Creating a Category: Path to Pioneering Event Strategy

While hosting events, including large scale virtual and physical conferences at SaaS Insider, Hari and I felt the tech stack for events outdated and data sync and insight gathering to be time consuming and manual. This has also been the case in enterprise companies that partnered with us, and hence, EventHQ.

Today, I am thrilled to share with the world the news about EventHQ’s pre seed fundraise! Powerhouse Ventures led the $500K round with participation from industry leaders like Vijay Shankar, Karthik Ramamoorthy and Arjun Pillai. 

We are also super happy to announce that the product is open for all, and we are just onboarding our first batch of beta customers!

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If you're curious about our journey, read more about it below:

Looking back, the journey from creating a SaaS community to founding EventHQ seems inevitable. Let me tell you how:

At SaaS Insider, we  primarily use events as a way to combine knowledge sharing and network creation in different geographies, creating 2 physical conferences with 1000 members each, 2 virtual conferences with ~2000 attendees each, 20+ webinars and 30+ meetups in different cities over a span of 2 years.

As we created more and more events, we recognized the challenges faced by event organisers and enterprises, and the lack of data aggregation and defined processes in the industry. No one has solved for event operations and event intelligence before.

Event marketing teams fail to deliver cohesive experiences, streamline processes, and efficient operations due to their reliance on outdated tools. Businesses' reliance on event marketing as a means of revenue generation has brought this issue into full view.

We interacted with hundreds of marketing leaders from different organizations, armed just with our original objective and some preliminary ideas.

Summarising my three years of research on the problems faced by event marketing teams -  

• Better alignment between event marketing and customer facing teams

• Compliance on handling personally identifiable information (PII), and the delays caused by it

• Optimising event strategy during budget cuts

• Lack of RoI on events to report back to their companies 

If you can’t measure it, you can't improve it, said Lord Kelvin. And those are the problems I want to solve for event marketing!

The first step towards developing the solution was to chart out all the steps as a template. We did so by helping enterprises run their conferences and the super awesome leadership team we have helped us at every step of the process. 

Turns out, 80% running of any event is the same and can be automated. The rest of 20% is to be worked on case-by-case basis. This 20% also constituted the agenda and its related items which are unique to every company. Each part of the solution fit perfectly with each other - as though we were solving a puzzle. 

Introducing EventHQ:

We started our journey with EventHQ at the perfect time and place to use our knowledge on running events to help us build our product. But we also want to think outside the box and find new ways to unlock event strategy for revenue generation.

Soon, the next step started becoming much clearer:

• build integrations to bring all event data to one place

• derive insights from the data gathered and create reports

• Model scenarios based on past event reports for future events

Ananda Narasimhan, Associate Director, Marketing Operations, CleverTap

Doing so, streamlines the event planning process. By centralizing all event data, we can eliminate the need for manual data entry and ensure accuracy in our reports. Additionally, this integration will allow us to easily analyze and compare data from different events, enabling us to identify trends and make informed decisions for future events. 

What does this mean for the future of event strategy?

EventHQ is reimagining, from first principles, how event marketing should work in any business. We believe that our approach will be the default expectation of a marketing team over the coming years, and the current manual approach and fragmented systems will be automated and connected together with event operations focused tools built first for businesses and not just for event organisers.

Take EventOps from a reactive to proactive approach

We want to innovate and take event marketing, a function that has always been reactive. We are committed to giving the best data backed decision to marketers and we believe the next step after making event intelligence real time from the current reactive approach is to create a predictive model to support their planning and strategy.

The pre-seed funding from Powerhouse ventures was key to taking EventHQ from concept to a closed beta. Thanks to Sri and Kshitij for believing in us to make EventHQ a reality! With the investment from Powerhouse, EventHQ has expanded the team and moved the product from a MVP to a beta. 

We're thrilled to be where we are now and can't wait to share more product updates with you in the coming weeks and months. We wouldn't have gotten this far without the help of people who believed in us and our vision - the investors who bet on us, the advisors who provided valuable feedback, the early adopters who helped shape the first version of our product, and, of course, our employees who worked tirelessly for months to make this launch a reality.

If I have to be candid, we believe EventHQ is one small step in marketing, but a giant leap for event strategy.