How many of us have come across the problem “There was a conference/meetup but did not get any reminder for the same … I could have met lot of like-minded folks at the event :)” This problem statement gave birth to a Bengaluru based event discovery platform – EventsHigh
Today we have a chat with one of company’s co-founder Arvind Batra where he talks about EventsHigh, it’s founders, technology & Entrepreneurship. Let’s start our Q&A with Arvind…
Can you give a small background about you, your start-up and it’s founders ?
Nikesh Garera & Arvind Batra are co-founders of EventsHigh. EventsHigh is an event discovery platform that brings all events at one place & helps users to find relevant events based on their interests, location and availability. Nikesh & Arvind have a strong background in machine learning and big data, they were part of the Kosmix team in Bay Area, that was later acquired and became WalmartLabs. They moved to Bengaluru couple of years back and have started EventsHigh recently.
Parag Sarda joined us recently. He brings in solid engineering experience with his previous work at Google, WalmartLabs and Microsoft. You can find more about Nikesh, Arvind & Parag here, here and here.
Every idea is born out of a problem, what was the trigger of starting EventsHigh ?
Nikesh & myself had missed Google I/O back to back which is a flagship Google event and its registrations sell out very fast. We got the seed that it would be nice to have a notification service that will remind users about events based on their interests. We did a hackathon at Techcrunch Disrupt SF to see our enthusiasm and since then we have been thinking about it.
How did your team come up with the name EventsHigh ?
Both Nikesh & myself are part of this group called Runners’ High and we like it. You experience a high after attending a great event, the whole experience stays with you for a long time. We wanted to share that feeling with everyone. Plus the fact that the domain EventsHigh was available 🙂
How does EventsHigh curate the information on various events happening in any city ?
We crawl various sources on the web to extract event data. Some sources such as Facebook and Eventbrite also have APIs that we use for sourcing events.
Currently how many cities in India does EventsHigh cater to ?
We are live in seven cities – Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune and Hyderabad.
Though it is too early to talk about revenue, but how does EH plan to make revenue [Revenue Model of EH] ?
The problem from event organizer’s perspective is how to promote their event. Our revenue streams will be in providing event outreach solutions to event organizers in terms of sponsored listings and advertisements. We will also be working on affiliate partnership with different ticketing sites and take a commission in ticket sales.
How does EventsHigh stack up against BookMyShow, IndianStage in terms of differentiation ?
In a given week, a city like Bengaluru has about 1000 events happening, but sites like BookMyShow or IndianStage cover only, at best, 50 of them. EventsHigh not only has lot more events but with our categorization and semantic technology, users can subscribe to events based on their interests such as hackathons or comedy shows etc. We want to provide ‘relevant’ events to you – based on your interests, near your locality.
What are the major changes that you experienced when you moved from an Employee to an Employer [or Entrepreneur]
The freedom to work on what I really want is something that I cherish a lot. The startup experience is pushing me to try out new roles every day and it is a great learning experience.
What are your key advice(s) to aspiring entrepreneurs ?
Just do it. Don’t over think it. But be patient and focused.
There is lot of hype around IoT, Big Data etc. what are your views on the same ?
Big data is a reality of our times. People are producing more data than ever before and big data solutions are efforts to manage them. The challenges posed by big data are fascinating and a lot of research is needed to match the scale of things to come. IoT is a new frontier in innovation and it is very exciting based on early results.
What are your views about the start-up landscape in India ?
The ecosystem in Bengaluru is very good. We have got help from unexpected corners, people have been very forthcoming to give their feedback. The whole ecosystem is quite collaborative. This is a great time to pursue a startup in India.
Here is wishing EventsHigh team all the best & hope they reach “High” in their startup endeavors. Do give EventsHigh a spin & share your feedback in the comments section.