BSEEN Live
Meet BSEEN Live, an ambitious events agency that built a thriving startup community on Hopin
Using Hopin to fast-track investment for startups
BSEEN Live is an events agency specializing in the production of virtual and hybrid experiences for a variety of organizations, including TheVentury, an innovation agency that supports startups and corporates. This client of BSEEN’s runs an accelerator program for early-stage startups called ELEVATE that offers boot camps, workshops, funding and execution advice, networking, and events.
The conclusion of ELEVATE is an event called Demo Day, which brings together cohorts of startups that have finished the accelerator program and begun looking for funding. It's a place for startups to share their stories and network with potential clients and investors. Before using Hopin, Demo Day had been held in-person and streamed on social media, but BSEEN Live took the event virtual to invite a larger and more global audience of investors, corporate partners, and startups.
The primary challenge for BSEEN Live was recreating the same intimate, welcoming environment Demo Day is known for to foster valuable networking opportunities. The organization considered several platforms before choosing Hopin for its flexibility and ease of use. To ensure everything ran smoothly on the day, the agency used Hopin's duplicate event feature to create a dress rehearsal for speakers and organizers, so they understood exactly how the live event day would run.
With help from BSEEN, TheVentury used Hopin’s networking and Expo features to create the one-on-one networking opportunities that attendees rely on Demo Day for. The wider reach of the event combined with its powerful interactivity improved TheVentury's chances of landing the vital sponsorship and funding deals that are the heart and soul of Demo Day.
It's quite easy to just broadcast content that people passively consume, but what Hopin offers is the possibility for participants to interact with one another and to do it within dedicated spaces [...] Being able after a presentation to approach the individual space of the startup to ask questions and connect with one another, that was a really important factor.
Juan Guerra
Founder and CEO, BSEEN Live
One of our biggest values at TheVentury is cooperation and empowerment, and one of my biggest personal values is connection. So I really wanted to make sure that this event was created around these values.
Katharina Binder
Head of Accelerator and Innovation Coach, TheVentury
Forging meaningful connections between founders and funders
The startups were the stars of Demo Day, using the event to share their stories of challenge and success and the role TheVentury's ELEVATE program played in that journey. The conference was a chance for each startup to show investors their business model and pitch for investment. Four businesses showcased their work, ranging from a platform revolutionizing funding for farmers to a peer-to-peer fashion rental marketplace.
Demo Day's agenda prioritized interaction. The conference opened for speed networking 30 minutes before it officially started, followed by a welcome from TheVentury's program managers Katharina Binder and Elisabeth Korshunova. The main stage program was short and sweet, with the next hour dedicated to startup pitches and audience interaction.
BSEEN Live was tasked with maximizing engagement on the day. While TheVentury’s team were on hand to help create an atmosphere by cheering startups on in the event chat, BSEEN worked diligently to spark real-time conversation around key topics via polls and Q&A sessions. BSEEN Live also built in breaks for attendees to network with each other in a more informal setting. This helped to break down barriers and facilitate the kind of conversations that can land those all-important investment dollars.
After answering questions about their pitch on the event's main stage, each startup moved into a pre-prepared booth in the Expo area where investors could follow up. In these booths, startups fielded questions from potential investors and chatted directly with the event's sponsors to understand what tools they offered and how they could help grow their business. BSEEN also set up a special booth for TheVentury to host discussions with other startups interested in joining its accelerator program as well as potential corporate partners and sponsors for future Demo Days.
Potential corporate partners received a special abridged agenda to get a taste of what TheVentury does. After the startup pitches were finished, these attendees joined dedicated interview slots featuring two existing partners to discuss topics around innovation. Along with building relationships, these talks were specially planned to generate post-event marketing content.
We had just opened up the program for corporate teams as well, not only startups, and so we wanted to give potential corporate partners for the future a glimpse of what we do. But we were also aware of the fact that maybe they're not interested in listening to all the startup pitches. So we created a special agenda for them after the startup pitches.
Katharina Binder
Head of Accelerator and Innovation Manager, TheVentury
The Hopin features that have helped BSEEN Live bring startups together with investors
These are some of the Hopin features that made Demo Day a success:
- Expo area: Startups used individual booths to showcase their businesses and connect with potential investors.
- Event stages: TheVentury invited startups onto the main stage to share their pitches and attract the investment their businesses need to grow.
- Chat: Interaction is a crucial feature of Demo Day, and TheVentury encouraged plenty of virtual networking using Hopin's Chat feature.
- Transcripts: Hopin automatically recorded downloadable transcripts of the event's chat, giving TheVentury insight into the audience sentiment of attendees during each piece of content.
- Q&A: Hopin's Q&A feature made it easy for investors to quiz each startup on the event's main stage during their pitches.
- Polls: The BSEEN Live team prepared polls ahead of the event to encourage conversation and engage attendees during presentations.
- Customizability: BSEEN Live created a consistent visual identity for the event, creating a clear brand that appeared in email, social media, the Hopin registration page, event stages, breakout sessions, and booths.
- Reporting: The reporting and analytics features of Hopin gave BSEEN Live and TheVentury insights into the best performing event content as well as where new leads for startups were coming.
The chat function is extremely powerful. When you go through those transcripts [post-event], you're really able to better understand who your customer is and what they are talking about.
Juan Guerra
Founder and CEO, BSEEN Live
A new global approach to startup funding
Attendees loved Demo Day 2021, giving it a satisfaction score of 9.8 out of 10. Total attendance was more than double what it had been in-person, with attendees responding positively to the convenience of a virtual event. BSEEN Live’s hard work building a genuinely interactive agenda also paid off as attendees stayed on average for 90 minutes of the 100-minute event
TheVentury was thrilled to see the results of Demo Day 2021. The event generated more quality leads and connections than ever before, with startups securing investment from partners that wouldn’t usually have been able to attend the in-person event. By adding a virtual component to its event strategy, TheVentury can now invite more stakeholders from across Europe and, in future, the world. This more diverse, international audience is helping the organization enroll more startups than ever before into its ELEVATE accelerator program.
To support this strategy, BSEEN Live used Hopin’s event reporting to analyze the best performing marketing channels and content from Demo Days. This information has proven invaluable in helping them plan a new series of events for TheVentury to better serve the global startup community.
We are 100% committed to Hopin because we definitely see it as a strategic solution. We have seen how it has grown our business and the business of our clients by bringing more people to their events.
Juan Guerra
Founder and CEO, BSEEN Live
9.8
Average attendee NPS
68%
Turnout
2x
Number of attendees vs in-person
90 Minutes
average attendance duration
We see that organizations can grow using Hopin to really go and have more events on an ongoing basis that allow them to grow their reach, expand and continue to engage their audience.
Juan Guerra
Founder and CEO, BSEEN Live