Hopin is the First Live Video Platform for Hosting Full-Fledged Events
Hey. I joined a company full-time and I wanted to share a little bit about why and what we built.
The problem
Events and conferences are great but it’s not always possible to attend them, and if you do, there are several pain points. Physical events (e.g., SXSW) require travel, parking, standing in line, catering, security, and a number of other time-consuming and expensive experiences. Plus, they can be exhausting for organizers, damaging to the local environment, cause excessive carbon footprints, and waste tons of food and water.
Hopin provides the same value of physical events—new connections and great content—without the pain points. With a Hopin event, you still get the amazing speakers, networking, expo booths, breakout discussions, and the fortuitous random “run-ins” that happen at physical events. The difference is you don’t need to buy a plane ticket or book a hotel to show up.
Whether you’re hosting a team meeting for 30 people or a global summit of 10,000, you can use Hopin to create an engaging event in 10 minutes, launch, and make hundreds of thousands of dollars—and nobody has to put pants on.
TL:DR
Create an online event in minutes and increase engagement in your online community.
Design your event with segments including Stages, Sessions, Networking, and Expos.
Sell tickets, get sponsors, and build a lucrative online events business on Hopin.
Best for: event organizers, community builders, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, remote companies, and educators.
The opportunity
Hosting events is a trillion dollar industry. You can make a castle-load of money throwing a conference. Events are how most media companies make a large chunk of their annual revenue.
But hosting events is hard. It’s expensive. It’s exhausting. Organizing venues, coordinating staff, recruiting speakers, booking catering—the list of tasks and expenses go on.
What if you could remove all of the inconveniences of physical events and keep only the best parts of an event? Remove the waiting in lines, expensive travel, parking, food waste, carbon footprint, and bathroom rentals and keep keep the great content and valuable connections.
That’s exactly what Hopin does.
Hopin is an online platform for hosting live, full-featured events from webinars with networking capabilities to large online conferences with breakout sessions and vendor expos. Everything happens from the comfort of your own home.
Hopin lets organizers host events with sessions, keynotes, webinars, breakouts, networking, and fireside chats.
But that’s just the front of the house. With Hopin, you also get a suite of back end features, including the event builder, registration page, ticket sales, expos, sponsors, reception area, backstage, and analytics.
You can design your event with the following segments:
Registration page. Tell people about your event and sell tickets.
Reception area. Warmly welcome everyone to your great event.
Main stage. For live webinars, interviews, keynotes, fireside chats, and more.
Sessions. For breakouts, group discussions, and meetings of up to ten people.
Networking. Meet one-on-one and face-to-face with attendees using Hopin’s special speed networking feature.
Expo center. Visit vendor booths and demo products.
Attendees enter the event and land in the reception room, where they get an overview of the event with the organizer message, event details, sponsors area and schedule.
Hopin’s Stage is where all the inspiring, insightful, and important talks take place. You can use them for webinars, live streaming keynotes, fireside chats, Youtube or Vimeo videos, live panels, and interviews.
Throughout the event your attendees can engage with staff and speakers through the live chat, where real-time discussions takes place. There are also separate chat rooms for the backstage and for each session.
Networking is similar to a FaceTime or Zoom call with another person — they are one-on-one conversations for as long as organizers establish. If two people click “Connect,” their contact information is swapped (like exchanging business cards for following up later).
Through different ticket tiers, you can organize attendees into various groups and decide who gets to meet each other in the networking segment. For example, you can create ticket types for job seekers and employers and set it so that only they meet each other (i.e., job seekers don’t meet other job seekers).
Our optional expo area allows you to invite vendors to your events where they can set up their own virtual booths for attendees to interact with. Expos are great for product demos, discounts, and learning about new services and features.
One of the best features of Hopin is our event builder that lets customize your event schedule to create the best engaging experience for your attendees — whether you decide to leave segments open for more casual events or scheduled for more structured events. It’s up to you!
Once an attendee signs up, Hopin takes care of the nitty gritty. We send email reminders to all your attendees prior to the event to ensure maximum attendance rates.
Hopin has a powerful data analytics dashboard to view registration visits, ticket sales, who your attendees are, where they’re from, how many attended your events, how many connections they made, and more good stuff through Hopin’s exportable data tables and charts.
So what’s in it for the attendees?
Attendees can receive the great content and valuable connections at your amazing event without having to worry about logistics, travelling, or even dressing up.
Imagine listening to expert panels, engaging in live discussions, networking with like-minded individuals and creating genuine connections without geographical restrictions—from the convenience of your own office.
Unlike other online events, Hopin attendees have the freedom to explore different rooms – much like how one can freely move about in a physical event.
You never have to worry about forgetting someone’s name or contact details after connecting with them. With Hopin, we make following up after an event effortless.
Physical events not only come with cost and inconvenience, but they are also taxing on the environment—we believe that the Hopin can deliver the same (if not greater) value of a physical event without the negative carbon footprint.
Hopin use cases
If you are involved with any of the following, try exploring how you could use Hopin to increase engagement and revenue.
Conferences: Livestream your keynotes and virtualise your breakout sessions, expos, networking on Hopin.
Online communities: Engagement is everything. Help your members interact and connect more deeply using online events.
Nonprofits: It’s difficult to get everyone in the same venue to raise support. With Hopin, now you don’t have to.
Trade shows: Hopin lets you set up an expo center with vendor booths where attendees can enter, interact with a salesperson, and demo a product (and maybe walk away with a discount).
Summits/Forums: Hopin helps you keep the smart content and valuable connections your attendees expect from your events, while leaving behind the logistics and travel.
Startup events: Host fireside chats, product demos and pitches. Get founders and investors in the same room and help pair engineers with marketers to build their ideas.
Online courses: Host live lectures with breakout sessions and one-on-one networking for greater learning, application, and collaboration between your students. Make it free or charge for tickets.
Remote companies: It can be difficult to gather a distributed company altogether. Travel, accommodations, and food are expensive. Hopin removes physical barriers and helps the company feel like family.
Webinars: Webinars tend to be one-sided. Listeners are passively attending. Hopin ups the engagement and creates more meaningful engagement between participants and organisers.
Training seminars: Instead of watching videos, Hopin provides a live collaborative environment for breakout sessions to discuss and practice skills.
Online workshops: Teach a lesson and breakout into groups. Come back together for another lesson, followed by one-on-one meetings.
Facebook/Slack groups: Host a remote meetup on Hopin and help your community get to know each other better and network live face-to-face.