of progress when it comes to the product. We are soon going to launch our version three of the product which is something that I have not seen happening in the virtual living space.”
To rewind a bit, Hubilo was started in 2015 as a virtual networking platform and currently operates as an end-to-end virtual event platform. It has more than 800 clients including marquee names such as Walmart, Facebook, Blackboard, the United Nations among others. In October 2021, the startup raised $125 million in a Series B funding round led by Alkeon Capital with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital.
Following are some of the things that Vaibhav believes has helped Hubilo shine in a crowded market.
Reliability and Scalability
According to Vaibhav, one of the key differentiators that really helped Hubilo stand apart from the crowd was their focus on building reliability and scalability for the platform.
“That’s why we have come across a pretty strong word within our organisation that connects our entire team, which is we need to deliver flawless events. [sic] So when we say that our tech team, QA team, product, design, sales, marketing, everyone is responsible for the customer experience.”
Focus on branding
Hubilo keeps a concentrated focus on the branding element that helps clients reimagine the virtual space in their own set of branding. While doing that, the platform has now elongated that process to pre-event as well where clients can automatically create an event website and all email communications in their own branding.
“So from the start till the end, which is the survey post event as well, everything goes in the branding of that particular corporate organiser, which helps them to engage their attendees much better.”
Engagement at scale
Hubilo is moving towards a place to showcase engagement at scale, highlights Vaibav. At this point of time they have achieved one-on-one engagements with the content that the organiser is producing, he adds.
“But can we go beyond that? Can we show that kind of chaos and liveliness that happens as a metaphysical event on a virtual event? That is the aspect we are looking at.”
Integrations done right
The Hubilo team is currently working on building “a pretty huge app marketplace” that will allow event organisers to integrate any platform that they would want.
For instance, if a company is doing an internal event and wants to integrate an award show or a hackathon coding simulation based platform, they can integrate more than 100 such apps. With Hubilo using the embed app functionality, they are also going after deeper integrations with large scale platforms.
“We (Hubilo) would not be their (clients’) first choice. [But] just ensure that you’re making a community at any of the platforms that have a major distribution system. Once you’ve made that and are matured enough to actually engage these people post delivering your content as well as have an ability to churn out content much faster is when you should go ahead and choose Hubilo,” he signs off.
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Recognising the burgeoning creator ecosystem and the new wave of entrepreneurship that comes with it, YS is celebrating the works of both established and emerging influencers in an initiative aimed at identifying, celebrating and accelerating the journey of digital creators who make extraordinary, unique and engaging content. We’ve partnered with Trell to bring you the Top 100 Creators challenge, which you can apply for here.
