DoAttend: A One Stop Solution for Event Managers Date:   Monday , February 07, 2011 How did you come up with this concept? DoAttend is an online event registration platform that allows any event manager to go online, create his own event page, set up ticketing and invite people to buy tickets for the events. Based on This is based on the SaaS model. This helps the event managers a lot as they need to pay us only when they want to sell their tickets online, so if they are doing a free event then the product is also free. This product is also sold across the world. Though for majority of our products, the foreign market is fairly large since it pickups faster than the domestic market; this particular product did very well in India. We have customers like NASSCOM, Python and many more who are using this it. DoAttend has got a lot of traction in India and it has given us more visibility in the technology product market. How do you compete with other contenders in the events field? There are very few players in this field. What sets us apart from the competitors is the product’s interface and ease of use. That helped us to manage and bring in big customers like NASSCOM who do really large events. We are very strong with user interfaces and making a product clean and easy to use. If you look at the website of the product or any event page for that matter you will immediately see the difference compared to a competitor’s site. Are you building up mobile interface for your consumer end? Right now we support iPhone and iPad, where one can go through the browser, type the same url and you will have a iPhone and iPad ready version available. We are the first in the industry to go to this end to make the attendee process available on multiple devices. What is the revenue model? When an attendee visits the site of a particular event, he makes the payment, this payment comes to us, we deduct our fee, and transfer the monthly payout to the event manager. We charges 4.9 percentage plus Rs 15 per attendee. To keep the transactions clear, we generate monthly statements for our customers. How do you manage foreign customer traction and marketing with the only office based out of Chennai? Internet, relying on Google Adwords, and other PC advertising platforms, but our main advertisement is through word of mouth. We get a lot of references from our existing customers and that is how our business has grown through the last several years. At one point we even brought down our advertising budget to zero and still managed to sell. In the U.S. we started with a very aggressive advertisement plan and from there on word of mouth has got us most of our customers. What are the challenges that you faced as an entrepreneur? What is the road ahead? Today it is acceptable that I work for a startup, unlike the scenario when I started. Back then, I really had a tough time hiring people. Services market was very enticing because of the salaries offered by the big five companies. Freshers too were hesitant to join a startup. So hiring was a big challenge despite being selective about who we hire. We still are a small company with just 10 people. By February three more will join us. We want to be small that is when we all can be really effective. The expansion we want to do is more on the sales and marketing side. We already have the products and we need to continue getting more customers.