Our Founder’s Story
By Andrin Renz, CEO and founder of EventScouts
In early 2020 I founded EventScouts. I had recently finished my stint at Bitcoin Suisse, the popular crypto-finance pioneer from Europe. For people not familiar with the sector, it’s the one that helped facilitate the Ethereum, Bancor and Decentraland ICO’s (ICO = Initial Coin Offerings).
As employee number 7, I witnessed the growth of the startup to a +150 employee robust company worth over several hundred million dollars. It was the journey of my lifetime, and I was a fairly crucial part of it.
My experience at Bitcoin Suisse left me craving for another endeavor. Maybe even a bigger one. And I had just the idea that would help me start it.
The Problem
(If you are a more visual person, I invite you to see this video about us)
During my time in crypto, I made a simple realisation: nearly everything is interdependent and interlinked — things don’t happen in a silo. And data plays the key role in this integration. However, when it comes to data about ‘things to do’, it is surprisingly not only not connected but spread over thousands of different platforms, websites and apps.
But why does it matter when data is not connected? Mainly, it makes it very difficult for users to actually make use of the data. Think about the way you save an activity or an event that you find in a travel blog, in a niche magazine, or just a city event that was announced in a Facebook group.
Other players in the industry can’t really build on top of it, because the data is stored by different centralized companies. There are work-arounds for most of the problems. However, if data for activities & events are stored on separate data-islands we will never be able to unleash its full potential. Blockchains are going to bring those data-islands on the same page. You can read more about what I believe are the challenges and opportunities for blockchains here.
Let me give you a quick and simple example on where we see the real-life problems:
Let’s say you are traveling to London and you want to know what things you can do. You would probably check TripAdvisor, GetYourGuide, and, through Google, a few of the millions of blog posts on the internet. Let’s say you also want to know which events you can attend, such as art exhibitions or a football match, you would need to check other websites. And the restaurants afterwards? Another platform.
Now, think about if you have to switch the city or country. Right? Not fun
Unconnected data
And to be clear, I don’t see the problem being the inconvenience for people to access different platforms, websites and blogs —The current discovery process can be a fairly rewarding experience and will most likely continue and grow in the future across different platforms. The real problem I see is the high inconvenience of the data not being connected. This makes it difficult for people to actually save, organize and make use of the content. And this is where EventScouts wants to jump in.
EventScouts
We created a platform based on two core elements: lists and cards. And we focus on the long-tail of user generated content — please allow me to explain that.
Our lists are the place where everything is saved. What’s everything?
For us, it is events and activities. In short, events have a specific date, such as a concert or a sports event, an art exhibition or temporary pop-up store. Activities are things you can do regardless of a date, such as going to a museum, eating out at a restaurant or bowling.
All of these are created in cards, which can be found in endless lists. An Art Exhibition in Soho can easily be in a ‘Soho for art lovers”, as well as “Things to do in NYC in November” and potentially in hundreds of other lists.
And just like cities change, our lists do too. Every owner of every list can add and remove cards — even if the activity or event was uploaded by someone else. This potentially can create the ‘creator network’ that we envision in which the community can build on top of each other and in which all the data is connected and interlinked. And a great feature is that people can subscribe to them and get notified when a new card has been added. This way, they will not miss out on the things they are interested in.
A second element, which makes me extremely excited to talk about, is the long-tail of user generated content.
As a quick summary it is about opening up the platform for all users to add content and allowing them to subscribe to their niche interests — in our case lists and the content creators that actually create them. Keep an eye for our future articles, as I’ll be writing one about long-tail user generated content.
This ultimately allows people to engage with the world through the things they are most passionate about. And then, what often happens is an internet phenomenon.
As each card can be used by other people for other user-generated lists we are potentially creating a gigantic network for “things to do” or “things that happen”. We call it the EventScouts Network, in which all the cards and lists are interconnected and interlinked — even if they are on different platforms.
And that’s it. The World in Your Lists.
Some people would call it a social-network for “things to do”, where users can subscribe to any list that fits their interests and get a notification whenever a new card is added. Users can walk around with their saved lists of events or activities, near or far, niche or mainstream, always available to check. And that’s just the beginning.
What’s the bigger vision?
As a big believer in decentralisation and Web 3.0, my team and I are working on the tokenomics of EventScouts that will redistribute money from advertising and other income streams back to our content creators”.
I’m confident that through decentralisation, we are not only paving the way for improved data reconciliation across various sectors in the activity and event industry but we are also empowering people by essentially making them true owners of their creations and allowing them to earn money for the high quality lists they create and promote.
Blockchains were not ready for main-stream use in 2017, and I would say blockchains were not even ready for main-stream use in 2020. But I am now more optimistic than ever before to see its power unfold as first end-user applications pop up that actually work smoothly.
As user data and content data is on the blockchain, people will not exclusively be dependent on using EventScouts to access it. We did build the first front-end user interface,but we won’t force users to stick with us forever.
Our future journey
I’m thrilled about the 18 month journey my team and I had so far. From creating a multi cultural team and raising seed funding, to ultimately bringing the first version of our platform live.
I’m excited to see more and more users join EventScouts, and receive their feedback.
If you have comments, opinions or thoughts of how we could make the platform even better, I would love to hear them at andrin.renz@event-scouts.com. I’m also very excited to see the journey EventScouts will take, especially as Web 3.0 surges.
And remember to follow us here and on our other media channels: https://linktr.ee/eventscouts
