Michael Balyasny is the founder and chief visionary behind Attendify, a software that bridges the gap between digital marketing and event marketing. As a product and design-driven entrepreneur, Michael is recognized as an expert in event technology, an industry that’s grown to well over $30 billion dollars.
In this episode, Michael joined LeadMD CEO Justin Gray to discuss how the B2B industry was impacted by COVID_19. They break down the rise of hybrid events, opportunities for innovation and why event success will always hinge on engagement. They also explore ways attendees can make the most of events, whether they’re attending in person or remotely.
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3 Key Points:
1. COVID-19 flipped the event space upside down.
Within a matter of weeks, B2B events around the world that had been years in the making were cancelled. Seemingly overnight, the virtual events that had previously been an afterthought became the industry’s focus. This presented a unique learning curve and set of challenges that is still being sorted out today. The silver lining? Hybrid events – a mix of in-person and remote – are here to stay.
2. Engagement is still the name of the game.
Organizations will always be after one thing: the right buyer. With in-person events on pause, event marketers have had to scramble to re-create opportunities for personal experiences and networking for sponsors, presenters and attendees. This is where mobile apps shine, helping people connect in trackable ways.
3. The future of events will be a hybrid model.
With the world opening back up, people are understandably eager to return to in-person events. But B2B digital and event marketers would be mistaken to turn their backs on what virtual events can offer. Expect to see satellite in-person events and central hubs where people can connect from anywhere in the world. The goal is for virtual attendees to have just as valuable experiences as those attending on-site.
Time Stamped Show Notes:
2:05 – What led you to the event space and what markets do you serve?
7:21 – How have you gained visibility into events to understand the changes that needed to be made?
10:14 – How are you working to create more personalized experiences?
12:49 – How do you quantify engagement in virtual events?
16:16 – When will we return to physical events?
20:35 – How are the lines blurring between digital marketers and event marketers?
29:58 – What was a catalytic moment in your life?
35:15 – Lightning round
42:17 – Wrap-Up: Find Michael on LinkedIn.
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Full Transcript
Justin:
Hey, hello and welcome again. You are back on Catalyst season three, which is well under way. So I’m joined by a great guest today who has some interesting perspectives certainly around this topic of rapid change and a bit of that COVID thing that we’ve heard so much about and how that changes down into certainly different industries. Different markets, different organization sizes. I’m joined today by Micheal Balyasny. Micheal is the CEO of an organization called Attendify. And of course Micheal you guys deal with events over there. So really heavily talked about in impacted space certainly from COVID. So excited to get your perspective there. But before we hop into that, first welcome to the show. And we’d love to kind of get a quick intro and background for our listeners.
Michael:
Sure. Thanks for having me on Justin. My name is Micheal Balyasny. I’m the founder and CEO of Attendify. We’re about 10 years into the business, and we focus on event technology. And event technology has been going through a lot of rapid changes like you mentioned. A lot of positive silver linings to it for sure. But a lot of short and medium term challenges as well. So it’s been a tumultuous last couple of months and we expect that to continue. But really my background is more as a product founder so I really focus on what we do, how we do it and executing on the product side, that’s where I feel my strengths are. And it’s certainly been a really busy time, a really productive time for us as we build a whole lot of new stuff for an industry that’s completely transforming.
Justin:
Yeah, absolutely. So first why events? What led you to the event space? You kind of mentioned you’re kind of more from the product side, so I’m assuming there was a light bulb moment or a need that arose around that and thus you went down this path.
Michael:
Yeah, this takes us way back. But for sure, we initially started with the thesis of helping small businesses go mobile, that was our goal. We saw an opportunity when the app store was really just scaling up when you saw a lot of different app builders popping up similar to sort of these early website builders back in the day. And we really didn’t see those tools as being particularly effective in terms of actually helping the business that they were serving. Either top line or bottom line and we wanted to build these really functional, useful apps that businesses would be able to deploy with simple template like solutions. But that really added value to the end user experience.
Michael:
And events just happened to be the first vertical we stumbled into, we knew some folks in the space through my co-founder. They said, “Hey, event apps are really becoming attractive, they make a lot of sense, they help us save money. Take a look at this, we know you guys are into doing something with apps, take a look.” And we did and the more we explored this space the more excited we got about it. And that excitement and interest in events only grew. I mean we all attend events, it’s highly relatable. The goals that attendees have going to events although events are very diverse and there’s a lot of different formats. But the goals that people have are generally pretty consistent, networking and learning. And we just saw an opportunity to do something that would be both template driven and incredibly valuable at the same time.
Justin:
And so what markets do you guys serve today? What’s the kind of size and if there is an industry focus where do you focus?
Michael:
There’s not an industry focus. We have over 2,500 active accounts. We’ve served well over 20,000 events since we got started. And we are a self service platform, so that’s really driven adoption across different industry verticals and different size companies. We do really well with technology companies, we do really with associations and non-profits. But if you really look at the pie chart of the industries that our customer base comes from it’s all over the place. So there’s really a lot of very small slices to that. And that’s something that we like and it’s something that we’ve always thought was missing in the event space, is a more self service, a more product oriented approach. Because a lot of the incumbents in the space are very much for the legacy software vendors, there’s a lot of hand holding, a lot of professional services. There’s a lot of costs involved to getting started with those platforms and that’s always been a differentiator. So we see a lot of different folks.
Justin:
So the very customer focus like that I assume you’ve seen again, areas that have been heavily impacted by COVID where they’re pivoting drastically. And then folks that are probably pretty well versed and mature on digital events. Has that been the case?
Michael:
You know this is a unique crisis I think for anybody in the event space because it affected everybody. And I don’t think there were lots of people pre COVID who really knew now to run virtual events. I mean, virtual events were an afterthought, it never even came to mind before COVID hit to do something for the virtual space. There was never any demand from customers, never any interest in it whatsoever. And virtual events are very different, so when this hit we found ourselves with a product that was maybe 50% aligned to what customers needed. So we had a lot that we could reuse, a lot we could repurpose and reposition.
Michael:
But then we also had some pretty significant gaps and we needed to fill those quickly. So I think now there are people who feel more comfortable running virtual events, but by and large people are still figuring it out. And a lot of our customers are still struggling and still desperate for live events to come back. I think there are a lot of unique challenges with the virtual events and we’re all still figuring it out. And I think the vendors in the space, even the ones who were more focused on virtual when this happened, they’ve got a long way to go as well. I don’t think anybody’s come close to really nailing the experience. But I think we’ve all seen the opportunity and the possibility of doing so and I think we’re all excited about that.
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