hobbiespot, key component in the emerging market of experiences

When people go to a Starbucks, they don’t do it looking for the best coffee, they do it looking for the best coffee drinking experience. Eventbrite’s debut on the Wall Street Stock Exchange at the end of last year only reinforces the idea that we are facing a total paradigm shift: the new generations — Millenial and Z — prefer the how over the what.

The mainstream media have described the growing importance of the economics of experiences. Large companies and corporations are aware of the importance of offering the customer something more than just a product or service. They no longer want to have, they want to live. They want to feel. Some, such as Banco Santander, are beginning to try to meet this demand. What the big groups still don’t know is how to communicate these experiences and make them reach the final consumer. This is where hobbiespot comes into play.

This startup, founded by Roberto Salcines, is the gear that connects the demand for experiences by the customer with the offering of experience by corporations and companies. hobbiespot integrates all the supply of experiences created by corporations (B2C model) and users (C2C model of collaborative economy, along the lines of Uber, Cabify or Wallapop, among others) and by hobbiespot itself.

In 2016, hobbiespot was selected by MassGlobal Partners on the basis of the partnership between the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), which led to a stay in Boston at CIC Cambridge between September 2018 and March 2019.

There, in addition to receiving mentoring from professionals with extensive experience, hobbiespot was able to create communities in the main universities in the area (Babson College, Boston University and Harvard University), being present by means of events and experiences on the campuses with the students. This helped to validate the business model that since then has continued to be refined with the integration of new technologies.

In February 2019, during the Mobile World Congress (MWC), hobbiespot reached an agreement to integrate third-party solutions into its app, with the North American companies Agora and Banuba, improving the functionality of video calls and augmented reality.

hobbiespot is advised by two heavyweights in the startup ecosystem, Rubén Mancha, a professor at Babson College (Boston) specializing in Information Systems, and Gary Leopold, an expert in travel and tourism marketing (his resumé includes American Express, Walt Disney Company and UNESCO, among others) and co-founder of Venturism, a prestigious startup incubator. Thanks to this mentoring, hobbiespot has participated in several startup competitions, finishing as a finalist in the last B-Travel Competition 2019.

Today, hobbiespot continues to grow its user base in free time communities. The revenue sources of its business model are based, first, on the licensing of its technology for corporations and companies, particularly in the hotel and financial field, with views on fashion and gastronomy. hobbiespot provides corporations with a simple tool that can be integrated into their own platforms, allowing them operational and technical scalability. Through this tool, they can create their own events and experiences, in addition to having access to the global event database of hobbiespot to complete the offer to their community of users.

The business model is completed with the collection of a commission for each ticket sold for an event, be it created by the users themselves and/or a company.

At the same time, hobbiespot reinforces its commitment with the creation of its own events, either on a small scale through its ambassador program (rewarding users who create more plans for the community) or on an international level by organizing larger events, such as the upcoming Experience Builders which will be held in Bilbao on 12th and 13th of September 2019. Another demonstration that, in the race to enter the experiences market, hobbiespot has taken the initiative, aspiring to occupy its own space in the current architecture of social applications.