Opportunity in Crisis: Online Event Startups Take Off During Pandemic

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The events sector was immediately struck by the novel coronavirus pandemic. In March, the authorities’ recommendation to avoid crowds prevented concerts, lectures and scheduled business trade shows. According to a survey by SEBRAE (Service of Support for Micro and Small Enterprises), 98 percent of the sector was already paralyzed in April. In this difficult scenario, a few startups with innovative solutions have achieved good results.

One of them was Congresse.me, founded in December 2018 by partners Luiz Gustavo Borges, Guilherme Torrejon, Dérick Pimenta and Maráia Rodrigues. The company developed a tool for the production of fully online conferences. Its platform enables the organizers to do everything from the event launch, with pictures of speakers and schedule, to video presentations and issuing certificates.

The vast majority of events held by the startup are free. The company’s strategy is to attract as many participants as possible and then sell them certificates and other courses. Under this model, organizations and companies that organize conferences are not required to pay for using the platform, but have to share the proceeds from the event with Congresse.me. For smaller events, clients may pay a fixed amount to use the tool.

The startup business model proved to be a success during the pandemic. The monthly turnover, which was R$80,000 in March, hiked to R$700,000 in June. This success led Gávea Angels and Investidores.vc funds to invest R$1,1 million in the company last month.

With this investment, the startup is expanding its team, which consisted of six people before the pandemic, adding over 15 new positions. The staff reinforcement aims to expand the company’s capacity to hold events – the company’s goal is to hold 220 conferences this year, nearly nine times more than the 25 held in 2019. “We want to start 2021 as a strong player, with infrastructure for online courses and streaming soccer games. We have started talks in this respect with a number of clubs,” says CEO Luiz Gustavo Borges.

Global platform

Another Brazilian startup that took off with the pandemic was InEvent. Unlike Congresse.me, the company was not created for online events. The startup was founded seven years ago by engineers Mauricio Giordano, Vinicius Figueredo Neris and Pedro Góes, to help large companies organize on-site events with a management software. Among its clients are companies such as Santander, Coca-Cola, EMBRAER and Amazon.

The business was born in the hallways of the University of São Paulo (USP) campus in São Carlos. From there, the three partners began to attract clients from all over the state, moved to the capital and began to serve the whole of Brazil. The business gradually expanded until, in 2018, the company decided to target the international market, opening two offices in the United States, one in New York and the other in Atlanta. In 2019, the company was selected for the Y Combinator acceleration program, one of the most disputed accelerators in the United States.

The success that seemed to be in an unstoppable crescendo was interrupted by the pandemic. When the first countries decreed quarantine to prevent the spread of covid-19, InEvent lost 98 percent of its revenue. The solution found by the company to survive during the crisis was to launch software for online events. “We were developing a product for this purpose. With the crisis, we anticipated its launching”, says Pedro Góes, the startup’s founder and CEO.

Currently, the product is used by companies in 184 countries, the startup’s main markets today are the United States, Canada and Europe. Unlike a conference by Zoom or Google Meet, InEvent’s product allows replicating the logic of a face-to-face event, with simultaneous lectures and private rooms where people can socialize and do business.

To use the software, customer companies need to pay an annual subscription, with the price based on the number of participants in each of the events held per year. If the contract exceeds the previously agreed number, companies can purchase more licenses. The initial cost is US$1,800, but may reach hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the size and periodicity of events.

With the new platform, the startup has grown from three to four times a month compared to the pre-pandemic period. “We’ve never seen such growth in our seven-year history,” says Góes. To meet the demand, the company has doubled the size of its team, to 50 employees, and plans to continue hiring until the end of the year. With customers in different time zones, it needs to have service teams working 24 hours a day.

The company believes that the new reality of online events will not fade with the end of the pandemic. “Even when face-to-face events come back, organizers will want to offer a structure for live streaming, the future will be hybrid,” says co-founder Vinicius Neris. For this reason, the partners are working to maintain the startup as one of the main global event management solutions – whether physical, online or hybrid.

Source: Exame