Company name: Eventbree
Founder: Tommie Edwards
Sum up the business: Eventbree is an EventTech startup connecting event organisers to suppliers who can cater to their event.
What is the business?
Through Eventbree’s mobile app which is available on both iOS App Store and Google Play Store, users can shop for event service providers to cater for any event imaginable.
The marketplace allows users to search for event suppliers, Compare their prices, view their availability, read the reviews from other users and book instantly on the app.
The business model focuses on promoting and advertising services of Eventbree Partners for free through our various promotional channels. However, charging a commision on every service bundle sold on the app.
This model provides immediate value to our supply partners and excellent customer experience for our customers who can now save time and money while shopping for event service providers.
What are your plans for growth?
We have substantial growth plans for the business. Growing our supply partners in the London area, scaling to other territories within the UK and gaining entrance into some major cities outside the UK.
Continually improving our offerings to our customers by introducing new features that take advantage of Artificial Intelligence to enhance the way our customers plan their events.
Launching EventbreeTV – a digital channel on YouTube and IGTV – in August 2018 as a marketing channel to promote the services of our supply partners. The programme on EventbreeTV will include – The Eventbree Show, Event Insider and Eventbree Trends. These programmes will be focusing on educating our viewers, providing them with inspiration and ideas, while promoting the services of Eventbree Partners.
What are the challenges you have had?
There is no doubt that every successful start-up faced its fair share of challenges and we are not anyway different.
In the beginning, it was difficult to understand what each customer persona wanted from their event services marketplace. We had some customer group who resisted change and wanted to stick to requesting quotes; while others could not understand why anyone would want to receive numerous quote. Then came the challenge of building the right team who understands our vision, understand the importance of Eventbree existing to the world and are creative enough to share this view with us.
Our concept of bundles also made it incredibly difficult for suppliers to understand. We had to come up with innovative ways of showing them how easy this can be for them in the long run.
Also considering we are a marketplace, the chicken or egg problem is bound to happen. The question was, how do we attract suppliers without already having clients to buy their product or how do we attract customers without a product or service to purchase. We decided to introduce Eventbree Trends, which offered value to both event organisers and suppliers. By doing this, we got both sides engaged and interested in what we had to offer. We also utilised our social media platforms mainly targetted at event organisers and built over the fanbase quickly.
What advice would you give?
For entrepreneurs out there with great ideas, get your ideas in front of people as quickly as possible and never wait for your thoughts to be entirely formed before pushing it out. I once heard from one of my mentors that if you look back at the first version of your product and you love it, that means you came into the market too late. I remembered seeing the first versions of Facebook, Youtube and Uber. It was funny to imagine companies with platforms that looked like that, in the beginning, could end up being multi-billion dollar companies.
The truth is you will learn a lot more about your product and how it can be shaped, or if you need to pivot, from frequent users than you will from just your team. Customer feedback received help shaped the companies we admire today along with the creative minds they attract.
So my advice would be, build your proof of concept or MVP with as little money as possible, focus on the core benefits to your end user and leave the fancy UI stuff till later. As the famous saying by Steve Jobs, ” some people think design means how it looks but of course if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works”. Business owners must learn to focus more on the actual concept of their offering. Identify the core benefit of your offering to your targeted audience and focus on building it piece by piece.
