Event-Led Growth in B2B SaaS - with Julius Solaris, Founder and CEO Boldpush

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by Julius Solaris, the founder of Boldpush, and a former VPN marketing at Hopin. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas with Julius. First, the evolution of events in the B2B technology industry. Second, event-led growth as a strategy for B2B SaaS and technology companies. And third, the intersections of events, community, content, and thought leadership. With that, Julius, would you mind taking a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming our guest on the Metrics and Measure Up podcast?

**Julius Solaris** (1:16)
Well, first off, thanks for having me, Ray. It's such a pleasure. I feel honored with such a great roaster of guests to be on the show very quickly. I'm an events person. I've been at events most of my life, pre-work, and then when I started working, it was my first gig. I was an event marketing person for conferences, where I come from in Italy. Then my life career brought me to write about events and become a media person for the events industry. I started a blog called EventMB that then became a full media platform and I sold that platform in 2019 to Skift, which is a much larger travel media entity. It's now called Skift Meetings. Also in between that, also founded a small event technology company that I sold as well. I exited two businesses in the event space. More recently, I've been in marketing capacity. First was WapCard, a large application for exhibition and trade shows. Then more recently, I became VP of Marketing for Hopin during the hyper growth moment of raising a billion dollars. Yeah, lots of stories with that. For the past year, I've been a consultant, a researcher for our industry, as well as creating content online, and a full-time creator as well for all the topics that revolve around B2B events and marketing, as well as whatever the future of events look like.

**Ray Rike** (2:52)
Well, that's why I was so interested in talking to you, Julius. Not only do you have this amazing background, but it's your vision for where the event industry can go. And our audience is 100% B2B technology, B2B SaaS executives, CEOs, CFOs, CROs and CMOs. So what I wanted to do in these first couple of minutes was just a real brief bit of history on how you've seen events being used in the B2B technology industry, a little bit about yesterday, a lot more about the last couple of years, and then maybe what you see happening over the next two to three years, because I saw you just posted on LinkedIn today, your kind of top 10 predictions for events in the rest of the 20s. So go ahead.

**Julius Solaris** (3:36)
Yeah, it sounds fantastic. Listen, I've been commenting on this for like 20 years. So I've been through a lot. We've been through the mortgage crisis and the role of events usually during a recession type of environment, which is similar to what we're living right now. Events are the first to go. Events were the first to go, I would say. Is that something that has changed as well in a sense of how the events industry and events in general position themselves? That has a lot to do with what happened more recently in the events industry. The past three years have been the most disruptive for the events. We've been at the core of the impact of the pandemic in the goods and bads. First, with the growth of virtual events as the only alternative to meet. So the spotlight, everybody, there was what I call the biggest advertisement for the events industry ever. Because all of a sudden, all these amazing events we could not attend for a lot of us were free to attend online and we got to experience what it meant to be exposed to these amazing communities and content online. So big advertising moment, hyper growth, I was involved with it, obviously being a Hopin for some time and so, and then right after that, we're in a phase right now where the pandemic is kind of swinging back aggressively towards in-person. We're actually out March, April, 2023, out of the fastest growing month for the in-person events industry ever. We've had $6.2 billion worth of acquisitions between technology companies and event planning companies being acquired by private equity or between each other. So there's been a lot of movement. And right now, I guess, where we are, there's a new definition for your audience specifically. I think a lot of CMOs really got to experience the power of events for the first time during the pandemic. Yes, they did webinars. Yes, they did their user conferences. But like this vision of pulling it all together sort of came across during the pandemic with a lot of force. And all of a sudden, we were seeing what the result of doing virtual and in-person together could be on the longer term in perspective. So we're redefining. There's no definition right now. The concept of events has been never as fluid as it is right now. We're talking about hybrid, in-person, virtual, async, recorded, repurposing. So there's a lot happening. Okay.