Startup secured $22M funding on July 23rd, 2024
What unites people is one thing - the desire to attend events with their friends (or meet new people) at events that are easy to find. However, today we're not talking about the people who attend these events. We’re going to talk about an interesting tool for organizing such events from the POSH startup, which is the logical evolution of digital posters and online ticket sales, and not just that.
POSH is much more convenient and interesting. And much broader in its functionality, because it’s not just a service for selling tickets to concerts.
Core Idea
POSH created a platform for organizing small events, ranging from a few hundred participants to, in some cases, a few thousand - though this wasn’t the primary goal, the numbers speak for themselves. These events can be anything - campus student parties, concerts, dance floors with DJs, offline meetups for online communities, business presentations, corporate events, personal birthday parties, blogger meet-and-greets, or anything else.
The event organizer chooses whether they want to make their event public, selling tickets via POSH, or private, where access is granted only through invitation sent via POSH.
For users, the platform is an app with a feed similar to TikTok, but showcasing events. Currently, the key factor for showing events is the proximity of the event location to the user’s current position. Soon, the startup promises to add the option to import friends lists from social networks, taking into account whether the event is organized by a friend, a friend of a friend, or if someone from the user's friend list plans to attend.
The platform gives event organizers the ability to quickly create an event description for display in the feed, then manage ticket sales through the POSH marketplace or control the sending of invitations through built-in tools for invitations. The platform even has a CRM, where real-time information about ticket buyers, invitation sends, and participation confirmations is recorded.
This CRM allows organizers to understand the demographics of their audience (geography, gender, age), enabling them to adjust their targeting and track their intended audience.
The startup claims that public event organizers manage to sell 53% of available spots through the POSH marketplace and its partners who advertise upcoming events. For each ticket sold, POSH takes a 99-cent commission plus 10% of the ticket price. Organizers receive the money for sold tickets daily, allowing them to reinvest more into the event organization even before it happens.
According to the startup’s co-founder, in the first quarter of this year, POSH sold tickets worth $14.1 million (a 126% increase compared to last year), helped organize 11,000 events (a 231% increase), and hosted 1.2 million attendees (a 200% increase). POSH has now raised an additional $22 million in investment, bringing the total funding to $31 million.
POSH is convenient for both users and organizers, which is why it can be considered a more advanced online-ticket platform for Generation Z.
By the way, about Generation Z…
Fun Facts & Highlights
As it is commonly believed, the main problem of new generation became the key argument for creating this app (as well as all other projects aimed at boosting offline communication between people): "Human relationships are lost. Generation Z is the loneliest generation of all that has existed so far."
This statement resonates very well with the report published in 2023, which was titled "The Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation". The cause of this epidemic is the rise of the internet, which has increased the amount of communication among everyone, but it's "not real" communication. As we already mentioned in the article about Howbout, Generation Z is increasingly suffering from a lack of real communication.
At least that's what investors seem to agree with, having invested $22 million in the latest round of funding, following $9 million raised by POSH in the previous five rounds since 2020 — a strong indicator and a significant jump!
"We help bring back human relationships in the real world. Whether it's a casual hangout, a rooftop party, a basement disco, or a music festival, our app helps people disconnect from their phones and enjoy true communication," say the creators of POSH.
The drivers of their growth are online influencers, who are beginning to take their audiences offline to provide them with a new experience, strengthen their bond with them, and enable them to connect with each other. The overall activity of app users has tripled in the last couple of years — both in terms of the number of events and participants.
Meanwhile, ticket sales for events through the POSH marketplace grew by 1,733% in one year! Thus, people are financially confirming their desire to take part in small offline events and gatherings.
Organizing offline events gives online influencers a new way to monetize their audience. The average revenue from a single event organized through POSH amounted to $4,300. If an influencer organizes 2–4 events a month, they can live quite comfortably just from this income.
At the same time, POSH plans to build a whole ecosystem for event organizers. Currently, their platform only allows selling tickets and sending invitations. But in the future, they plan to offer organizers a full range of services — finding venues for events, hiring staff, including security, photographers, videographers, catering, drinks, and so on.
Thus, influencers could truly become a powerful growth driver for POSH. The more they want to earn, the more events they will organize. The more events they organize, the more popular the app will become due to the expanded range of options. The more popular the app gets, the more influencers will want to organize events through it. And so on.
Where Are We Runnin’?
This strongly resembles TeachMe.To, which develops an app for conducting offline lessons using a similar approach. POSH and TeachMe.To are conceptually very similar: Both have chosen to focus on organizing offline activities. One focuses on events, the other on lessons. Both have found growth drivers that can earn through their platforms.
One works with influencers, the other with people who can teach something. Both essentially believe that offline demand is currently seriously limited by the number of offerings. That’s why they’re building their platforms as comprehensive solutions, removing most of the operational problems from event and lesson organizers. Both expect that simplifying things will lead to an increase in the number of offerings — which will raise demand, which will, in turn, increase the supply.
And this will continue until the market becomes saturated, and they become billion-dollar companies in the process. Therefore, the possible direction is towards offline! Using online as a means to attract users to offline. Examples: Howbout for friends, Saturn for students, Atmosfy — for an easier choice of places to go. They all aim to help organize offline communication and events.
As we mentioned in the article about Howbout — this is a very relevant trend that must not be missed. So, what other offline topics could be developed using this same principle?