Events High is a prolific online platform to share events. It’s a one stop place for all the events happening in your city from events to nightlife, from live shows to travel destinations, they have got it all! We got the opportunity to interview Events High co-founder Abhishek Shrivastava , who has managed to inspire startups and entrepreneurs.
Durofy: How would you describe Events High in one sentence?
Events High is an online events & activities marketplace that connects users with their favorite events, and organizers with the right audience.
Durofy: How did the idea strike to curate Events High?
The idea originated a few years back while we were working in WalmartLabs, Bangalore. Having been avid event-goers across many interests, myself being a big fan of technology events especially tech conferences and hackathons, many times it happened that we learnt about an event after it had already occurred. That is when we realized that there was absolutely no place where one could find or discover events based on their interests and location. Yes, there were some players like BookMyShow in the market but they only focused on event ticketing and not user-centric event discovery. It came as a surprise to us that in this modern age where one has access to such extent of global information at their fingertips, it was still so hard to simply find out what’s happening in your neighborhood! The fact that a fundamental problem like events discovery still remained unsolved, seeded the creation of Events High.
Durofy: How is Events High different from its competitors?
Events High is very unique in a lot of ways. Our biggest achievement is that we have built a unique platform which is equally loved by both event goers as well as event organizers while most of our competitors have taken an organizer-centric approach and focused their efforts primarily on building a SAAS product for online ticketing. We, in contrast, not only solve the problem of event discovery for all our users but also provide a seamless way for anyone to publish their events and sell tickets online.
Another thing we do very well is to help acquire visibility among the right audience for our organizers via targeted notifications and personalized recommendations to our users.
The reason our organizers love this about us so much is because elsewhere they only get access to a ticketing platform leaving the rest of the burden in terms of promoting events, reaching the right audience and getting conversions to be shouldered by themselves, which could turn out to be a daunting task for first-time or limited-budget organizers.
At Events High, we have more than 1 Million Monthly Active Users (MAUs), majority being organic, who visit our website and app looking for events and activities around their interests. Not only that but we even have access to what categories our users like and what kind of events they have previously gone to. Based on all this data, we are able to do highly effective targeting via emails, notifications and personalized recommendations to users on behalf of our organizers and help them find the audience they deserve.
Durofy: Who should use Events High?
Everyone should use Events High! From a hard-core marathon-runner to a hard-working employee looking to wind down, from children looking for summer camps or adults looking for parties, from geeks looking for hackathons to health-conscious folks looking for group yoga sessions… we’ve got all of them covered! This is one of the best things I like about Events High – our user base is pretty much everyone living in the four cities we are live in and spans across all age groups, genders or backgrounds.
At the same time, Events High also gives a free platform for anyone to showcase their events and get desired audience. Anyone who wants to host their events whether small or large-scale, can use Events High to quickly promote their event and sell/manage tickets. We have had so many success stories where first-time event organizers were able to get the right visibility among users at Event High which helped them host successful events.
Durofy: What were your biggest challenges while starting for Events High?
I think the biggest challenge so far was pivoting from a purely B2C events-discovery platform to a B2B2C company that also has an organizer-front for hosting events. In the beginning, we designed our product with event-goers as our main focus. We did all we could in terms of crawling events across the internet and categorizing them correctly to make them index-able and visible to our users, all while trying to solve the primary problem of events discovery. But sooner we realized that although users are loving our product, to be able to make revenue and become sustainable as a business, we needed to start ticketing for these events as well. Most users also gave the feedback that they would like to book tickets right where they find the event instead of being redirected somewhere else. That is when we started our whole organizer-focused event ticketing effort, building a full-fledged SAAS platform for DIY (Do-It-Yourself) organizers, starting a sales team to reach out to existing organizers across all categories in all the cities we are live in and have them on-boarded, to mention some.
Durofy: What are your main marketing channels for promoting Events High?
We do very little marketing compared to some big players in the industry and majority (>90%) of our traffic is still organic and has grown mostly via word-of-mouth powered by great customer service, largest inventory of events and delightful interface. On major occasions like New Year’s eve, Holi, etc we do run social media and search campaigns to make sure we make ourselves known to everyone looking for an event.
Durofy: What’s in store for 2017?
A lot. While I cannot reveal everything we have planned, some of the things you can expect will include major new feature additions in our organizer-side DIY platform making it the most advanced yet easiest-to-use platform for managing events in India and a major redesign of our consumer-side web and app fronts to make it more delightful to our growing user-base. We will also be expanding to other cities this year and will be launching some interesting features that will surprise and change the way our users discover events.
Durofy: What were some memorable moments in Events High journey?
From attending customer calls at 2AM in the night to the amazing team-bonding sessions, Events High has been a journey of great memories. Some really special memories for me include the first time we crossed 1000 users concurrently live on the website and the time we hit double the GMV target we predicted for an entire month. These are all baby steps in the making of a great company.
Durofy: What would be your advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?
Having once been in that category, I have 3 major advices:
- If you have the entrepreneurial spirit in you, start as soon as possible. The world is changing very fast and for each day you wait, the opportunity cost of not doing something keeps getting higher and it will bite you later.
- Be willing to leave your comfort zone. I’ve known many people in my life who could never cross from being a wanna-be entrepreneur to an actual one, primarily because they are too used to their current way of life. Yes, your life will change drastically when you become an entrepreneur but what you gain out of it, the success and the learnings, will be something that will stay with you for the rest of your life and will be worth the sacrifice.
- For entrepreneurs, the journey is as important as the destination. Being an entrepreneur is very hard, you’ll have to sacrifice short-term pleasures to follow your long-term dreams. So make sure you have a strong support system in terms of either a dedicated co-founder, your partner, or your family who will support you throughout.
Good luck and may the force be with you!
Click on the link to create your exclusive event: eventshigh.com
