Transforming events into Happening Hubs

Vaibhav Jain – Founder & CEO, Hubilo
An engineer by profession but entrepreneur at heart, Vaibhav founded HUBILO, an event facilitating platform that enables the organizers to not only organize a dynamically interactive event but also facilitates easy networking among the attendees. Heading a diligent team of startup enthusiasts, he aims to build a one stop solution for all types of events by transforming them into happening hubs. As an entrepreneur, Vaibhav believes in the importance of fundamentals in business such as giving the customer value, focusing on Design, usability, minimalism and beauty of the product, constantly pursuing the best people with vision, hard work & loyalty to build the best team and helping further the growing Indian Startup Ecosystem.

Here are some more details about his venture.

What is Hubilo. What is the issue that your venture is trying to address and what makes you feel that it is a winning proposition?

Operating in the Event Technology space, Hubilo is a one stop solution for an event organiser’s online management needs for every event. It works as an all-in-one event platform that makes events dynamically interactive and empowers the event organizers to create, promote, manage and analyze a number of events effortlessly.

The problem lies in the way these events are orchestrated. Till date there has not been any advancements made in the technology involved around the whole concept of organizing an event and leveraging the opportunities it creates. It involves a significant amount of TIME in coordinating with multiple vendors to get things done as well as a great deal of MONEY to devise any event.

When it comes to marketing spend, the most recent research says that around 24% of the marketing budget is spent on meetings, events, tradeshows and conferences- BY FAR THE HIGHEST CATEGORY of spend by any marketing category — above digital marketing, above traditional advertising, above content. And we all have our marketing clouds and our sales clouds YET typically most business are still running their event programmes in a fairly disjointed/old/traditional fashion. Almost 80% event processes are handled manually making it impossible for these organizers to gather and manage data.

There are a lot of touchpoints that are created in the journey of an attendee right from coming across the promotional material to the on-site presence. But lack of a proper technology is resulting in Losing opportunities to save and hence losing opportunities to Gain. Thus, these events are not able to prove ROI, hence HUBILO. Hubilo has Automated the entire process — taking over the mundane task that the organizers will be doing manually and allowing the software to do it in an easier and much more efficient way, allowing it to create your event, gather the data, making sure your data is secured, but really helping you save a lot of time and money that is spent across coordinating with multiple vendors.

Through Hubilo, an organizer is able to create his entire event online by just filling in the basic information about the event. Within minutes, automatically an event website is generated, html emailers are created along with a number of social media posts in order to promote the event online and a robust networking platform for the attendees for them to network and make fruitful connections during the event. There are 4 major modules catering to this all-in-one management: Create; Promote; Engage; Analyse. So all of this work that an organizer takes about 2-3 months to complete, is done within minutes on this platform!

By making this entire process of creating, promoting and analysing every event very smooth, it solves the major problems of time management, coordination with multiple vendors, budget constraints, and marketing your event online. The value addition that Hubilo proffers is equivalent to the services offered by 7 vendors.

What were the key factors that led you to take the plunge?
Belonging to a family with a strong business background, I always had the entrepreneurial streak within. Even after qualifying for some of the best B-Schools in India and London, I always wanted to start-up even after completing MBA. And that was the plan until one day I happened to be at an event where I accidentally met one of my seniors from college who had started his own venture a few months back. Being at that event and talking to him incepted both the things- 1. That I was ready to start-up and 2. The idea — Events. Since this event marked such a huge difference in my life, I wanted to dig deeper and explore this space. That’s when Hubilo started to take its shape in my mind.

How did you manage the initial capital?
During an event I came to know about the grooming batch of icreate (International centre for Entrepreneurship and Technology), an incubator where they provide mentorship along with financial support to startups. I applied for it, went through a grooming program of 6 weeks and got the initial capital to build the Beta version of the product and validate the idea.

What were the initial days like?

Team Building: It was one of the crucial task in the beginning that was also a challenging part, to find the CTO who would look after the technical set up. Initially, we had to outsource the product.

Product Development: Validating the idea took a couple of months and the idea took its shape through a thorough on ground application of the beta platform.

Office Space: Being incubated at icreate, there was a lot of energy and sharing of ideas with the fellow entrepreneurs.

Have you managed to raise any funding — angel/seed etc?
Yes, we have recently raised angel round from marquee investors. Having the industry experts from almost every domain; marketing, product development, sales, we wish to scale Hubilo to a global level.

Describe your revenue stream
Revenue Stream:
We have ifferent types of events — sizeable, managed, mega etc. all priced between US$ 500-2000
We also make money by Ticket Commission: 2% per ticket.
We have a Subscription Model for Event organizers: approx US$ 1500 per month
Future Additions to revenue stream is likely to happen through Event Vendor Subscription or Booking a speaker, sponsor, venue or exhibitor etc.​

What is your guiding philosophy when it comes to doing business?
The one thing that we have learnt from our journey so far which has also become one of our guiding philosophies in doing business, is to listen to your user’s needs and cater to them. This has not only helped us retain our clients throughout but has also helped us build our vision of a robust product which will definitely be a one stop solution for every event.

Where do you see yourself 3 years from now?
Catering to all the stakeholders in the event space and creating a global impact in this space. Automating most of the manual processes and communications before, during and after the event.