WHAT happens when your business is blown up by Covid? Well, you pivot. Here’s the story of how Delegate (DEL) went from an events marketplace to an event tech platform.
For the last six years, co-founders Melissa Lou and Jacqueline Ye had been diligently building up their startup, Delegate, into a thriving marketplace, matching event vendors and venues with event organisers.
The idea was simple. Users browse the platform for event inspiration, vendor comparison and booking of services. It is free for users and vendors are charged a percentage of the fees for each transaction.
Recognising vendors’ pain points in delivering event services in 2018, it developed Delegate Pro, a productivity tool that helps vendors manage user engagement, sales leads, user reviews. This is provided on a freemium subscription model, so vendors can join for free and upgrade to higher tiers for access to more features.
The business gained traction and the numbers are fairly impressive. Delegate has 150,000 users, 4,000 vendors and 5,000 events have been transacted through the marketplace.
Then came Covid which blew up the physical events business and with it, their marketplace business was badly impacted.
Said Lou, “2020 was a challenging year and it forced us to have more grit and resilience as a company. It has been told that startups go through on average four near-death experiences, 2020 definitely could have been one for us. We had to quickly cut costs, but decided not to lay off anyone.”
From marketplace to software PLAY
Recognising the massive shift to virtual events, they quickly developed Delegate PLAY, a virtual events software for organisers to host large-scale events in an immersive 3D online environment.
“Knowing the needs of event organisers especially during this pandemic, helped us conceive Delegate PLAY. This virtual event software is highly customisable and modular, which organisers can customise to the format and size of their events, be they full scale conferences, small webinars or hybrid events, where online and onsite attendees will have seamless access to the same features.
“Organisers can also customise the specific fields used in attendee matching, to optimise a fruitful attendee networking experience, both online and offline.
“We had to pivot very fast, launched the new Delegate PLAY product quickly then iterated, implementing a new feature every week.”
The fact that they came from the event space gives them an advantage in building the right product for the market, they say. “We know how event organisers think and are customer-focused in product development.
“In building up our tech team of seven, we leveraged events and met our CTO through a tech event! He has since helped us develop the team and build up a solid tech foundation and infrastructure to support the constant iteration of Delegate.”
While transaction fees from vendors have been the bigger revenue driver to date, the duo said that “Delegate PLAY is seeing a lot of interest as event organisers are looking to host more virtual and hybrid events, as (COVID) restrictions will be around for a while”.
Event organisers though are finding it hard to monetise virtual events and Lou said Delegate Play addresses this by not only allowing organisers to earn revenues from attendee sales but “also includes a feature for sponsorship acquisition, to help organisers easily activate an additional revenue stream”.
“The SaaS platform is available by annual subscription or on a per-event basis. There has been overwhelming enquiries for demos as hybrid events are here to stay. We are on track to host more than 250 virtual conferences for 2021.”
Creating their own online wedding and lunar new year events
Beyond hosting other people’s events, they have also launched their own events – last November, they launched an online wedding festival to enable hotels and wedding venues in Singapore to sell their services to wanna-be-brides and grooms as well as the Lunar New Year Virtual Bazaar.
Said Ye, “the Delegate Virtual Wedding festival is the largest wedding expo ever held in Singapore with 16,000 brides-to-be and engaged couples, 120+ wedding vendors and 800 meetings facilitated for couples and vendors on one platform.
“The Lunar New Year Bazaar was the first of its kind in Singapore and a great way for our merchants to try promoting their products virtually in the 3D immersive environment. 3,000 visitors and 30 vendors interacted and transacted in different halls in a SIMS game-like experience.”
While they have managed to raise US$1.5M so far, they acknowledged that event tech, while currently a hot area for investors, is still not familiar territory to most investors, unlike the sectors of fintech, blockchain or AI.
“It was a challenge to educate investors about the event industry, as well as for us to learn what investments they were interested in, and the metrics they use. What worked well for us is our great team, our relentless belief in the events industry and the growth trajectory for event technology.”
Asked who inspires them most, they cited Naval Ravikant, the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of AngelList. “We like him not only because he is a successful tech investor, but that he leads his life with self-awareness and balance. His sound decision making, integrity and credibility are values that we want to emulate at Delegate.”
How well do they work together and when was the last time they disagreed? “We disagree quite regularly actually, and it is a good thing! Scaling a business together is like a marriage, different opinions enrich intellectual depth and growth. Whenever we diverge in opinions, we remain focused on overall business objectives, and never take things personally or engage in the blame game.”
And despite 2020 being a near-death experience, the duo said they have no regrets at all about launching their own startup. “This has been such a fulfilling six-year journey, and we have barely started!”
