The market that 10×'d overnight, then halved.
In 2021 virtual events were the hottest category in SaaS; Hubilo competed with Hopin, Airmeet and Cvent for the same buyers. As founding PM I led the core platform launch and drove it to product-market fit in a hyper-competitive market where every competitor was burning venture capital on the same customers.
Then offices reopened, event budgets moved back to in-person, and the entire category contracted. The platform we'd fought to build PMF for was suddenly fighting a shrinking market.
Follow the retention data into the pivot.
- Read the signal honestly: usage cohorts showed the durable, recurring behavior wasn't mega-events; it was the humble weekly webinar with a revenue target attached.
- Helped lead the pivot to a webinar-first product: repositioning from "virtual event platform" to a pipeline tool for B2B marketers, where engagement and analytics prove ROI.
- Iterated rapidly on engagement and analytics: registration → attendance → pipeline reporting that let marketing leaders defend the spend, which became the product's sharpest differentiator.
- Shipped weekly against incumbents like ON24 and Zoom Webinars, out-executing on product velocity rather than out-spending on marketing.
$900K ARR in under a year, and a second life for the company.
The webinar product scaled to $900K ARR in under twelve months, repositioning Hubilo from a contracting category into a growing one. That product, Webinar+, became the company's core offering and a key reason Brandlive acquired Hubilo in 2025.
Today it lives on as Brandlive Webinar+, and the original events platform I helped take to PMF underpins what Brandlive now sells as Virtual PRO.
Pivots aren't a failure of vision. Watching a team kill its own category darling and ship the unglamorous winner taught me more than any growth quarter did.