- The Runway Ventures
- Posts
- 🤯 He Bootstrapped Remo from $0 to 8-Figures & Got Acquired
🤯 He Bootstrapped Remo from $0 to 8-Figures & Got Acquired
Here’s the playbook...
Admond Lee
August 10, 2025
Hey Founders,
👋🏻 Welcome to The Runway Ventures (🎙️Podcast Edition) — where I interview founders and deep dive into their stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their startup journey and mistakes with actionable insights.
Today’s story is about how Hoyin bootstrapped Remo from $0 to 8-Figures & got acquired. Let’s get to it! 🚀
Today at a Glance:
🫡 1 Founder → Hoyin Cheung (Founder of Remo)
⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Assumed COVID Demand = Product-Market Fit
🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Bootstrap your business by default
🔗 The Runway Insights → Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → Enviro bags $5.92M to tackle Southeast Asia’s wastewater challenge
🫡 1 Founder: Hoyin Cheung (Founder of Remo)
🌟 The Highlights
🇺🇸 Founded by Hoyin in September 2018, Remo is an interactive virtual event platform that humanises the online event experience, and brings people together worldwide.
The Problem — 🚶🏻♂️ Virtual events felt lifeless, resulting in poor attendee engagement, no organic interactions, and zero sense of presence or connection.
The Solution — 🥳 Remo is an interactive virtual event platform that replicates the feeling of in-person events.
Attendees could move around a digital venue, sit at virtual tables, and engage in real-time video conversations — just like at a real conference, networking event, or meetup.
Instead of one-way webinars or boring Zoom rooms, Remo creates immersive, human-centred virtual experiences that build real connection.
How Remo looks when hosting virtual events (damn cool!)
🫡 Founder Story
Hoyin started off like a lot of us — doing the corporate dance in tech, banking, and consulting. But he had this itch to build.
His first real break?
An e-commerce business on Amazon he ran for 8 years. That e-commerce hustle taught him marketing, systems, and how to generate cash flow.
After a few more experiments — mobile apps, SEO agency, social media SaaS — he finally built something that exploded: Remo.
 | At first, he launched it as a virtual office product. But in late 2019, the real traction came from the events they hosted to promote it. People were raving about how human the experience felt. 🚀 So Hoyin made the bold pivot — ditched the “virtual office” angle and went all-in on interactive virtual events. |
🙏🏻 In early 2020, however, Remo was still a scrappy underdog and money was tight. Hoyin’s wife was growing anxious — where was this business headed?
In January 2020, she prompted him to set a hard deadline — if Remo didn’t take off by April, Hoyin agreed he’d shut it down and move on.
🌏 Little did they know, the world was about to change.
🤯 In March 2020, COVID-19 hit, and Remo became an overnight rocket ship. Within 10 months, Remo grew 30×, reached 2.2 million users, turned profitable in 4 months, and scaled from 10 to 160 people — all bootstrapped.
Since Remo was already profitable and growing, Hoyin didn’t need VC money to survive, and he preferred to keep control rather than take a misaligned deal. So, He didn’t take a single dollar from VCs, despite getting reached out by them daily.
🔥 Remo’s immersive experience stood out from every other Zoom alternative. And at its peak, it was generating solid 8-figure revenue. It became the go-to virtual event platform during the pandemic.
🌋 The Lowlights
We hit a lot of dead ends… People were not continuing to buy.
But when the world started reopening, things got rough. Post-COVID, in-person events returned, and demand dropped fast. Customers churned. Revenue slowed. Remo’s hypergrowth hit a brick wall.
⚠️ Worse, the team had grown too fast. Hoyin admitted he made bad hiring calls — bringing in a VP of Marketing and a CRO who looked great on paper but weren’t hands-on enough for startup chaos. Culture took a hit. People burned out. Focus slipped.
And with all the demand gone, the cracks showed. Hoyin was suddenly leading a company bloated with roles, chasing too many ideas, and unsure which customers to serve.
🙏🏻 The hardest part? That “near-death” stretch where they didn’t know if the company would survive. Hoyin was back to square one — doing endless customer interviews, staring at churn reports, and waiting for signs of renewal.
This was the toughest moment in Remo’s journey as Hoyin and his team were figuring out how to adapt after the COVID spike and the world was back to normal.
🚀 The Comeback
We needed people who could test, fail, and ship quickly — not optimise processes that didn’t exist yet.
To rebuild, Hoyin went full founder-mode again. He personally spoke to 2–3 customers a day. Pored over usage data. Cut noise. And zoomed in on the few segments that stuck around post-pandemic — like networking events, virtual career fairs, and distributed communities.
🏄🏻♂️ Once they found the sticky use cases, they doubled down hard. Trimmed the product. Refined the UX. Cut everything that didn’t serve those loyal niches. Slowly, Remo stabilised — no longer riding hype waves, but building a real, focused business.
Internally, Hoyin rebuilt the team too — ditching senior “big company” hires for scrappy, hands-on doers.
That renewed clarity led to a strategic move.
🎉 In 2024, Remo was acquired by Events.com, a platform for in-person events. It was the perfect match — Remo had the virtual experience, Events.com had the live-event muscle. Together, they could finally offer hybrid event solutions at scale.
It wasn’t just a financial win — it was a strategic exit after years of scrappiness, resilience, and staying true to the mission: human connection, no matter where you are.
📌 Here’s the TLDR of Remo:
2018 — Hoyin founded Remo in Hong Kong as a virtual office for remote teams.
Sep 2019 — Pivoted to virtual events after realising that’s where users got excited by the virtual events hosted on Remo.
Mar 2020 — 📈 COVID hit. Remo exploded. 30× growth in 10 months. Profitable in 4 months.
By the end of 2020, it had over 2.2 million users globally, a team of 160 (up from 10), and was profitable (achieved in just 4 months).
2021 — 🙅🏻♂️ Rejected VC funding and proudly bootstrapped.
Late 2021 — 📉 Post-COVID slump.
As in-person gatherings resume, virtual event demand dipped.
Churn spiked.
The company had expanded rapidly and now grappled with overcapacity, a few hiring mistakes (e.g. a mis-hired VP of Marketing and CRO), and a need to refocus.
2022 — 😮 Near-death phase.
Hoyin and team conducted extensive customer interviews and analysed usage data to find new product–market fit in the post-pandemic world.
After many trials, they identified a few niche segments (like virtual career fairs, professional networking events, etc.) where Remo provides unique ongoing value.
So they pivoted the product and sales efforts to serve these core use cases, dropping other distractions. Remo stabilised as those niche customers continued using it regularly.
2023 — 🙏🏻 Product and ops streamlined. Sustainable traction resumed.
The pivot worked!
Remo was no longer in hypergrowth, but it had a sustainable business model and a loyal user base.
Oct 2024 — 🎉 Remo was acquired by Events.com to scale hybrid events together.
The acquisition allows Remo’s mission to scale further by combining with in-person event solutions, marking a “dream come true” milestone for Hoyin as a founder.
🎢 Throughout this rollercoaster journey, Hoyin’s journey of building Remo is one of grit, adaptability, and vision.
He went from nearly quitting in early 2020, to steering a rocketship in late 2020, to surviving a crash in 2021, and finally to engineering a comeback that led to a successful exit in 2024.
🫡 Nothing but respect.
Want to learn more about Remo?
⚠️ 2 Mistakes
Mistake 1: Hired “Big Company” Execs too early
They weren’t entrepreneurial. In hypergrowth, you need fighters — not people waiting for decks.
At the peak of Remo’s COVID boom, Hoyin hired a VP of Marketing and a CRO — both with impressive pedigrees. But here’s the catch: they came from larger companies, used to managing systems, not building from scratch.
The result? Slower execution, bloated costs, and frustration. These hires struggled in Remo’s fast-moving, scrappy culture. It wasn’t their fault — it was a misalignment of stage and skillset.
Mistake 2: Assumed COVID Demand = Product-Market Fit
COVID created a fake PMF for us. It wasn’t real — it was forced by circumstance.
🔕 Remo’s 2020 surge was a false positive.
They were still testing use cases — yet they started scaling fast once traffic came in. In hindsight, Hoyin admits they didn’t validate retention or repeat usage enough before pouring resources into scale.
When in-person events returned, churn spiked. Customers saw Remo as a "pandemic band-aid" — not a long-term solution.
And Remo was left with a product optimised for a world that no longer existed.
🧠 3 Lessons Learned
Lesson 1: Bootstrap your business by default
You know what’s underrated in a world obsessed with VC funding?
Bootstrapping.
Not because it’s glamorous. Not because it’s easy.
But because it forces clarity, gives you the maximum control and freedom, and becomes profitable from day 1.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
🤑 Charge early — even if it’s $1
Don’t wait for the perfect product. Find someone with a burning problem and solve it just enough to get paid.
Hoyin tested Remo by hosting real events and charging for them before the product was polished.
In fact, charging customers is the best way to validate your startup idea because people can’t lie with their own money.
I’d highly recommend reading this book (Million Dollar Weekend) — written by Noah Kagan (founder and CEO of AppSumo) — to learn how to validate your startup ideas and charge for money.
🧠 Reinvest revenue, not hype
When your startup finally starts making money, it’s tempting to act like a successful company instead of becoming one. That’s where most founders screw up.
Instead of $5K in Facebook ads, spend $5K building a better onboarding journey, adding success metrics into your dashboard, or creating guided tours.
Hire someone to run ongoing customer interviews or surveys. Incentivise NPS feedback. Use that to fix the product before you build more of it.
Lesson 2: You’ll never lose if you don’t give up
When Remo hit the post-COVID slump, Hoyin didn’t just meditate or “stay positive.” He rolled up his sleeves. He ran 2–3 user interviews daily. He stared at churn data. He killed features. He rebuilt the product based on who was still paying, not who used to.
🫡 That’s real resilience.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
🚦 When you’re lost, find signal from your survivors
Instead of chasing new markets, look at who’s still using your product even when it’s no longer trendy.
These users are your goldmine — they’ll show you the path forward.
🤔 Run 10 in-depth interviews with your most active users this month by asking:
Why are you still using us?
What problem do we solve better than anyone else?
What would you miss if we disappeared?
Lesson 3: Don’t confuse demand spike with product-market fit
The surge in demand wasn’t because Remo had nailed the product. It was because customers had no other choice. The world was on fire. Everyone needed a virtual events solution — any solution.
So Remo scaled. Fast. But without truly understanding who their best-fit customer was, why they stayed, or what pain point they’d still have once offices reopened.
And when the world went back offline?
Churn spiked. Usage dropped. Reality hit.
Customers didn’t stick around — because many never truly needed Remo. They just needed something.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
🏄🏻♂️ Focus on “Pull,” Not Just “Push”
True PMF looks like this:
Users pull your product into their workflow.
They tell others about it without being asked.
They feel pain when it’s taken away.
Remo had strong “push” (COVID urgency), but weak “pull” once the urgency faded.
🚀 Validate PMF with retention, not hype
Don’t rely on usage spikes or short-term urgency as proof of product–market fit.
Instead, track user behaviour over time.
Do they come back after 30, 60, 90 days?
Do they use it even when they don’t have to?
🔗 The Runway Insights
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar
🤝🏻 Before you go: Here are 2 ways I can help you
Founder Office Hours: Book a 1-1 call with me, share your problems and questions, and I'll help you cut through the noise, avoid costly mistakes, and get clear next steps that actually work. I help early-stage founders with:
Validating ideas & building MVPs
Tech & product development
GTM strategy & fundraising
Finding PMF & growth hacks
Growing & monetising newsletters
Attract customers & investors by building a solid founder brand on LinkedIn
Promote your business to 18,000+ founders: Acquire high-value leads and customers for your business by getting your brand in front of highly engaged startup founders and operators in Asia.
💃 Rate Today’s Edition
What'd you think of today's edition?Your feedback helps me create better content for you! |
That’s all for today
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope you’ve learned some actionable tips to build and grow your business.
You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.
See you again next week.
- Admond
Disclaimer: The Runway Ventures content is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed above belong solely to the author.
Reply