Eventopedia

Plan Your Events with Ease at Eventopedia - "The tripadvisor of the events industry” - Conference News.

SEIS

Location: London, United Kingdom

www.eventopedia.com

Categories: Content & Information Digital B2B

Investment sought:: £127,000

Equity offered:: 6.03%

Funded 18 Mar 2016

Investment amount:: £128,605

Valuation (pre-money):: £1,980,000

Idea

Introduction

Eventopedia is designed to make the corporate meeting and event industry more efficient. We want to become the world's leading event supplier sourcing and information platform. Eventopedia has been described by Conference News as "the Tripadvisor for events community".

Eventopedia was launched in January 2015 and already has 24 leading hotel and venues as paying subscribers.

To support our existing website, we intend to build a native mobile application of the Eventopedia platform with best in breed functionality and user-centred design. This will be useful for event planners on the move and we believe it will enable us to dominate the new markets of Africa and Asia where wireless device usage is far more prevalent than laptop use. We have a joint venture in process to launch Eventopedia in sub-saharan Africa.

Intended impact

Our technology aims to simplify the events planning process and allow people to plan their events with ease. By streamlining the process of searching and finding quality, peer-reviewed venues, we want to save the event planner time and the venue owner receives qualified, validated business leads increasing conversion.

Winner of the Innovation of the Year at the Professional Publishers Association Connect Awards 2015: http://eventopedia.com/blog/eventopedia-wins-in...

We launched in New York in September 2015 at a joint event with the International Special Events Society and we have a volunteer community manager based in NY permanently.

We have a partnership with DoubleDutch Event App Provider which has enabled us to kickstart our mobile app strategy.

We are currently 3rd best ranked globally compared to our competitor set on Alexa.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We have already onboarded over 20 premium subscribers in London, Monaco and New York including JW Marriot, Mandarin Oriental, SBM Monte Carlo, Sanderson Hotel, Cliveden and more. We have gained traction with individual hotels but the major upside is gaining approval on an international scale which has been achieved with market leader Marriott in London and Paris.

Launched in January 2015. We have had fantastic press coverage: http://eventopedia.com/press-coverage/

Winner of the Innovation of the Year at the Professional Publishers Association Connect Awards 2015: http://eventopedia.com/blog/eventopedia-wins-in...

Also shortlisted for 9 events industry awards including the Independent Publishers Awards, Meetings Industry Marketing Awards (MIMA), Event Technology Award for Favourite Technology Supplier. Highly Commended at The Event Awards.

Selected for the Alpha Scheme at Dublin Web Summit 2015.

Monetisation strategy

The Eventopedia platform is a freemium business model. Venues and suppliers can list for free with the option to upgrade to premium features and functionality maximising the marketing possibilities of the global platform. Subscribers are paying for promotion to an international database of event planners. Prices start from £600 to £1188 a year and in our view there is scale to substantially increase prices in the near future.

Other revenue streams include interactive video production with direct advertising, sponsorship, iPad apps, educational events and industry data insights planned.

Use of proceeds

The capital raised will be used to build the platform community, data collection for the global expansion, create a sales and account admin team, host events and marketing.

Funds will be spent on:

Mobile development and site Improvements
Digital marketing
Live Events
UK Salaries
Data collection team
Working Capital
Interest payments

Market

Target market

Our target customer segments on one side are hotels/venues & event suppliers and on the other side event planners & agencies who book events. We believe the current process method is labour intensive and inefficient, therefore ripe for a disruptive technology.

The major hotel chains have already bought into a similar business model for their bedrooms through Tripadvisor and they have shown significant interest in our business model for their increasingly valuable event spaces because it saves them cost and drives efficiency.

We are currently covering London, Monte Carlo, Dubai and New York with Las Vegas, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco and LA next on the radar. Joint ventures with local experts are planned for sub saharan Africa and France. Penetration into Asia and Africa through the mobile app is expected in 2016.

Characteristics of target market

The UK events industry worth £58.4 billion to the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP). More than 1.3m meetings were held in the UK in 2011, attended by 116m people who spent almost £40 billion.

The US meetings and events industry generates almost $1 trillion a year. The industry’s direct $263 billion (£170 billion) contribution to the U.S. GDP is greater than the amount generated by auto manufacturing ($78 billion).

In 2012, the estimated total global addressable market size for event technology was $28bn with a 4 year projected compound growth rate of 3.3% (Frost & Sullivan 08/11/13). It is a highly fragmented market comprised of over 300 companies in the US alone. The largest players in market have no more than a 15%-20% market share.

According to Gartner Insights, digital business is driving 'big change'. The current leaders in a given industry will not necessarily remain there. They need to identify potential disruptors and stay ahead of the game.

Marketing strategy

The two founders have 30 years experience in the market already with a great variety of contacts from all sides including the media. We are on boarding clients directly from our network and will be supplementing this with targeted marketing and events.

In November 2015 we had 6,000 unique users visiting our site and we have currently over 3800 twitter followers. In the first 14 days of January 2016, 33% of our traffic is coming from the USA.

We are supported by a high profile group of event & communications professionals. We have partnered with global event tech company DoubleDutch who have raised $78m in the past 3 years and have a relationship with Eventbrite that have over 200,000 twitter followers. We run our own live event brands Eventopedia VIP and Discovery. Events held so far include the Mandarin Oriental, Hyde Park, 8 Northumberland Avenue, One Horse Guards Avenue, Westminster Boating Base and 30 Euston Square.

Competition strategy

Similarweb website analysis of Eventopedia against venuedirectory.com (15 Jan 2016):

Global Rank
Worldwide
Eventopedia.com#725,825
Venuedirectory.com#3,029,569

Country Rank
United Kingdom
Eventopedia.com#43,476
Venuedirectory.com#264,285

Category Rank
Business and Industry
Eventopedia.com#89,883
Venuedirectory.com#507,923

Grosvenor House Hotel (part of JW Marriott) on Park Lane thinks Eventopedia delivers the highest ROI compared to other platforms:

http://eventindustrynews.co.uk/event-technology...

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