rel events final

Advanced Entrepreneurship

Berkeley-Columbia XMBA296T

Lessons Learned(The hard way!)

Social planning tool, with a recommendation engine to personalize the experience, providing discounts and targeted group deals as the primary revenue model

Simple way to find things to do, that cuts through the clutter of existing event websites/competitors

Opportunity: $800 million target market, based on a Groupon-like group-deal model for the events space

RelEvents – or was it IntellEvents?

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Nathan BlumbergPrincipal Internal Auditor, LSI Corporation

Role: Finance and Auditing

Ranjit JoseDirector, Global Product & Solutions Marketing, Model N

Role: Sales and Marketing

Spencer LooneyPresident, Grove Land

Role: Event Production & Strategy

Praveen Rutnam Group Product Planner, Microsoft Corporation

Role: Product Management - TV and Gaming Industry

RelEvents - TeamMentorsSumeet Jain Partner, CMEA Capital

Pete VlastelicaFounder, Yardbarker

Canvas V1

Software development and maintenanceAdvertising Support

From businesses providing experiences: targeted group advertisingFrom Internet Users; Free/Freemium

Key Activities

Revenue Streams

Cost Structure

ChannelsKey Resources

Key Partners Value Proposition

Customer Relationships

Customer Segments

- Facebook, Google+, Linkedin

- Data Acquisition (info on events)

- Software engineering

- Active social networkers

- Advertisers- Businesses

providing experiences (promoters, venue owners, community orgs

- Premium conferences, corporate events, small businesses, universities

- Mass market and Internet Users

• Social plan options tailored to your preferences and past behavior

• Leverage social network preferences

• Targeted advertising to organically create groups - Facebook,

Google+, Linkedin

- Data on events

Automated services and communities

What we learned from end users: Validated consumer value

prop of initial idea w/ 24 of 25 consumers interviewed saying they were interested in our proposed offering

Advanced discovery of events was the greatest pain point

Interest was split among large ticketed events (i.e. concerts) and smaller local events

Users preferred to get personalized event recommendations via email (vs. going to a website)

What we did: Talked to 25 potential end users and 2 event organizers (potential advertisers)

What we learned from event organizers:

Local event organizers need efficient ways to raise awareness & fill excess capacity

It difficult to know how much they spend on user acquisition, they don’t track it well and are not willing to share

Daily group deals not appropriate for event market because of limited frequency

Group deals are geared towards customer acquisition for lifetime value

We received 139 responses What we learned:

Print media plays a more significant role in local event discovery (vs. large ticketed events and business events)

Greatest interest in our service was around local events

Parents emerged as a potential archetype“; 69% of people who answered they’d “very likely” be interested in our service were married with kids, (vs. 40% overall)

We tried to use Facebook ads and a $25 gift card to generate more responses While we received 20K impressions this

translated into only 6 clicks and

ZERO completed surveys (over 1 week)

What we did: Based on our interviews we published an end user survey

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1

2

2

What we learned from some of them:Sonic Living

Referral revenues from concert ticket sales do not provide sufficient revenue to be a scalable startup even at scale

Lucky CalSimilar to sonic living focused on larger ticketed

events (i.e. concerts) and concluded there is not sufficient revenues from an affiliate model

TriporatiImportance of defining an event taxonomy for use in

the personalized recommendations.

What we did: Talked to competitors and other companies to learn from them

Canvas V2


Advertising and paid resultsLead GenerationMarketing DataSelling empty seats or ticket sale revenue sharePersonalized marketing data

Key Activities

Revenue Streams

Cost Structure




Customer Segments

-Ticketmaster and other ticket sellers- Spotify, Last.fm,

Pandora, iTunes- Yelp

- Data Acquisition (info on events from producers/users)


- Businesses providing experiences (promoters, venue owners, community orgs

- Marketing Firms/Data Users

- 18-44 Y/O Internet Users

- Parents looking for family activities

Users:• Most

comprehensive list of events tailored to you

• Don’t miss anything you’re interested in

• Simple (cut through clutter)

• Status (super users)

Businesses:- Provide social

graph intelligence to advertisers/Targeted Ads

- Lead Generation- Excess event

capacity clearing

- E-mail driven web interface

- Web- Mobile Apps

(low priority feature only)

- Scrapable data on events (only for kick-off)

- Existing user base of other services

Users: • Automated services and communitiesBusinesses:• Advertising and promotion support

We started working with the various potential Revenue ModelsTargeted and General

AdvertisingExcess capacity fulfillmentLead GenerationSelling demographic data

Tried to connect with business users who could help validate the millions they were going to pay us

But….

What we did

Tough to connect with & extract info from these event organizers/business users

So – it was time to seek help from our mentors and the teaching team

What we learned

The mentors/ teaching team’s advice was to focus on usersCould we get them?Will they interact

regularly?Will they share with

friends?Will they attend events

we suggest?Validating this meant

going full force on building out our user- focused Minimum Viable Product

What else we learned …

So, the MVP, went from this…

To this…. (dynamically generated event page unique to each user)

And this…. (page to capture user preference for Fairs and Festivals when they register)

We started too broad We started with all types of events – and then decided to focus on Fairs and

Festivals for San Francisco Parents are not our target customer

The users who signed up through our Ad-Words campaign tended to be interested in more of the singles and couples events

Acquiring users solely through advertising is expensive!!! ($10/user acquisition cost) Viral user acquisition is key

User Engagement of 60% might actually be too good to be true Developer might have been testing Facebook share functionality

Solid technical talent that can conceptualize the business goals & communicate well is CRITICAL! (Who would have thought?)

Without a Data Strategy, we are dead in the water Scraping data at scale difficult due to data inconsistencies Challenges in locating data sources to expand geographically

And this is what we found

Canvas V3


Advertising and paid resultsLead GenerationMarketing DataSelling empty seats or ticket sale revenue sharePersonalized marketing data

Key Activities

Revenue Streams

Cost Structure




Customer Segments

- Public specialists (Crowdsourced)

- Ticketmaster and other ticket sellers

- Data Acquisition (info on events from producers & users)


- Businesses providing experiences (promoters, venue owners, community orgs

- Marketing Firms/Data Users

- 18-44 Y/O Internet Users

- Parents looking for family activities

Users:‐ Most

comprehensive list of events tailored to you

‐ Don’t miss anything you’re interested in

‐ Simple (cut through clutter)

‐ Status (super users)

Businesses:- Provide social

graph intelligence to advertisers/Targeted Ads

- Lead Generation- Excess event

capacity clearing

- E-mail driven web interface

- Web- Mobile Apps

(low priority feature only)

- Existing user base of other services

- Public/ crowd sourced experts

- Viral introduction to site/service through event sharing

Users: ‐ Automated services and communities‐Businesses:‐ Advertising and promotion support

We made it part of the way…We have customers~40 customers in our small selected market & limited set of events

We have a (feature reduced) productWe provided our scrappy, hacked together, product - surprised that we were serving customers

Virality is our next major hurdle and biggest concern:

•Reduction of Customer Acquisition CostsViral customer acquisition absolutely crucial to the model, and we were unable to prove or disprove our mechanism – will shortly

•Brings scale appropriate for the revenue models

In the process – we took away a lot

We have to do what, Steve?

…It was a lot of getting out of the building

Looking back -(this is supposed to be happy)

Team Dynamics• Difficult to organize team quickly and effectively• Class (group) vs. Real Startup (leader driven)• Our team was dysfunctional – operational and time constrains compounded issues•Alignment of goals on team

Local vs. International Talent• Our technical skill set was lacking – turned to outsourcing to India• Cheap but more management than expected, especially with the time differences• Inability to experiment rapidly• Would have been worth the upfront investment finding quality talent

Feedback• Unexpectedly easy to obtain: Interviews, surveys, competitors, partners, advisors• We had trouble deciding when to listen and when to ignore what we were seeing/hearing•Real validation & tracking more useful and we learned to build it into the product

In the process – we took away a lot

User Acquisition• Paying for traffic is easy, but not sustainable at $5 to $10 per user • Adwords/Facebook– only good for kicking things off and testing hypotheses• Need a proven mechanism for adoption• Crafty but time consuming ways of driving traffic – craigslist spam, Twitter, Facebook groups

Multi-Sided Network• More difficult to validate, craft a viable business model, and decide where to focus first• We spent a lot of time figuring out where to focus next… Thank you advisors

Validate then Pivot or Move Forward?• We struggled when and why a pivot might be warranted• Setting targets up front saved us time and pain, but we got smarter -eventually

And now?

Viral & Social Sharing

Crowdsourced Data Acquisition

Revenue Model Validation

Reduction of Risk With Next Steps

Even though our execution fell behind… we are testing the viral component next week – since it is a vital component to our model, if we don’t get 10% of users sharing recommended events with friends (or if we have unexpected results with user engagement), we pivot / quit

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The replacement for the community newspaper event guide – a personalized, simple way to find local events…

Social Planning Tool

Recommendation Engine

Discounts and Targeted Group

Deals

Appendix

Recurring E-mail

Event Listing

Detailed Event Page

Information

Product Refinement & Specs (Web)

• Getting real, useful information from customers is painful – can be misleading• Looking at usage and customer patterns is invaluable– but implementation is critical.

• Event recommendation ratings, user clicks, and social sharing of event information crucial to prove for our model – we’re there but with no conclusion

Appendix 1: Feedback loop invaluable

Appendix 2: Data sourcing

Crowdsourced Event Data

IncentivesVarious Sources of Local Data

Web & E-mail Event Information

Company or Crowdsourced

Quality Control

We Borrowed Without Asking

• Technically challenging given local source differences

• More work than expected in driving quality and relevance from the data

• Still an unknown given our selected feature set was to test our user value proposition• 0

• Product algorithm and event taxonomy needs refinement• Served our needs in the initial stages but likely will not scale to a broader set of events

Beta / Kickoff Final Model

rel events final

Education