FullEvent is the “Lego” of back-office solutions for event creators. With FullEvent, creators can use one tool to build and manage any event or activity, whether it’s weekly yoga classes, weekend dance festivals, or anything in between. Learn more about their business proposition, growth potential, and their live round on Leapfunder.

1. Hi Ali. Thank you for agreeing to do the interview. Tell us about FullEvent, the idea that got it all started, and the amazing team behind it.

I started my career as an Alzheimer’s researcher. There, I became fascinated by the concept called “Enriched Environments” and all its benefits to human health. These are high-sensory social experiences where you get to meet people, move your body, learn something, or just enjoy a good time. Enriched environments can slow down the aging of our brains, and help combat loneliness and depression. Most importantly, they bring joy into our everyday lives. 

This fascination led to my calling, and I have dedicated almost 20 years to creating “Enriched Environments” for people worldwide. However, working in this industry as a business owner, organizer, artist, volunteer, and consumer, I recognized the true complexity that lies behind creating these events, and I was feeling increasingly frustrated that no software could deal with that complexity. 

With my technical co-founder (who has two decades of back-end engineering experience and over a decade of event experience), I decided to tackle this issue in the way we believe is needed to truly help event creators and event-goers. This is how FullEvent was born.

2. What problems are you trying to solve? What are the benefits of FullEvent?

Community-driven events can be highly complex. They can encompass very different schedule types, with both recurring and one-time events; they require careful design in participant composition (balancing group sizes for sports activities, dance roles, and groups of differing ability levels). All of this complexity can result in much more work and less revenue.

With FullEvent, we’ve joined the API revolution. We’ve pulled every aspect of events (their schedules, bookings, landing page, and more) into separate modules. Then, we give event creators an easy way to link them back together in any way they want, so that they can adapt to any situation they might face. In fact, by providing each element with an API endpoint, we have already set the groundwork to tap into Natural Language Processing solutions, in which event creators will only need to describe what they want and FullEvent will build it for them. This means that our clients will be able to not only adapt to any degree of complexity they face but even have AI take care of much of that workload.

3. You have a live round on Leapfunder. What makes it the right tool for your startup, and what do you expect from the round?

Let me first set the stage before answering this question: The reality of most startups is that they build a quick-and-dirty version of their software to test it on the market. The dark side of this approach is that, once the software architecture is established, it’s extremely difficult to change trajectories. The startups end up “building themselves into a corner”, having to create fixes on top of a shaky foundation. Consequently, in the event software industry, there’s no dominant player. Each company has formed itself based on a single underlying schedule type, and you see a proliferation of smaller companies, none of which have managed to solve the industry problems completely and elegantly.

So, because it’s already clear that better event solutions are needed, we’ve bet that the largest long-term challenge for us is not whether or not the market will want our solution but rather how not to get stuck midway through because we started poorly.

This is why we invested €80K of our own money, and almost three years, to build an incredible modular API-driven infrastructure to ensure we can handle the final vision we’ve set for ourselves.

Now that we’ve taken this step and onboarded our first pilot clients, we see Leapfunder as our strategic partner to simplify onboarding our first angel investors.

Although the money is also important, the know-how and access to contacts these investors bring is more important, and with Leapfunder we don’t need to make the financial amount the limiting factor. With a minimum ticket size of only €5K, the primary decision is now: “Do we want to take this journey together”?

4. How much growth potential do you see for FullEvent?

FullEvent is built to unify the fragmented event industry. Of course, we’ve started in a particular niche, with our pilot clients on board, but our software is built from the ground up agnostic to industry. This means that, when we’re ready to expand into other industries, we can make these choices as marketing strategies without any software limitations holding us back.

Already now, FullEvent can handle any language and currency, and most types of underlying event schedules. This means that we have the potential to not only provide a powerful event management back-office tool but also pool these events into a global all-encompassing event marketplace for consumers. At this point, we will have an extreme growth potential. We aspire to do for events what Amazon did for consumer goods, where we provide a powerful marketplace that includes any type of activities and events. We can only get to this point if we first solve the event organizers’ back-end solution and automatically merge their events into a marketplace. 

5. What are your plans for the upcoming months? Tell us about the strategy a startup should take to increase its chances for success.

From working hand-in-hand with our initial pilot clients over the past six months, we have identified the shortest path to a self-service solution – which will allow new clients to simply visit our website, decide if they want to try it out, and purchase FullEvent to use for their event. Working closely with these clients allows us to make sure we fully understand their needs. But at the same time, we make sure that we don’t narrow our scope to only suit their needs.

I believe the best path to success is to work intensively with your clients to find the right balance between building what they need today, while still staying true to your own larger goals and vision – on what you can do for them and many others further down the road.

Thank you for sharing your story, Ali. We wish FullEvent the best of luck.

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