23ML — Why we’re quitting the events space

As a bunch of 20–22 year olds working on event tech in India, we at 23ML faced various challenges. Our goal was to build a profitable self-sustaining business by the time we graduated from college. We’re now months away from graduation and the coronavirus pandemic will impact our business in a way we could have never foreseen so we’ve decided to move on to something else.

If you plan to start a technology business in the events space, we hope that this helps you identify a lot of the problems you’ll have to solve to survive and hopefully thrive.

We started 23ML because we had frustrating experiences as attendees at various sorts of events. We wanted to make attending events a more fruitful and efficient experience. The first market we entered was the college fest market in India. We also expanded to the professional conference space. Our observations are based on the product we built and sold — a software suite including an event app that would be used by organizers and attendees on the days of the event.

A lot of these observations below may seem like we’re blaming the market for our failure, but we were happily operating under all these circumstances because most of these are solvable given enough time in the market.

1. Payments: Cash payments are rampant — A lot of events still run solely on cash to avoid paying taxes. Once it is collected — which has to be done physically if you didn’t notice — is hard for us to spend on our business since most of our costs are servers.
2. Budgeting: If you have an original product as we did, they won’t have a line item on their budget for your product. If you offer your product for free, they’re going to say “I’m getting you downloads, give us some money as sponsorship”.
3. Trust: All businesses operate on trust. Trust that vendors will be paid on time. Changing organizers disincentives the building of trust between the different parties that run events — especially in India. Multiple times, organizers negotiated an amount for our product, but never ended up paying it. It is also very hard to enforce contracts in this country.
4. Churn: The events market is unique. One of the only types of businesses that are temporary in every aspect. Changing organizers and event dates across editions drove churn in our business. Doing a SaaS model is possible only with very large organisations that do events regularly. The long tail of smaller events simply do not repeat consistently and changing organizers means that we have to repeat the sales cycle every time this change happens. Point no. 4 kicks in hard here.
5. Deadlines: Product delivery has extremely tight deadlines. Our in-event software had to be deployed latest by the eve of the event. It’s simply useless otherwise. A lot of times this is hard not because the tech is not ready, but because organizers leave their tech setup right till the very end and that gives us virtually no time to test it. The 48 hours before an event were some of the hardest we’ve done in our lives.
6. Operations vs Tech: Something that should be obvious but let us mention it anyway. Most event organizers don’t care about the tech. You can’t expect them to readily understand how your product solves their problems. Solving problems operationally as they occur and preemptively preventing problems are very different paradigms of thinking about event management.
7. Customization: Every event wants to give their attendees a “custom experience” without wanting to invest in it. We ended up building some major customizability into the product but once that was done, we were asked for out of the world functionality like “God Modes” and the like. Without paying extra ofc.
8. Fragmentation: The events market is extremely fragmented. There are at least 20 different types of events, all with different requirements. A one size fits all type of product or service is simply not possible. This made it very hard to commoditize the offering and build a self-sustaining model without compromising on the variety of event types we could support.

Unfortunately, the coronavirus driven changes compelled us to shut this down. We figured that it would take a long time (2 years) for the events industry and its sponsors to recover to the levels before the pandemic. Our entire plan going forward was to monetize by creating additional value for sponsors. This hypothesis stopped making sense overnight as the economy underwent a demand shock.

I mentioned earlier that we wanted to build a profitable self-sustaining business. How far did we come? Pretty far along actually. We built a highly automated, yet customizable product. We also had standard guidelines for most of our operations. We ended up writing off a bunch of our receivables and if not for our collection issues, we’d have been profitable too.

We never raised money externally and kept our costs extremely low by recruiting only such students to our team who primarily wanted to use this as a learning experience. We were able to create a great environment for professional growth which allowed us to attract great teammates. Our core team of 6 consists of some highly talented individuals and I’m personally very proud of having been able to assemble them into one team.

For now, the team will stick together to work on something new. We’re still exploring concepts. If you’re working on an interesting problem, we have a strong team of 3 engineers, 2 designers and a PM/generalist that could consider joining you. We built this completely remotely from our college hostels all across India, so if you’re a student team looking for some tips, we’d be happy to help :)

You can reach me at <firstname>.<lastname>@gmail.com or on Twitter. Read part 2 to understand how we planned to solve the issues mentioned above

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Ken Robinson