The following interview is a conversation we had with Alex Reynolds, CEO & Co-Founder of Vendelux, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $20 Million Raised to Build the Future of Event Intelligence
Alex Reynolds
Hey. Doing well. How are you?
Brett
I’m doing excellent, and I’m super excited. Let’s jump right in. What are you building today?
Alex Reynolds
We’re building an event intelligence platform. So simply, we help companies figure out the best events to attend and sponsor conferences, trade shows based on the people who are going to be there.
Brett
How do you get access to that data? Is that from the event organizers or where does that data come from?
Alex Reynolds
We get it everywhere that we possibly can. So customers are sharing information with us. There’s publicly available data and more. We’re working with the event organizer directly because everybody wants the same thing, right? Everybody wants to make sure that these events are the best that they can possibly be. And the more prepared the attendees, the sponsors, the organizers are, the more value is created.
Brett
What was Covid like for you? I’m guessing it was a fun times awful.
Alex Reynolds
Yeah. I mean, we ended up building the first version of the platform on nights and weekends. We had ten unaffiliated customers, February of 2020, all set to go full time. And then the pandemic hit. And that was probably one of the lowest moments in my life. Right, because you’re all set to go build this brand new company. Overnight, the entire events industry was pretty much put on hold.
Brett
What did you do? How’d you survive?
Alex Reynolds
Thankfully, we didn’t quit our day jobs, so that was good. But, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of uncertainty. All the digital event platforms, the hop ins, the hubalos, were all the rage. Everybody thought that it was going to be a new paradigm around these digital events. We were skeptical. We felt like the magic around events is getting people together in person. And so we figured it was going to come back. But those are some dark days, right? You look at yourself and say, is this really going to come back? And so, thankfully, I have a great Co-Founder. The two of us supported each other and what were once major headwinds for us are now major tailwinds.
Brett
What was the end outcome there with Hoppin? Wasn’t it like they went from a $10 billion valuation to getting acquired for like 50 million?
Alex Reynolds
Something like that, yeah, something like that. I think at the peak they were around 8 billion and they sold to RingCentral for maybe 15 million twice. Something like that.
Brett
Oh, so it’s even lower. That’s crazy.
Alex Reynolds
Yeah.
Brett
What was it like fundraising for event technology at that point where VC’s bought into this idea that, oh, the world’s going to be virtual events only? Or did everyone start to see at some point the world’s going to go back to normal? Were VC’s on board with that idea, or was everyone very much going in that direction of events are dead? Because I feel like I was seeing that a lot in my LinkedIn feed. Social media events are over.
Alex Reynolds
Yeah, totally. When we raised our first round, went out to raise in October of 2021. And, I mean, in general, VC market was super frothy, right? And multiples were crazy. But just as we started to kick off our fundraise, that’s when Omicron hit and it was like this whole wave again. And so I think VC’s often talk about being contrarian and we found that most people were saying, oh, in person events, those are never coming back. Fortunately, we found a great partner and Ben Narson at tenacity, where he believed, right, he had gone tons of events, you know, often for his portfolio companies. He’d been on the trade show floor, started a public company himself. And so he saw it when few others did. When we raised our series a in November was a completely different story.
Alex Reynolds
It felt like everyone was seeing the pendulum swing back. And so that race was significantly easier, I would say, or people saw the value more than initial race.
Brett
I think that whole narrative that events were dead and virtual events for the future was just insane. I remember attending a few virtual events and I was just dying to get out of there. Like, this is just a glorified webinar. I don’t care how engaging or cool the technology is, I want to go to an event, I want to get some drinks after, I want to have fun, and I want to meet people and collaborate. The virtual version, like, doesn’t even come close to real world experiences.
Alex Reynolds
Exactly. Yeah. The magic of events are that 10,000 people or 100,000 people are all going to a specific place at a shared moment. In time for a shared purpose. Right. And so people are open to new experiences, new relationships, and you’re just able to forge much better bonds with people and create those great relationships, maintain those relationships and virtual events. They tried to imitate that, but it’s just, you can’t do it.
Brett
Yeah, can’t be done. And who are you selling to? Is it event marketers? Like, do most organizations of a certain size have a dedicated event marketing team? Or is this more like the general marketing team is responsible for events as part of their many other duties?
Alex Reynolds
Yep. So we sell to event marketers, field marketers, and generally speaking, any company above 100, 200 employees tends to have a dedicated person. Our ICP is anyone that goes to at least ten events, because we want to support these marketers throughout the calendar year. And it’s really an underserved market, like, we call these marketers the unsung heroes, because if everything goes right at an event, then you’re nothing. But if the coffee is cold or the booth isn’t set up on time, then they get all of the blame. And so when we come in and say, hey, we’re going to help you show the value of everything that you’re doing, their eyes light up. And this has been a great ICP for us.
Brett
Where did that desire and passion to serve event marketers come from for you?
Alex Reynolds
Yeah. So before starting Vendelux, my Co-Founder Stefan and I, we worked at Shutterstock, a public tech company. We ended up building a brand new business unit within the company over about a four year period, from zero to 30 million in ARR, roughly the two of us, to about 75 people. And that growth mostly came from going to events and conferences and trade shows. And so when it worked well, it was the best thing that we could do. When it didn’t work well, it was a huge waste of time and money. And so we looked at each other and said, like, how can we make this more repeatable? And just realize that there was no easy way to figure out what types of people, what types of companies, what Personas were going to be at these conferences.
Alex Reynolds
And in working with the event team at Shutterstock and then talking to hundreds of other event marketers, we realized that this wasn’t just a problem that were experiencing. This is a problem that almost every large company experienced. And so we knew that if we could create a platform that would help people find the stakeholders that they wanted to work with, that could solve a major pain point for an industry that is essentially anywhere from 24% to 40% of B2B marketers budgets.
Brett
If we look at event marketers, field marketers, where’s the AHA for them? When you’re having your conversations with them, what do you say that really makes them say oh I get it, awesome, I need it.
Alex Reynolds
What if I could show you every Persona that you care about at all the events that are on your radar? Right. These people are doing, they’re using a combination of tools, they’re using CRM, they’re using marketing automation, they’re using sales intelligence like a Zoom info. But the vast majority of what they’re doing is PowerPoint, Excel, blood, sweat and tears. Weve talked to marketers that say oh, I spend 30 hours every two weeks, were just googling to figure out what events I should be at. Which sounds crazy but its such a manual, time intensive process and theres no tooling for this entire job bug. So thats a magic moment.
Alex Reynolds
The other one is when we tell them that they can hold sales accountable because oftentimes sales reps, of course they want to go to Vegas or Miami or Cannes, France, and they almost treat it like a free vacation. And the reality is there to make something happen to drive revenue. So when we help marketers almost turn the tables and use data and insights to make sure that sales is doing their job, they love that.
Brett
Why do you think such little funding has gone into building tooling for event marketers and field marketers? And if you just look at like social media for example, like I think a lot of money’s gone in there, at least based on like my inbox of getting pitched from these vendors. There’s a thousand different software platforms, which I would guess means there’s a lot of venture money flowing into social media tools, there’s a lot of money flowing into demand gen tools and email marketing tools. What’s the deal? Why is, why were event marketers left behind?
Alex Reynolds
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think that the end of the day, a lot of VC’s are pattern matchers. I mean they probably wouldn’t want me to say that, but often what we hear, and there was actually a thread between Jason Lemkin and Julius Solaris on this exact topic a couple of days ago. The everyone looks at C Vent. Cvent is the largest company in events, they’re worth roughly 6 billion and took them 20 years to get there. So people look at that and say, well if that’s the market leader in the event space, then how can you really have these decacorns or even unicorns in the space? Our view is that every company or most companies that have focused on events, event tech, are all thinking about it from the event organizers perspective. How can I help companies throw events?
Alex Reynolds
But the organizers of events don’t have big budgets, and so we’re starting with events. But the end stage for us is really to help our business, to empower humanity, to build meaningful professional relationships. And that happens very well at events today. But if you zoom out, there’s a ton of other channels where we can help the right people meet together, you know, at the right time.
Brett
Where do you see events headed? Is it moving to a world where, like, these mega events that have, like, tens of thousands of people are going to have less interest and it’s going to move to more like these, like, niche events that have maybe like 500 or a thousand people attending? Like, what do you think we’re going to see more of?
Alex Reynolds
Well, the large events, I almost think of them as an ecosystem, right? So people say, like, the event around the event. And so a lot of the value at those conferences are in the vip happy hours, the small dinners, all of the events that happen around the event, because all those stakeholders are there. And the best event organizers embrace that, right? Some event organizers want to control that ecosystem because they think that all that value should be controlled by them. But the reality is that when you have all those satellite events, the buzz, the value creation is just much higher. So, you know, I think for us, essentially, trends are at events. People are not working in offices anymore. And so it’s harder now more than ever to get FaceTime with people.
Alex Reynolds
And so if you can get FaceTime with stakeholders that matter, then whether it’s at a large hundred thousand person conference or 100 person event, the most important thing is that you can get that FaceTime.
Brett
Are events like the big, major events, are they back to the capacity they were pre pandemic, or is it still trailing a little bit behind? Do you know?
Alex Reynolds
They’re bigger? So we hear generally, in 2023, events were back to roughly the same size, and that was with less of an international audience because people were just less willing to take a longer trip. In 2024, events are now bigger, on average, than they’ve ever been before.
Brett
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Brett
And you can obviously talk through, they’d be using your tool, of course, like talk through what a modern event marketer should do to build an event strategy from start to finish.
Alex Reynolds
Totally. So, yeah, I mean the first thing is what are the objectives? To me, the best objective around events are going to be lead generation, nurturing your existing pipeline, seeing existing customers. So what are your KPI’s new pipeline generated ARR that’s touched by events retention and growth? NRR of a net revenue retention. I’m throwing a bunch of background, I’m sorry, but never revenue retention of customers that you have. And so you work backwards from there. Brand awareness is important, but I think more important for larger companies than it is for smaller startups. So that’s where you start. That’s your North Star. You want to increase all of those things you’re driving back there. And so then the next step is, where are my customers and where are my prospects? Where’s my ICP going to be? And thats the traditionally difficult part.
Alex Reynolds
You can talk to event organizers to try to get a sense, you can look on their websites to see what types of companies are going to sponsor. But traditionally its been very difficult to get that information on our platform. You would upload that information, the companies you care about, the people, the Personas, and then well cross reference that against the entire world of people and companies that are attending the 200,000 events that are on our system. And ultimately you want to go where the money is. So now we have a CRM integrations. You’re not just looking at specific people or companies. You can see if you have a $10 million deal, right, then you’re going to want to meet with those stakeholders, more than maybe a $50,000 deal.
Alex Reynolds
So I think a lot of marketers look at the industry of the event, or they go to an event because they’ve always gone to the event or because their CEO says that they should be there. Its very much based on politics and gut, not data and insights. And so if I was driving the strategy, it would be about what are the top events, where my Personas, my prospects, my customers are going to be? Who should I send from my company? Because you want to make sure that the people you’re sending are in touch or are aligned with the audience thats going to be there.
Alex Reynolds
So if one sales rep has 50 leads that are going to be at the event, then you want that person to go and then you want to track the ROI very closely to make sure that the events that you’re going to, those meetings are actually happening. They’re translating into wins in your CRM and your RoI. Positive.
Brett
Let’s talk a little bit about marketing. If you were to summarize the marketing approach, the marketing philosophy, how would you best summarize it?
Alex Reynolds
We consider ourselves to be customer zero. So we go to events ourselves. We use Vendelux to figure out what events we should go to. We have sdrs that live in trade show hubs. So think Vegas, London. They go to shows every week and every show there are hundreds of event marketers and if you think about it, they’re at the maximum pain point. They just spent the last two, three months preparing for the event and oftentimes they don’t feel as prepared as they want to. They don’t have enough pre booked meetings. And so we come along and say hey, there’s a better way. We have a whole platform that can help you. And don’t take our word for it.
Alex Reynolds
Talk to the 1020 30 customers that we have at the event and come to our vip appy hour where you can meet with them off site. So that works really well for us and we’ve been scaling that up in a very efficient way.
Brett
What about content marketing? I see there’s a lot of content on the site. Talk us through the content marketing strategy.
Alex Reynolds
Yeah, we do content marketing largely around events. So we have event guides, we have content around industries. So the best AI events, the best tech events that performs well for SEO and its really valuable information. We see that two to four weeks before any show, people want basic information, even something as simple as whats the dress code for this event? And so we’ve looked at the most commonly asked questions around events and we’ve created guides around that. Always love case studies and all that. Content drives lead generation as well as free user signups. We have a free tier with roughly, I want to say 7000 event marketers who are in that community who are able to access basic functionality and that there’s some conversion there from free to.
Brett
Paid when it comes to your market category. Is this a category creation play? Like do you need to get them to create the line item for event intelligence platform? Or is there some type of existing line item there that already exists and you just need to take from that.
Alex Reynolds
So, yes is the answer. We consider ourselves to be category creation. We don’t consider ourselves to be event tech or sales intelligence. We need a good name for the new category, whether it’s connection generation marketing or something like that. But it’s still working process. But yeah, I mean, we, in the same way that company, like Gainsight took the account manager function, that I can.
Brett
Pause and go again, customer success. Right?
Alex Reynolds
Yeah. Well, in the same way that gainsight took the account management function and essentially turned that into customer success. So account management was considered a cost center, it was considered tactical, and now they morph that into customer success, which is strategic, and it’s a profit center, and there’s net revenue retention. As this gold standard metric, we see event marketing needing to go through a very similar transition where today events are kind of considered a cost center. Everybody knows that events are valuable, but it’s hard to quantify. And people are going to events in all different areas of a business. So sales will go to events on their own, sdrs will go, customer success will go, even like recruiting or legal and finance will go to seminars for learning and development. So there’s all these disparate folks who are going to events for different reasons.
Alex Reynolds
And the event marketing function has very little visibility into that end to end world. And so we envision a new marketer who’s almost the quarterback for all of those in person touch points. Anytime that you’re going to meet customers, you’re going to meet prospects, partners, recruits in person, this marketer should have visibility, should be directing all of those actions. And so that’s the new category that we’re building. In terms of the line item, though, this has been really interesting. So event marketers tend to have a large budget. Again, 24% to 40% of the B2B marketing budget is in events. And so oftentimes our event marketers will borrow money from their existing pie, right?
Alex Reynolds
Maybe they, instead of doing the platinum sponsorship, they’ll do the gold sponsorship, or maybe they have some money left over from an event that didn’t cost as much as they thought. And so they’re able to allocate that budget. We start there, we show the results, and then they’re able to build on top of that, because all of a sudden the sales team says, oh, I want to be on this platform. This seems great. And so then we grow organically from there.
Brett
Trey, as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over 20 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey.
Alex Reynolds
It’s hard, no, I mean, it’s so fomo driven. I think that it’s really hard to run a tight process. And I think founders often get into the trap of feeling like they’re making good progress with a handful of investors, and so they kind of lose their discipline when it comes to the process. But I can vividly remember having a conversation with a founder who’s a few rounds ahead of us, and were talking about the data room. And what he said to me is, you cant just say, hey, heres the data room. After you talk to every investor, you say, our data room is launching on Friday at 05:00 p.m. And we will give access to everybody at the same time. All of a sudden, you’ve shifted the dynamic there and you’re putting everybody on the same footing.
Alex Reynolds
So its easy to say, but its hard to do in practice to be diligent. But the more that you can control the process, the more successful you’ll be.
Brett
What was the biggest difference as you shifted from working at this big, massive public company to a startup? What was that most difficult shift that you had to really absorb and transition through?
Alex Reynolds
Well, I think it’s a good question because we built this business unit within the public company. It honestly didn’t feel like a huge transition because everyone says, oh, we built a startup within a company. It was like a startup. But for us, I was reporting to the CEO, I was reading out to our board, but were in a brand new space around our public API. And then later were licensing data and data models to companies to help them build AI models. And so it was very much whitespace opportunity, and there was not a playbook that were following. So advantages at the public company, weren’t concerned about Runway. There’s more concern around profitability, there’s more red tape, right. But there’s also more support at a startup. There’s no guide, right. And everybody’s experience is different.
Alex Reynolds
And so you’re making decisions constantly, every day, and you can’t paint by numbers. There’s no two situations are alike. And so you have to get so comfortable with the ambiguity and just power through, right. You’re constantly focused on the hardest, worst parts of the business, because if it’s going well, then it doesn’t need your attention as much as other places.
Brett
And our final question here is just really focusing on the big picture vision of what you’re building. So paint a picture for us three to five years from today, what does this look like?
Alex Reynolds
Yes, our vision is to empower humanity to build meaningful professional relationships. And so note that nothing in that vision has anything to do with events. Events are where we’re starting because, again, it’s a moment in time when you have all these like minded folks coming together. But there’s a lot of people, for whatever reason, geographic reasons, socioeconomic reasons, they can’t go to events. And so we want to democratize access. We want to make sure that everybody all over the world can build these great, meaningful professional relationships. Meaningful because clicking connect on a social media platform for B two B folks is not necessarily building a meaningful professional relationship. And so to start, we want to expand across the value chain for events.
Alex Reynolds
Today, we focus very much on the Predez event, everything with planning, but theres roughly a 40 month end to end journey that our customers are going through as they think about planning for next years events, a year of events, pre event, during event, post event, and then the ROI measurement, which can take anywhere from six to 18 months per event. So we want to provide a platform that helps across that value chain, first for event marketers and then all those other stakeholders that we’ve been talking about, sales, customer success, because they have needs around events and then expanding across the channel. So 100,000 person event like CES looks somewhat similar to a 10,000 person event like shop talk. And so if you keep going down to 1000 people, 100 people, ten people, theres a lot of similarities that exist.
Alex Reynolds
Even a business trip that you are going on, thats sort of more one to one. And so we want to provide that engine to help that quarterback, right, for the marketer to help drive any of those in person touch points, no matter if it’s at a hundred thousand person event or a one to one business trip.
Brett
Amazing. Love it. All right, Alex, we are up on time here, so we’re going to have to wrap before we do. If there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Alex Reynolds
LinkedIn is the best place I post multiple times a week. We can include the link there and then. I am occasionally active on Twitter, but much less so.
Brett
Amazing. Alex, thanks so much.
Alex Reynolds
Really appreciate it. Thanks, Brett. This is great.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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