(Photo: Jamie Nassar, Co-founder and COO; Michael Bleau, Co-founder and CEO)
Last month HelloAdvisr ran a giveaway to help a startup showcase their company at TechDay Los Angeles – the largest one-day startup event in Los Angeles.
One of our winners is Event Hub, a live event management platform looking to offer event organizers with a smarter and more powerful way to manage and execute events. Event Hub was also a past participant of the Techstars Anywhere accelerator program. We had a chance to hear from Michael Bleau, Co-founder and CEO of Event Hub to share a glimpse into this amazing company and team!
Let’s start from the beginning. How did it all start? What was the inspiration for your startup?
My co-founder Jamie Nassar and I spent several years managing brand sponsorships at live events all over the country, from marathon expos to food and beverage festivals, music festivals to parades, and everything in-between. We also spent three years as the organizer for a large charity festival. The combined experiences from both sides of the event organizer and sponsor relationship led us to realize a huge market need for a platform that could solve two major challenges. Event Hub offers a smarter way for sponsors, exhibitors, and vendors to match with the right event opportunities, and provides event organizers with a toolset built from the ground up to streamline the applications, payments, paperwork, and communication that make up an event’s relationship with their non-attendee participants.
What are you most proud of as a company? What sets you apart?
We are extremely proud and excited about being the first of our kind, while providing immense value to our loyal and fast-growing customer base. We set ourselves apart by homing in on the sponsorship challenge for organizers of consumer events, versus other event software companies that either serve niche verticals or focus primarily on attendee ticketing. We have built a platform capable of realizing the multi-billion-dollar opportunity that is the consumer event software industry, with software that makes event operations exponentially more efficient, giving organizers more bandwidth to close new sponsorship deals that our marketplace helps to create. Even more exciting is that we already have the data proving our model works, as our marketplace is successfully creating a network effect and driving increased sponsorship revenue across our customers’ events.
What are you trying to achieve at this year’s TechDay LA?
As a recent graduate of Techstars Anywhere 2019, the Event Hub team is excited to put our learnings into practice and rapidly scale up our operations. Growing our network within the Los Angeles startup community by meeting the right potential future investors and top local talent is paramount to achieving our ambition to quickly grow into a live event industry powerhouse.
What’s next for your company?
We are closing in fast on our 100th customer organization. Our customers, such as the Conqur Endurance Group (Los Angeles Marathon), California Wine Festival and Jive Live Entertainment in-town, combine to produce more than 300 events across the US and Canada, while our marketplace is populated by more than 10,000 sponsors, exhibitors and vendors. We are also hard at work on solidifying key partnerships with select established industry players, and event production companies with national portfolios that we hope to announce in the near future.
Last question! From the lessons learned and successes won, what is one piece of advice you can share with aspiring founders and entrepreneurs about building a startup?
I would say that as you get excited about bringing your idea to life, your focus and communication will be major keys to success. As a dreamer betting on themselves against the odds, you need to be able to focus on the one or two things that you should be prioritizing most, versus all of the directions you could go in. Once you understand what to focus on, communicating that plan to your team will be critical for execution.
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