Tuesday, 20 February 2024, Bengaluru, India
There is always a fee involved when attending a conference spending ROI, whether for sales and marketing purposes or to hear from an executive. For the former, it includes the price of a booth and space in addition to lodging, transportation, and meals for the booth crew. For CEOs, it means taking time off work, paying for a ticket, and incurring travel expenses.
(Image Source: https://companyventures.co/)
It was tough to do up until now. Still, Sproxxy, an early-stage business, hopes to alter that by developing a platform to organize conference-related activities and assist clients in calculating the return on investment of attending these events. The venture officially started today after financing $1.1 million to launch the business.
Twenty years into her career in marketing and communications, Melanie Samba, the founder and CEO of Sproxxy, oversaw twelve executives who attended eighty conferences annually, all of which she tracked using Excel spreadsheets. She didn’t intend to develop a software firm. Still, she eventually launched Sproxxy to create the platform she had in mind after having an epiphany that there had to be a better way to handle this information.
Our positioning is as a platform for conference intelligence. Additionally, we are measuring conference activity. Thus, we assist businesses in demonstrating the financial benefit of their attendance at conferences and in determining the return on investment (ROI) of speaking at, supporting, and attending industry events, Samba told TechCrunch.
According to her, pre-planning might include selecting the appropriate conferences to attend, working with colleagues across departments to arrange attendance, and post-conference analysis, which is determining whether or not going was worthwhile in terms of money and time. Ultimately, she claims, the organization’s goal is to provide information about the company’s attendance, including data, analytics, and insights into what the company learned—or didn’t know.
Following her conception, Samba commissioned the first software version to be developed by a company. She successfully sold her first license to an agency overseeing sixty clients on the platform. She decided to restructure the product and bring development in-house last year. She currently employs a product manager and three engineers on her team.
She claims there is a need with a pipeline of 1200 organizations she is working through and trying to integrate. The intended audience comprises moderate to large businesses needing help managing this process.
She claimed she was concerned about the fundraising process because she is a single Black woman entrepreneur and a mother of a small child. She was justified in being so. Regardless of gender, fewer than 1% of venture capital invested in 2023 was raised by black founders. According to her, the difficulty is entering the room and assisting investors in realizing the worth of the offering.
Eventually, she came across Ivy Ventures, a company that contributed an additional $600,000 to Sproxxy after investing a meager $500,000. Samba is working toward her target of raising $1.8 million in total and talking to other investors about the remaining funds needed to close the deal.
(Information Source: Techcrunch.com)
