Briefly, tell us how your journey took where you are right now
Events always excited me. The possibility to meet new people who can inspire you, that bring you on new ideas and that you can create synergies with, is one of the most valuable forms of interaction.
I started organizing events during my studies and even thought about starting my own event agency at one point. Nevertheless, my partner Nico and I always continued looking for a more scalable solution within the event industry. And this is when we founded evenito, a scalable all-in-one event management software for virtual and hybrid corporate events.
Now 4 years later we have more than 200 corporate clients all over Europe which have organized thousands of events around the globe. We count clients from all different industries and support companies such as Disney, Oracle, Breitling, Swiss Life, DZ Bank, WWF and more.
In our evenito family we currently have 35 people mainly based in London, Hamburg and Zürich.
We are raising our series A round to double our team this year and continue to strengthen our position in Europe.
What was your "aha" moment which led you to create your business?
After creating a basic process to automate guest management for some specific events, we started to realize that many corporates from completely different industries have the exact same challenges and requirements. Our clients range from industries such as automotive, insurance, finance, luxury brands and others. However their main challenges in guest management are mostly the same. This is when we started to understand and further explore the scalability of our solution and fully focused on creating an all-in-one tool that can be used by the client independently.
Why is your business relevant to the issues you have identified?
Hybrid event formats are the future. This is the feedback from thousands of users which are organizing events with our tool. The corporate clients we support, organize an average between 50-300 events per year each, while these events have a wide range of different formats, event process complexity and requirements in design. Nevertheless, the event organizer wants one tool that covers it all. Therefore we built a scalable standard software that covers most of their requirements before, during and after the event for virtual, hybrid and physical event formats. While players such as hopin or zoom are covering the long tail market very well with their one template approach, we fully focus on the corporate clients with higher demands in flexibility and customization.
What has been your biggest lesson learnt from growing your business?
Starting as a two man show, bootstrapping the business and growing organically means you need to find people around you, who you trust, like and that you can convince of your vision. Your team should become your family, as you spend most of your time together. Building a team with people who share the same values, are keen to become the best in what they do and believe in the same vision, is in my opinion the most important task of an entrepreneur.
Believing together in something bigger is key to a sustainable high performance culture. And a high performance culture is key to become the best in what you do. In order to reach that, it is essential to have a clear vision and mission and most importantly communicate it very well and often with the whole team. Communication of your vision is essential to give purpose to everyone's hard work and feeling of accomplishment.
So our biggest lessons learnt are invest in the right people, communicate your vision as much as you can and build a performance culture to become the best together.
Tell me about your customer acquisition systems?
We have a good balance of inbound and outbound driven sales. Around 50% of the leads come through outbound channels and 50% via inbound marketing.
In outbound we focus on B2B sales, picking up the phone and speaking to all the potentials out there which can benefit from our solution. Especially now post COVID with hybrid event formats, many potential customers need support and consulting in how they can cover their new event formats in an optimal way. Therefore a conversation with these high potential customers, which organize more than 50 Events per year is crucial. We further do LinkedIn and Email campaigns and experience very good conversion rates.
On the other hand inbound marketing focuses on google ads and relevant website content. We try to automate most of the process and focus a lot on lead qualification. Spending your time on clients with high potential and automating the smaller ones is crucial.
For us it is key to have a good balance of both, inbound and outbound as different types of customers are reached via each channel.
Thinking about your legacy, how do you want to be remembered?
Business is all about human connections. Our vision is to bring people together who create great things together. From a user/guest but also team perspective. Connecting people who have similar interests, complementary skill sets and network, and on top of that even like each other. We enjoy what we do with people we like, working hard to become the best together and are open to connect more human beings who create even great things, this is what we want to be remembered for.
Source & Partner: Tech Brains Talk ⎪April 2021
Podcast: How can technology save the event industry⎪April 2021
