Looking for cofounder in Events Industry
Hello indiehackers!
I came here to look for support / cofounder.
I'm currently a solo founder.
I built Evently.
A marketplace for venues and event services(e.g. catering, emcee, etc). A tool for event organizers and ultimately a social platform where users can discover events, chat with their friends and others.
The idea was inspired by my frustration of not finding interesting events or any event at all in my city. I wondered what makes it hard to organize events and found that organizers today currently use fragmented tools (i.e organizers use facebook / eventbrite for posting events, excel for tracking attendance, facebook, google search or referrals for booking services and websites for venues).
So I built Evently to fix that.
Links:
Website screenshots:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1XKcJRYtlg-un67MW8PepiQM0TLSu4UDY
Website: https://evently.center
Play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ljay_builds.evently
The business model is simple. We can make money once the user numbers grow and more enterprise clients join Evently. We can make money through several channels such as venue commission and vendor service booking fee, sponsored top placements for events, service or venue and ticket sales!.
I’ve worked on Evently for a year now. I worked on it like a full time job at least 6 - 12 hours a day barely skipping a day.
The Vision:
1.Regular users find events to attend locally. A hang out place where users discuss events and attend together.
2.Event organizers big or small uses the platform to complete their event with venue or services. As well as the main place where they can post and manage their event.
3.We become the mainstream app for booking and listing venues for events and finding services to make events more special.
The Stack:
Website - cloudflare for dns, nginx, nodejs, nextjs, react, redux, firebase, running on ubuntu virtual machine. (fully migrated to NextJS)
Android app - react native, firebase and expo.
About me:
I came from a meek background.
1.Havent had one programming job. Only freelance projects.
2. Have 2 discord servers one for startups that also started from here in indiehackers and named indie hackers lol. It has about 800 members now. One server is for virtual assistants with 250+ members.
4.Have joined 3 business incubators this year so far and all are still active.
5.Had applied to YC for the winter batch. Its so scary to film the one minute introduction. I know my chance is slim but its still a chance so I took it.
About the project:
1.2,000 usd in google startup cloud credit.
2.Android app published in play store. The last update was in February. Since last month I have been doing a lot of refactoring and its almost finished.
3.Website developed and ready to scale.
4.I created 2 sitemaps. More than 50,000 urls crawled for cities pages. Optimized for queries such as “Events in x city” but not all was indexed because the site was still down.
5. The registered user count is just in the range of hundreds currently and mostly came from the play store.
What I’m Looking for:
I’m primary looking to fill in the role I’m not actively working on so I can focus on technical and planning aspects of the startup.
I'm also only offering potential equity/partnership as I currently dont have the means to hire.
So here’s the list of what I'm looking for.
- You can grow a business. You understand how the event market works or have a connection to someone already in this space.
- Outreach to event organizers, venue managers/owners or event vendors.
- You're passionate and persistent.
- You understand, were in this together so its crucial for both of us to be comfortable working together.
I’m really excited to make gradual transition from full time coding to partnerships, marketing as what we'll be doing together, lesser coding and more maintenance.
Thank you for reading!
If you’re interested in the startup here are my contacts:
Email: ljay75116@gmail.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louieyutuc
Github: https://github.com/louieyutuc
This is a really interesting idea, especially because the event discovery + organizer side of the market is still quite fragmented. The event population part stood out to me — finding and maintaining a reliable stream of local events is probably one of the biggest challenges for a platform like this.
I’ve been working around the Bangalore event ecosystem, and B2Bangalore is focused specifically on discovering and listing **events happening in Bangalore, including tech, startup, networking, AI, and other events. It might be worth looking at as a reference for how local event discovery can be approached.
The vision of combining event discovery, social interaction, and event services in one platform is definitely interesting. Best of luck with Evently!
Congrats on getting Evently this far solo. The fragmented-tools problem you're describing is real and a good marketplace can genuinely fix it.
One thing worth locking down early if you're mid-migration: your data model for multi-sided listings (venues, vendors, events). We've built a few marketplaces in this space and that's usually where refactors get expensive once organizers and users are both live.
Evently currently combines three hard businesses: local event discovery, organizer software, and a venue/vendor marketplace. I would choose one city and one event category, recruit enough supply to make one booking workflow reliable, and measure completed inquiries or bookings before expanding the social layer. A co-founder will also evaluate the opportunity more clearly if the initial wedge and traction target are specific.
The fragmentation you described across discovery, venue booking, vendors, and event management is a real problem space.
The part I'd be most interested to see is how organizers currently stitch those workflows together in practice, especially once an event moves beyond the initial planning stage.