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In today's episode, Spencer Elliott joins us from Viewstub to discuss how they are revolutionizing the way organizers can handle events to move forward into a hybrid live + virtual future.
What does it take to found a globally important company in these times? We’re interested in what happens before universally-acknowledged success.
Join Brett Kistler as he engages in deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets, being vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.
Intro: The future of this industry is going to be hybrid, and we believe it is kind of like cars. We call them hybrid cars today. When they are all hybrid, we are just going to call them cards.
Brett: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the ClearView podcast. Today I am with Spencer Elliott, the CEO of Viewstub. How are you doing today, Spencer?
Spencer: I am doing well. Thank you. How are you?
Brett: Doing wonderful, nice sunny day here in Hawaii.
Spencer: As well in Florida.
Brett: Wonderful, so tell me a little bit about Viewstub.
Spencer: Sure, Viewstub is an online event platform that is really catered towards not only individual organizers and creators but also for agencies and other B-to-B groups that are looking to host multiple events either directly on the Viewstub platform as well as in person. But they can also host it on their own website without our branding. We have a full wide labeled solution. We are really poised to help everyone come out of the pandemic with a solution for both their in-person events as well as their online content. We have really helped them to monetize that with expanded reach, creating additional revenue streams.
Brett: That seems like a very timely product. Is this something that you started from the Coronavirus, the need that arose or were you guys operating on this already and then Coronavirus hit?
Spencer: We were about a year into development before we ever heard anything about Covid or the Coronavirus. We had launched all of our in-person event features, so QR code scanning and the ability to sell tickets to an in-person event, right before the pandemic hit, and so it was really funny to us because we had to immediately shift back to the virtual side of our business. We haven’t seen really too much going on for the in-person events industry for the last 12 months at least.
Brett: How has that been going for you guys?
Spencer: On one side of the business, it has been great. We are certainly expecting the in-person event industry to come back in full force. I think as they lift restrictions and develop more vaccines for more individuals, we will see everyone start to become more comfortable attending conferences and attending in-person concerts. But what really has been great is that now there is a ton of awareness about what we are doing and what we have always professed, which is get more ROI from your production. Find ways to reach more people. Allow access to people that just can’t attend your event in person, and they never were able to in the first place.
In general, the statistics before Covid was that about 75% of your target audience was never going to make it no matter what, whether they have kids, they have work, they live in a different state, they live in a different country. They are not going to make it no matter if they are a member of your association or anything. If they are your biggest fan, they probably can’t make it.
But if you give them that online option, okay, now they can watch, and then they are 67% more likely to come to the in-person event the following time. We had a lot of that data, and we were really trying to convince people about virtual but now I think everyone is on Zoom, everyone understands how virtual works. Now it is almost an expectation, and so we know that the future of this industry is going to be hybrid. We believe it is kind of like cars. We call them hybrid cars today. When they are all hybrid, we are just going to call them cars. We believe the same thing about events.
Brett: It is interesting. I can imagine there being like two objections to moving through that Covid has really helped with, one of them being if people cannot make it to the event, it’s just not worth it. Why would somebody watch it, pay tickets to go to a concert they are just watching online? The other objection might be why dilute the value of a ticket to a concert by making it available outside of the event. How have you addressed that? How has that shifted in the market’s perception?
Spencer: You are right. That really was what we were hearing, and the biggest one was you are going to cannibalize my in-person ticket sales by offering it online. People that want to come in person are now going to watch online. But I think we all know that that’s not the case. I mean pandemic aside, if I wanted to go to an event and I am willing and able to go, and I have the means, I am going to go. I am going to go in person because I prefer the networking. There is value in that as well. Now I can take those recordings with me and watch them at night, so I don’t miss the opportunities at the coffee bar to meet that prospect that I wanted to meet. I don’t have to run and jump to a session because it is only available in person.
Then we are seeing a lot of the CE credits being offered online now and that becoming accredited, which is really nice. Yeah, the perception has totally changed. We were trying to convince people pre-pandemic. Now they know and they are coming to us and asking us for help. We are consulting and becoming their trusted resource for virtual events as well as how to strategize. You touched on a couple of things about the pricing. You really need to create that value online the same way you would create the in-person value. You should create one experience but for two separate audiences. They both are going to have different nuance types of interactions that they are going to have with your content.
For that reason, we believe that you can charge more, the same price and sometimes less for the online content, but there are tons of ways to really create that value and say you are going to be able to watch it live only for this price. If you are VIP, you are going to get access for a couple of days. You are going to get a VIP swag bag sent to your house, and we are going to send you lunch through DoorDash. You just build up the value differently. There are a lot of things you can do online. We are going to do a VIP networking with the celebrity keynote, and that’s only going to be able to this ticket type. You can create subscriptions. You can do donation base or set your own price tickets.
We have the ability to sell merchandise. We have got people selling audio books on our platform because we have really developed a Shopify type of platform for online content and events, so a lot of brands are using us to monetize these activations, these brand activations. We have had clients, very well-known brands, that have sold millions of dollars’ worth of gift cards, and when you buy the gift card, you get free access to a virtual concert with the likes of top country stars in the nation. We have done a few of those campaigns, and of course those were all fully branded with that brand and so no one knew the difference that Viewstub was one of the behind the scenes powering the whole thing.
Brett: Sounds like the previous model was like maximizing the concentration of value in a location and then try to maximize perhaps dollar value of ticket sales based on that, but what you are doing is allowing these events to maximize for engagement and allowing broader engagement in more ways, bringing more people from more places. You can still maintain a lot of that curation by having specific ticket types and specific types of conversations. You can even have questions coming into a live presentation, a live Q&A from a remote audience, enriching that conversation. You are really enriching a lot of the soft value from which monetization for the event makers can occur and value for the attendees can be created.
Spencer: You hit the nail on the head, and I think that’s the biggest challenge that the whole industry is looking at is how we morph these into one experience. Bringing the online audience into the in-person experience in a way that seems seamless and that they can really feel like they are at the event, but also it doesn’t inhibit the people that are at the event, meaning they are not interfacing with a video screen or something like that. That’s been a lot of the research that we are doing, a lot of the R&D that our company is putting forth in terms of the innovation in that space. That engagement is really important, and that type of data, whether it is how long did they watch, how long did they stare at this sponsored video, or how many people attended this session. You start to get very granular in terms of how much was from this group or this ticket type, and you can really start to slice and dice things in a very peculiar way.
Then, when you look at it, you are like we have the ability, like we were just talking about, to really create it where the in-person audience is just as profitable as the online audience, if not more. You said it, maximizing the ticket value for the in-person, and just overall getting the ROI for the event. It used to be roughly 33%, to your point. You would get 33% on your dollar in terms of profit back from each ticket. We are seeing anywhere from like 65% to 85% ROI on each individual online purchase or access, but it is just so much more creative. There are just so many new ways to set things up where you didn’t have those opportunities before.
Brett: It seems like if you set up the interactions and frame them properly, then you end up with a much more scalable way to interact. Your per user cost is much lower than an in-person visitor, but they are still able to get a lot of the value. There is that increased network effect of everybody is getting more value from more engagement.
Spencer: Especially for sponsors, and so that’s where really where we have seen a lot of growth is in the sponsorship revenue side for our events. They are able to craft very specific packages. Hey, we are going to run your commercial. We are going to put a logo on screen. We are going to have overlays. These are things that are not necessarily available in person, especially with that type of reach and that type of tracking. If you put a big banner inside of an expo hall, how can you really track that ROI? How many people actually saw it? How many leads did that turn into? It is harder to do that with an exhibit as well. You might go to grab some business cards, get some people to write down their emails for you, but online, you know these 77 people came in here. These 33 opted into the email. These 32 said they were interested for a demo. You can really start to pump out some interesting data.
But what Viewstub is really passionate about is being agnostic for our event organizers in that they can use several other pieces of the pie if they want. We certainly can help them with their streaming and help them with their promotion. We do a lot with the marketing. We can also help them with the registration. But if they have another piece that they like to use, including Zoom, we have a Zoom integration. We would love for them to use those things because we don’t want to reinvent the wheel for them. This is all very complex, and so we let them plug in pieces from other companies and we have been very API driven. If you want to bring your own CRM or you want to bring your own ecommerce store, we want you to plug that in. We can support you in growing your event revenues in another area. We certainly have really positioned ourselves that way, and we really want to become that infrastructure for these organizers moving forward.
Brett: That brings up another good question. Given that complexity, with how complex the roll out could be, what is your onboarding process for bringing in a new client who has traditionally been running? Let’s say there is just a typical event at a location that happens annually, and they sell tickets. Maybe they have live streamed it before or live streamed portions of it, but they have really had the value being part of being at the event, being the core of the value. How much tech skills would they require to be able to integrate their process? Do you support people? Is there sort of a turnkey version and then a more custom, bespoke integrated version?
Spencer: Absolutely, we have set out from day one to create the easiest platform to use for event management. That’s always been at the core of our product. If you get on there, it would really take you a number of minutes, assuming you were already ready to go with your event. If you are still in the brainstorming phase, of course you can create a draft and come back. But if you have your picture you want to upload and you have your description, you fill everything out within a few minutes. You are up and going. You have got your page. There is no upfront cost to do anything like that, and so you can actually start promoting your event, start fundraising your event, start selling your tickets, and not pay Viewstub a dollar until you actually start making money. We do everything on a revenue share model.
We kind of changed the game in that sense. We wanted to make sure that our organizers were making money first, and then they were able to use the extra money they are saving not having to pay us upfront as a vendor to be able to continue to promote their event and make their event bigger. Then we added things like affiliate links to make it even easier for them, and a lot of tools around that. But yeah, to your point about wanting to see these organizers, make it easy for them, transition them into this virtual world, each organizer or agency or customer that we have gets a dedicated salesperson as well as a dedicated account manager. They have got that upfront help from the sales manager to answer any questions and do demos, and everything to get them feeling comfortable, and then from then on, they have got the account manager as well as the sales manager still there to really go in and be technical.
We offer, as a company, day of event management. We can click the buttons for you if you want. We have people that can do that. Typically the organizers are working with already have a good production company that they are working with and that they have used in the past, whether it be for those big screens they used to do on the back of the stages for the people in the back of the room, for B roll footage, and they weren’t really monetizing it. Now all we are really doing is helping them to find a way to monetize it and then create that paywall and that gateway in order to restrict the access. Because what we saw was people were trying to use YouTube and Facebook, and here, I am going to get a million views from my hundred-person conference, and I am going to make $700 bucks. We thought that was backwards. You should make all the money and give us a small percentage.
We built a platform specific for event organizers and specific for this market, and then what we realized is that more people wanted this model than we thought. It has kind of extended into industry coaches and smaller workshop style, like a learning management software. We have also got, like I mentioned earlier, people selling access to audio books or documentaries, replays of video and audio podcasts, things like that. They are using the platform for that, and they are hosting it all on their own website with their branding. They love that. They get to create their own branded experience. We want to be supportive of them in every way.
Brett: Tell me more about the learning management software that you guys are building.
Spencer: Essentially you just create a series of videos. You can do them live. That's the cool thing about Viewstub is that we have all the flexibility to create a sales page, and then within that sales page, there is a media page. That media page can have unlimited number of uploaded videos. It can have an unlimited number of live streams, and it can have an unlimited number of breakout rooms, sponsor booths, those types or things. But the cool part is not everyone will see everything unless you want them to, but you can actually by ticket type restrict the access.
From an organizer perspective, you will have all your media in one place. It makes it easy, but each ticket will have different levels of access. Some people will only see this stage, and some people will see everything. Some people will see the ability to go to the expo hall. Some people won´t. You have the options. It is really toggle switches we have put into Viewstub to turn these features on and off. Some can do the pulls. We have turned everything into a feature where the organizer gets to decide how they want this to be tailored, and so it is very highly customizable.
You can customize the buttons. You can customize the names. You can really customize everything to make it flexible for you, and what we saw in the industry was that there were a lot of platforms that tried to pigeonhole these events into everyone's going to say agenda, everyone´s is going to speaker. But we do fundraisers, and they don't want it to say donations. They want it to say a gift. We want them to be able to change that button so it doesn't say donations. It says gifts, or whatever. I am just making up a scenario, and that's what we want to be, that customizable platform that works for everyone.
I know that is a horrible thing to say. But we believe we can do it. We are doing it every day. We have several industry verticals that are very successful with our platform, and for us, we are just really focused on finding those hubs that have several spokes. We have always been very successful with brand ambassadors, and referral partners, like videographers and meeting planners. We have become entrenched in those worlds, and they have become great sales members for us and brand advocates, just speaking on podcasts about us and things like that.
Then we took that model and said let´s enable them. Let’s develop a software where they can now manage all of their clients. We have now developed an agency model. The cool part is, and we talked about this earlier, the agnostic part of Viewstub, that you can sell on other platforms. That is fine with us. We will actually do the paper-per-view fulfillment for you if you want to sell on EventBright or Ticketmaster. We can take those registrations, put them all into our system so you have one hub that has all of your registrations and then one place to distribute all of the media and the video player for the people to be able to watch the actual event.
Brett: I can think of already a couple people that I could connect you with that might be able to use Viewstub. For the rest of the podcast, I would like to take this into a personal direction. What is a personal journey that you have had in starting and growing this company, something that you learned about yourself that you didn’t expect or some kind of business problem that it turned out it was coming from you, and you learned this thing about yourself and then you changed course and things improved?
Spencer: Sure, I mean there is a ton. I have just been a work in progress since really starting this journey. I was in the corporate world for about 4 years, and I worked that whole time with startups on the side. I actually took two years off from that same employer and went and got my master’s degree in entrepreneurship. It has always been a passion of mine. I thought, man, when I get into this entrepreneurship role, when I am the leader, I am never going to operate that way. I remember my boss telling me at one time Spencer, you have really great ideas, but we move at a cruise ship mentality, not at a speed boat mentality. That always resonated with me, and I was like man, why not? But they were a billion-dollar company that sold later for a billion and a half.
Now that I am in this role, I have learned why there is bureaucracy, why there is a hierarchy, why there is a little bit more complexity from one side of the perspective than there is from maybe the person that is in that role day-to-day. For me, I have tried to have more empathy for my team members and try to bring that all the way up to the decision makers that are affecting that individual role. I just think that’s one thing that was a realization for me is that I shouldn’t have been acting that way before because I was a young gun out of school and I didn’t really know what I was talking, I guess.
Maybe I did, but there was nothing I could have done about it and these things take time. I think I always expected that we are at with Viewstub today, we would have been there sooner. Just realizing there is a lot that goes into it, you really need to find the right people to join your team and I think we have done that. They are just the most passionate group of people that really have the best interest of not only our customers but also our other team members as well as our investors and stakeholders, and that’s one of our values is to create value for everyone in the food chain. I realize that in any given situation you are kind of like is this going to be best for Viewstub or is this going to be best for the customer or is this going to be best for our shareholders, and it is like really we should be looking for what’s best for all three and making sure we are moving in that direction. Those are just two things, I guess, that came to mind. There are a ton more I can share.
Brett: I am curious. You pointed to finding the right people. What have you learned in this process about finding the right people?
Spencer: One of our mentors said you need to hire three people at a time when you want one. I thought that was pretty sound advice after having gone through several hires that for any good reason they didn’t work out, whether that individual wasn’t comfortable with the fast paced, at the time, start-up mentality we had and having an unsure career trajectory. I shouldn’t say that, sorry. An unclear daily routine is what I meant to say. It is not routine. They can’t come in every day and expect they need to do this, this and this and tomorrow is going to be the exact same. We are very comfortable with being uncomfortable, and constantly reprioritizing things almost daily because of the feedback we are getting from our customers and wanting to make sure we are building a product for them. Yeah, sure, this might help four people, but if this other product feature is going to help 400, then we need to prioritize that.
We are constantly looking at things, and so the team really has to have that mentality. One thing for us is we have just gone over the values every single week in our meeting. I actually do something now where I highlight one of our newest team members if there is one, or I go back and I highlight. I have been doing it in order of seniority, the people that have been here the longest so that everyone that’s new gets to meet them and can learn about them at least for 10 minutes, 15 minutes in the Monday meetings. I do one a week, and then what I make that individual do is I take out a couple of words from our values and our mission statement, and I make them fill in the blanks. Everyone is watching. Everyone gets to participate a little bit and they get to phone a friend if they get stuck. But what I am trying to do is reinforce these things because we have identified them over the last year of things that we want to improve upon.
Having gratitude, going beyond, so not just doing things at status quo, having focus in feedback, being proactive and productive. There’s a lot of alliteration in there to help people remember it. Our mission is to partner with organizers to create successful events globally, and there are different versions of that mission but essentially those are the pillars. That’s Viewstub.
Brett: How did you arrive at your values and your mission? How do you iterate them as your team grows and as your mission evolves?
Spencer: The first one, I forgot to mention it, is best product and team, and I think that was the first one that we really did outline, and we said if we can have the best team, we will create the best product. If we can have the best product, we will have a great company. Customers will want to use it. Then we started honestly asking our own team members what they thought the values should be, and then I remember there was a big list at one point. We looked for themes, and we looked for things that made sense for everybody. Then, from there, it was actually just a natural refinement. I think we entered them into a few meetings, and just kind of ran through. People would say it doesn’t sound right, or that’s not really what we are trying to say. It just naturally evolved through several iterations. I mean I know we have worked on that for weeks. It wasn’t something we tried to do in a day.
We really wanted it to feel organic, and so for that reason, everyone now I feel like wears it like a badge of honor. We all agree with them. I have asked every week if anyone thinks this should change or if anyone has any questions about any of these because I really want it to be ours and not something that is dictated. That was one thing I really wanted to make clear is that I didn’t tell them what the values were. They were part of it. It was our values as opposed to separating it as executive leadership versus everyone else. We built it together.
Brett: It sounds like that circles right back to that cruise ship versus speed boat mentality. Early on, you were like why can’t everything be like a speed boat, and then in this role you have learned there is a reason for bureaucracy sometimes. But you still have the empathy for both sides, and so building your mission and your values isn’t a top-down thing. It doesn’t work for you if it doesn’t connect with your company where people are at in the company. You want it to be a collaborative process. It can still be steered, but it may not just be thrown out every day and then write a new set of values or something.
Spencer: I don’t want them to believe it is like Noah’s Ark where there is no rudder, and you have to just have faith. I want them to know what’s going on with the company. We are very transparent with everything that we are doing whether it is fundraising or the sales number. We show everyone everything because I want them to have that type of ownership and autonomy in what they are doing. They can’t have that unless they know more than their individual role. For them to be able to make those decisions, they need to be informed. We have really pushed for that in everything we do.
I can think of one example. We were beginning to offer health care for our full-time employees, and it was something we had wanted to do for a long time and didn’t always have the means to be able to do so. But we are able to do so now and pay for a portion of their monthly premiums. We could have gone about it two ways. We could have just said we are doing this in the background. We will launch a plan. Everyone is going to have to deal with it. We thought about it differently. We went and asked everybody, what would you want in your health care plan, and we got everyone’s feedback. We decided what was the most prevalent or the top priorities for everyone. We went and made our plans around that because I knew everyone was different. I don’t want to create one plan that only works for half my team. Now we have four plans that they can pick from. I am just hoping that that fits everybody’s criteria.
That’s just one example of how we try to do things a little bit differently, and I think that’s going to help us have sustainable growth and longevity with retaining top talent.
Brett: So let’s say Viewstub is exactly as successful or even more successful than your wildest dreams, what does the event industry look like in three years?
Spencer: I am not sure how many people have followed the fastest growing unicorn in the world, which is Hop In, which is in our industry, and really was able to ride the hype train, so to speak, when everything happened. They were that company that was set up with backing from Silicon Valley and everything to really be that front runner for the industry. They were able to, like I said, grow very, very fast. What we see coming out of that is that there will be a lot of disruption, a lot of consolidation, and a lot of acquisition, mergers. We will see this industry expand dramatically.
We have some really good insights into that with some consultants, and others that are working with us on the market analysis. That will essentially level out. This will become the new norm, and companies will need to settle in. That’s when I feel we will be approaching more of a maturity period. I would say that’s probably closer to 10 years, but this industry is huge anyway. I mean the events industry, registration, ticketing, online registration and ticketing specifically is massive, and so it has just had a huge kick in the butt in two ways. I mean it was a negative impact for the entire industry when convention centers were shut down and venues couldn’t operate. Everyone was unable to even host a 10 person get together, much less a whole production crew for a concert or anything like that.
Everyone had to quickly shift, pivot, and augment, but what is coming out of that is now the entire virtual side of the event industry has been built out to I would say probably almost the same size as what the in-person event industry was on track to be. I see it almost being like a one and a half X on what we saw in 2019. A little bit of that will go away, but overall, I see the industry actually growing by one and a half times what we saw before 2020. It was on track for 14% CAGR, compound annual growth rate, but I think it would be more like 50% over two years, which is insane. We are talking about close to $100 billion dollars industry wide.
Brett: Wow, sounds like the tea leaves are boding well for you guys. Well, Spencer, thank you. This has been a really fascinating interview, and I have got a lot more I would like to talk with you about. Thank you for joining.
Spencer: Absolutely. Any time.