Every year, a lot of events are held in Nigeria, Africa too. These events range from political to entertainment, religious and corporate. These events need one very important thing, publicity. Now, this is where DoingSoon comes in.
We had a chat with a founder of DoingSoon, Shina Charles Memud, where he shared a lot of insights about the company. What they do currently, how they make money and their goal in the next few years. Well, enjoy.
Pitch to me in just a few sentences.
DoingSoon is a discovery and distribution platform for events, we help event organizers promote their events through multiple channels.
What informed working on this? Did you encounter problems publicizing events before now?
The original idea when DoingSoon started was to make it easy for organizers to create event and accept local payments, unlike requesting for USD which is what they do using Eventbrite or asking attendees to pay into an account after registration. I initially only wanted to integrate payment and bookings together for better management but found out (after research) that there were even bigger problems on how organizers promote their events. All the events I found was (and still) duplicated everywhere online by organizers just to create as much exposure as possible.
That is a lot of work, lots of time and lots of money as well if they are spending on marketing.
So what is your exact model to promoting these events? What platforms do you leverage?
Without revealing much, we are building a distributed commerce. Simply put, distributed commerce means selling tickets to your fans or attendees wherever they are (not relying on driving customers to a ticketing website) by leveraging partnerships for the convenience of consumers. We are currently working with selected platforms (~10 for the start) for our distribution.
Anyone can still book or buy tickets via our platform.
Speaking on how the platform makes money, Shina says that,
“Yes we do charge 10% commission for paid events, paid events are distributed and gets more exposure. Free events gets limited exposure via our distribution channels. Listing events is completely free for all events.”
Lastly, in a few years, how big do you envisage DoingSoon?
We would like to:
Spread across multiple African countries (~5)
Cross one million users
Be able to sell out (at least) thousands of tickets within few days
Create a large pool of partners and integrate into thousands of platforms
Hopefully create more jobs along the way.