Nigerian startup DoingSoon has launched its event discovery and ticketing platform, aimed at helping organisers to promote their events without spending money on marketing or wasting unnecessary time on social media.
DoingSoon went live with its minimum viable product (MVP) last month, a distribution system that allows it to distribute events created on its platform through various channels to automatically create exposure for events, help organisers reach large audiences and allow Nigerians to discover events online.
“All over the world, event organisers have always struggled with finding attendees for their events. It is costly, time consuming and sometimes difficult to find the right tool to manage their events,” co-founder Shina Memud told Disrupt Africa.
“Take Eventbrite has an example. They don’t accept local currency for events created for Nigeria, which forces the organisers to request for bank transfers or link to external payment options like Paystack. Using external payment options creates the additional problem of managing payments and attendees separately.”
DoingSoon claims to allow organisers to reach millions of Nigerian with zero marketing costs, request custom information for event registrations, create complex ticket pricing, and manage their bookings and tickets with a simple-to-use dashboard.
“Our business model is quite simple and straightforward. We charge 10 per cent from every successful transaction. We pay out to our organisers the same day the event ends, mainly to protect our users from any fraudulent or cancelled events,” Memud said.
Currently DoingSoon allows free event listing, but it will be launching paid events this month.
“So far, we have hosted 15 events, and more have been added for 2018 from over 100 organisers. This will surely grow as we are working extensively on marketing,” Memud said. “Considering the problem we are trying to solve is universal, we do plan to expand to other countries in the near future, most likely starting from 2019.”
