This article is from WeChat official account:Geekpark (ID: geekpark) , author: Zhao Weipeng, editor: Jingyu, the original title: “the” video version Clubhouse “, set up year earnings, valuation of $ 2.1 billion,” head Figure from: vision China
Musk’s “platform” made the Clubhouse, which has been online for less than a year, completely popular. This audio social software that originated in Silicon Valley has begun to cause a large number of imitations worldwide.
It allows users to quickly establish chat rooms and talk about various topics. The chat rooms are usually open and any user can enter. If you want to participate in the voice discussion, just click the button to apply. The creator of the room will decide who Have a say.
In terms of volume, the “video version of Clubhouse”-the online virtual event platform Hopin by US President Joe Biden and Microsoft founder Bill Gates “Platform”, is much less impressive.
Clubhouse’s chat room interface, each room is divided into a speaker and an audience on the stage
However, neither Clubhouse nor its apprentices have been able to solve the problem of profitability. And Hopin did it, and it verified the commercial feasibility of this model for Clubhouse to a certain extent.
This product, which is only half a year older than Clubhouse’s morning launch, achieved ARR(annual recurring income)30 million U.S. dollars, the company has begun to make profits.
In addition, in the current mobile Internet era, Hopin has only had a PC web version since it went online. It was only two months ago that it just planned to launch a mobile app. It seems to be far “sluggish” in form. But this does not affect its explosive growth. Starting from February 2020, in 8 months, Hopin’s registered users have grown from 5,000 to 3.5 million, and its corporate members have reached 50,000, and its valuation has reached 2.1 billion US dollars.
Hopin’s virtual round table meeting interface is similar to Zoom, with the speaker on the left and the audience discussion and communication area on the right
However, due to the promotion of the new crown vaccine and the resumption of offline activities, the stock price of video conferencing platform Zoom has begun to fall. Some people questioned that once the epidemic eased, Hopin’s growth would cease to exist. Boufarhat, the founder of Hopin, responded that Hopin had been online before the epidemic, and he firmly believed that even if the epidemic passed, “conferences and other activities will never return to the past.” He feels that Hopin actually points to a future of “online and offline hybrid”.
What will the future “event” look like?
Hopin is a bit like a collection of online event registration platform + “open” video conference platform.
On Hopin, viewers can find activities of interest to them on the “Explore” page. At present, there are various activities on Hopin, including job fairs, online education and technology summits, comedy performances and even live football matches.
Hopin’s activity “exploration” page, you can discover activities of different categories according to different tags
Users usually sit in front of the computer screen to participate in the event. After registering to join an event, they can watch the performance of the event guests and “swipe the barrage” in the chat box on the right with the participants in the same event. communicate with. Hopin also allows the audience to initiate one-on-one video socialization with the participants while participating in this event.
Initiate one-on-one video socialization with attendees of the same event
Boufarhat once said that the reason he created Hopin was to participate in an event online, just like in real life, “so I created this real-time video platform.”
In his opinion, Zoom is a scene for people to have meetings in meetings, and Hopin hopes to be the entire venue.
“It’s like if you rent a building for events, there may be a meeting room in the office building, which is equivalent to the video platform Zoom; but then downstairs, there is usually a large square, you can Hold job fairs or speeches there; you can go to the meeting room to listen to it, or you can go to the square to have a look. It’s like you are hanging out at an offline event.” Hopin provides these infrastructures, and their role , Event initiators areYou can define it yourself. Even the details go to the theme and visual style of the web page.
Currently, Hopin allows up to five people to be on the main stage at the same time with 100,000 onlookers.
Hopin’s exhibition page, visitors can click on different modules to interact
In addition, Hopin’s exhibition is also a highlight. It provides modular and customizable button designs for different booths. Participants are participating in the virtual expo, and they can communicate with the staff of the booth via the webpage. Hopin also designed the sponsor’s advertising space for event initiators. Event initiators can sell their own event advertising space to increase revenue.
Hopin founder Boufarhat
Because of the rich customization features and the high degree of restoration of offline event scenes, Hopin is more confident to charge the event initiator a subscription fee. The basic version is $99/month; upgrade The version is 799 US dollars/month, which can unlock services such as brand promotion integration and advanced data analysis; for larger-scale activities, it needs to be customized through the enterprise version.
And if you use HopinThe built-in ticketing platform will charge 7% of the total ticket sales. Currently, these two parts of revenue have contributed objective revenue to Hopin.
From content to person
Hopin’s B round investment agency Accel once invested in Facebook’s B round, and its market value at the time of its IPO was 200 times its B round estimate. Accel believes that Hopin also has the potential to grow by about 100 times.
The rapid development of Hopin also attracted follow-up. Clubhouse’s investment agency A16Z quickly followed up and invested in Run The World, an online virtual event platform in California, USA. At the same time, zoom, the “pronoun” of video conferencing, has recently launched on Zoom, an online event platform.
Run The World event page, select a “round table” to join the video discussion
Although Zoom’s growth is crazy enough, it turns out that the application scenarios of real-time video conferencing are far more than that.
With the addition of Zoom, which holds the advantage of massive video conferencing users, it will inevitably make competition in this field more intense.
The event organizers of Reuters said that this model restores human-computer interaction online, and at the same time collects precious participant behavior data, it can also engage in activities at the lowest cost and provide community cohesion.
As the forerunner of this model, Hopin’s current model is bound to be staged. For example, Hopin recently acquired an offline event social software Topi, whose main function is to allow people participating in offline or online events to communicate with other participants, and create a unique locationRestricted new communities.
In this regard, Boufarhat also stated that Hopin’s purpose is to make people rather than places become the core of activities, “Most activity platforms focus on the content of the activity, not People.” He believes that for the event industry, the focus should be on making the event experience more humane, helping users be more focused, and making social interactions more effective based on interaction.
“Even after the epidemic is over, all large-scale events will be combined with online to become an integrated meeting.” Boufarhat believes that “a large amount of user behavior data generated by online activities cannot be obtained from offline activities. Through these Data, organizers can analyze the dimensional data of participants’ participation, social connections, expectations, and evaluations.”
In the future, the influx of more new and old companies will bring new sparks to the RTC(real-time audio and video) era.
This article is from WeChat official account:Geekpark (ID: geekpark) , author: Zhao Weipeng