Any time you attend a conference, whether as a sales and marketing exercise, or as an executive speaker, there is a cost involved. For the first, it involves the cost of the space and the stand, in addition to hotels, travel and meals for the employees who work at the stand. For executives, it's time away from the office, attendance ticket costs and travel expenses. How do companies justify the cost of attending these events?
Until now, it was quite difficult to do, but esproxy, an early-stage company, is looking to change that by creating a platform to manage conference-related activities, while helping clients understand the return on investment (ROI) of attending these events. Today, the startup officially launched after raising $1.1 million to get the company off the ground.
Melanie Samba, founder and CEO of Sprogxy, was 20 years into her career in marketing and communications, managing 12 executives attending a total of 80 conferences a year, and managing it all in Excel spreadsheets. She wasn't looking to start a software company, but she had a sort of epiphany that there had to be a better way to handle this information, and she would later launch Sprogxy to build the platform she envisioned.
“We are positioned as a conference intelligence platform. And what we're doing is quantifying conference activity. That's why we help brands demonstrate the business impact of participating in conferences and understand the return on investment or value of speaking, sponsoring and attending an industry event,” Samba told TechCrunch.
She says that can involve pre-planning that includes finding the right conferences to attend, collaboration across departments to coordinate attendance, and post-conference analysis, which involves determining whether it was worth the cost in time and resources to attend. . She says that at the end of the day, the company is focused on providing data, analysis and insights into what you gained (or didn't) by attending.
After coming up with the idea, Samba hired a company to create the initial version of the software and was able to sell its first license to an agency that managed 60 clients on the platform. Last year, he decided it was time to bring development in-house and rebuild the product. Today it has a team of three engineers and a product manager.
She says there seems to be a demand with a portfolio of 1,200 companies she is working on and hopes to get on the platform. The target market is medium-sized businesses and companies looking for a way to manage this process.
She said that as a solo, Black founder, who is also the mother of a young child, she was concerned about the fundraising process. She had good reason to be. Black founders, regardless of gender, raised less than 1% of all the venture money invested in 2023. He said the challenge was getting in the room and helping investors understand the value of the product.
He eventually found Ivy Ventures, a company that invested a modest $500,000 to get Sprogxy off the ground, and then added another $600,000. Samba's goal is to raise a total of $1.8 million and is on track to achieve it, while he discusses the remaining money with other investors to complete the round.