When you attend a conference, whether it's a sales and marketing exercise or an executive presentation, there are costs associated with it. In the former case, in addition to the cost of the space and booth, there are costs for hotels, transportation, and meals for the employees staffing the booth. For executives, it costs time away from the office, ticket costs to attend, and travel costs. How do companies justify the cost of participating in these events?
While it has been quite difficult to do so in the past, early-stage company Sproxxy is creating a platform to manage conference-related activities while helping customers understand the ROI of attending these events. By doing so, we are trying to change the situation. Today, the startup officially launched after raising $1.1 million to get the company off the ground.
Melanie Samba, founder and CEO of Sproxxy, has a 20-year career in marketing and communications, managing 12 executives and attending a total of 80 conferences a year, all in an Excel spreadsheet. I was managing. Although she didn't intend to start a software company, she had some sort of epiphany that there had to be a better way to process this information, and subsequently developed her Sproxxy to build the platform she had envisioned. I have decided to launch.
“We are positioned as a conference intelligence platform. And what we do is quantify conference activity. So we help brands understand the business impact of attending a conference. and demonstrate that they understand the ROI and value of speaking, sponsoring, and participating in industry events,” Samba told TechCrunch.
She says it involves advance planning, such as finding the right conference to attend, cross-functional collaboration to coordinate participation, and deciding whether it's worth the time and resources to attend. This may include post-conference analysis. At the end of the day, she says, the company is focused on providing data, analysis, and insight into what people get (or don't get) from participating.
After coming up with the idea, Samba hired a company to build an initial version of the software and was able to sell the first license to an agency that manages 60 clients on the platform. Last year, she decided it was time to bring development in-house and rebuild the product. Currently, she has a team of three engineers and one product manager.
She says she has built a pipeline of 1,200 companies willing to join the platform and there appears to be demand. The target market is medium to large businesses looking for a way to manage this process.
She said she was concerned about the fundraising process as a solo Black female founder and mother of young children. She had good reason to do so. Black founders, regardless of gender, raised less than 1% of all venture capital invested in 2023. The challenge is to break into the space and help investors understand the value of the product, she said.
She eventually found Ivy Ventures. The company invested a small amount of her $500,000 to get Sproxxy off the ground, and she later added another $600,000. Samba's goal is to raise a total of $1.8 million, and he is moving toward that goal as he talks with other investors for the remaining funds to fill out the round.