Culturio
"Culturio" is a personalised content event platform that helps low-budget event and workshop organisers to scale and sell out their events. We aim to revolutionise the way events are found, advertised and experienced with the help of our self-made enhanced algorithm and more personal approach for each organiser and user.
Kovas Kastanauskas
Erasmus University Rotterdam
International Economics and Business Economics
Over het initiatief / About the initiative
Culturio
In welke fase zit jouw initiatief? / In what stage is your initiative?
Uitgewerkt conceptfase
Heb je jouw initiatief al gevalideerd? / Did you validate your initiative?
We have talked with more than 100 event organisers, have conducted customer survey twice (750+ responses in total) - both initiatives helped us not only validate the idea, but also understand what is the pain exactly. We are also taking part in Erasmus University Challenge and just finished a hackathon back in Lithuania, where observations of 20 highly-skilled mentors helped immensely to validate the idea.
Meer informatie over jouw initiatief / More info about your initiative
Nowadays people have seen it all and it is getting more complex to attract the public’s attention with advertisements and, moreover, to sell out the tickets to one’s event. The event organizers spend around 20% of their budget for event for marketing – to advertise their events on various popular platforms. Sadly, the outcome they get from it, is cleverly compared to spent resources, as according to Google’s Display Network performance data average Click-through-rate% for event industry advertisements vary between 0.1% to 0.5%. Moreover small event organizers are not able to afford advertising through the mainstream ticket providers as it is pricy and they stay unrecognized. We want every event to be sold out and recognized by the people, that long for it.
As mentioned before – the customer is a low-budget event or workshop organizer. Only by creating a pleasant and functional platform for small organizers that specifically solve their pain of not being recognized enough, we would be able to attract them to use our platform and not an alternative such as Instagram or Facebook advertising.
Regarding organizers – they would choose us, at least partially, for event advertising through if the aforemented click-through-rate percentage is better than in the other platforms and the modern dashboard and real-time statistics easens and improves their marketing strategy (we aim for making this platform an integral part for every marketing campaign, so organizers can track and compare all platforms at all times).
On our platform organizers are able to post an event for free, we do this to attract as many events as possible, at least at first. Though, we will monetize the platform through a freemium model. The “newbie program” is an opportunity for organizers to see the list of all event venues in the selected city and possibility to book them without extra hassle, also an event calendar, so they can choose the best time and date for their event, so it does not cross with other, same category events. The pricing model is still in works, but most likely will depend on the amount the people the event is expected to gather. Naturally, we would also get a commission fee from ticket providers if we transfer users to their platform for a ticket purchase (pricing and percentage would be agreed individually with each platform). Lastly – if organizers choose to sell the tickets through us – we would take a percentage of the ticket sale.
Wat is er anders/nieuw aan jouw idee/oplossing t.o.v. bestaande oplossingen? / What is different/new about your idea/solution compared to existing solutions??
Every market obviously has a dominant ticket seller / advertiser, but often they have some flavors. Some platforms tend to have so much going on at one place, that expensive advertises disappear in the middle of all the other content. Others use rather simple recommendation mechanism, while some have absolutely no social aspect at all, disencouraging any more engagement of the user other than seeing the listing and buying the ticket. We believe in a revolutionized way of searching and advertising of events, that not only brings organizers and users closer, but also shows only what is relevant and important. In the submitted pitch deck you can find a simple table showing our direct competitors in Lithuania. Our platform’s approach is more direct, optimized and connecting – resulting in better engagement, advertising and sales.
Wat zijn jouw volgende stappen om het verder te ontwikkelen? / What are your next steps to develop the initiative?
Right now we have a functional MVP website version of our platform, I will be able to show it in person or on a video call. We are still working on some technicalities and design, but the plan for the upcoming months is clear. Right now we need more and more data to train our algorithm model to be even better, so next step would be to launch and scrape as many events as possible to have a huge flow of info all the time. We also need to conquer small organizers to start advertising through us, but that is simply sales. So to simply put it – next steps are to both keep developing the product and selling it to the buyers – that’s how it always goes with tech startups :).
We aim to launch the beta version by the end of this summer and start to set foot to the Lithuanian event industry in the last quarter of this year.
Wat heb je nodig om (nog meer) impact te maken met dit initiatief? / What do you need to make (more) impact with this initiative?
We need mentoring, a lot of it. We also need to understand the market better – so someone from the event industry, an insider, who truly understands the pain of the organizers would be really valuable. Also since we work with a lot of information, a person from a legal services would be great.
Lastly – we need connections and money to scale and for developing.