VenueLook Success Story: How it is Helping All Book Venues in a Jiffy?
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Finding a good venue for any event has always been a challenging task. Checking out various venues and finding the right one in terms of budget, facilities, and size is quite time-consuming and tiring too. However, thanks to the online venue booking platforms, now the scenario is totally different. Venuelook is an online platform that makes venue booking super easy for you.
Venuelook Startup Success Story
| Startup Name | Venuelook |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Noida |
| Founders | Ruchi Garg and Sovit Upadhyay |
| Sector | Event management |
| Founded | 2014 |
| Parent Organisation | TenXT Solutions Pvt. Ltd |
About Venuelook
Venuelook - Industry
Venuelook - Founders and Team
Venuelook - Venuelook Startup Story | How was Venuelook Started?
Venuelook - Mission and Vision
Venuelook - Name, Tagline and Logo
Nenuelook - Business Model
Venuelook - Revenue Model
Venuelook - User Acquisition
Venuelook - Startup Challenges
Venuelook - Funding and Investors
Venuelook - Growth
Venuelook - Competitors
About Venuelook
VenueLook is a Noida-based O2O platform for venue aggregation, recommendation, and booking. Founded in 2014, Venuelook is making venue booking seamless and awesome across 30 cities in India.
What is Venuelook?
Venuelook is an O2O platform for venue aggregation, recommendation, booking, disrupting the venue discovery and booking process for weddings, and other social and corporate events.
The facilities that Venuelook offers in the B2B segment, i.e to the venue owners are-
- A multi-platform friendly dashboard to manage their business pipeline with booking calendar and option to create promotional offers
- A mobile app for business on the go
- An option to promote and sell tickets for events hosted at their venue on Venuelook.
Besides, Venuelook’s product offerings for venue seekers include –
- Assistance for venue discovery and shortlisting with the availability confirmation
- A communication channel to engage with one or more shortlisted venues in an easy, hassle-free way
- Venue Seekers can buy tickets for upcoming events from the Live events section of Venuelook
- VenueSeekers can also review the venue(s) on the platform
- Venuelook has recently enabled the creation of e-invitations also for all event hosts, who are visiting the website
- Evolving as a DIY platform with easy to use features and content that aid in decision-making, online booking and providing reviews and recommendations for venues
One venue property might have multiple event spaces like banquet halls, party lawns, restaurants, conference rooms, rooftops, pool-side. These spaces are independently bookable inventories, and suitable for various different kinds of events. They need to be showcased individually and mapped with the right kind of event types. The USP of VenuLook is that it enables and markets each individual space within a venue for all kinds of events it is suitable to host. These events could be social like baby showers, birthday parties, alumni events, social get-togethers; wedding-related; or corporate events like conferences, farewells, and offsite corporate events to name a few. The other services provided by Venuelook are catering services, wedding planning, event planning, and birthday planning.
VenueLook serves all kinds of social, wedding and corporate events throughout the year. Annual event distribution on the platform is - 35% wedding-related, 35% birthday parties of all age groups, 30% corporate events, get-togethers, parties, and festive celebrations.
Venuelook - Industry
Venue and catering, which mostly comes along, is the starting step of event planning and consumes 50-70% of the total event budget. According to researches cross birthday parties, wedding-related events, social mixers and corporate events, the opportunity across 10 major cities in India is roughly around INR 250,000 Crores ($35 Billion).
Again, taking into account event services and commerce as well, the total Industry size comes to about INR 360,000 Crores ($50 Billion).
In the first phase, by 2021, we believe 10% of venue and catering opportunity will come online, which makes our target market size as INR 25,000Crore ($3.5 Billion).
Lakshya Singh
Venuelook - Founders and Team
Ruchi Garg founded Venuelook in 2014.
Ruchi Garg
Ruchi is a B.E in computer science and holds 15+ years of experience in building products and team. She started her career with STMicroelectronics and her first startup was Eventeve.com. Being a passionate entrepreneur, Ruchi loves fixing business problems using tech and processes. Besides, reading and writing, watching sci-fi movies with her kids helps her rewind and relax.
Sovit Upadhyay
Sovit Upadhyay is another founder of Venuelook. He is, as Ruchi revealed, a friend of the Founder-CEO Ruchi Garg, who started together to found Venuelook.
Venuelook has a team of 50+ young and energetic professionals.
Our team’s core belief is that we can add a lot of value on both sides of the event marketplace. We believe in trying, learning and building solutions to cross every new roadblock we encounter. Even after 4 years of brainstorming and hard work, we feel we are at Day 0 when we look at the humongous value that is yet to be delivered and tapped. We are always hungry for more!
Venuelook - Venuelook Startup Story | How was Venuelook Started?
Events, as a sector, was always close to Ruchi’s heart. She realized that finding the right venue was quite painful and cumbersome and the use of technology could simplify the task. So, team Venuelook white-boarded all possible ways of making the venue booking process easy and figured revenue generation ideas around it. After all the planning Venuelook was launched in 2014.
There was no glamorous launching of Venuelook. We performed religious rituals with the initial team to get started on Venuelook. When the MVP was ready, we enabled the Inquiry buttons, made our phone no. available on the website and ran some Google Ads. SEO worked best for us.
Venuelook - Mission and Vision
Venuelook's mission is to "build the #1 technology enabled Social Events platform of India."
Our long term mission is to become a single stop platform for all event management needs. Starting from venue discovery and booking, invitations, event supplies to event entertainment, we want to help event hosts and planners at every step in their event planning journey.
The vision of the company is to lead the event service industry of India.
Venuelook - Name, Tagline and Logo
According to Ruchi, finding a good domain name was not easy. The name Venulook is a close match to the services offered by the company. And domain name was also available for the same. Hence the name Venuelook was finalized.
Venuelook's tagline is - "Making Happy Occasions Happier".
In the initial days, some people thought we were saying “When You Look” when we were actually saying “Venuelook”. Venuelook came closest to what our family and friends liked from the available domain names.
Venuelook - Business Model
Once on the site, a user can browse, filter and shortlist one or more venues for their event or just leave their event requirements on the company’s site. Venuelook’s technology and team help match the right venues as per the user’s preferences with confirmed availability. Soon, the shortlisted venues share their best proposals for the event. The platform further enables users and venue managers to communicate at their ease, schedule venue visits, and book.
Venuelook - Revenue Model
The Venuelook revenue model is lucid. It earns from the venues that pay for promotion on the platform. In Venuelook marketing service for B2B users (Venue Owners), the sign-up cost varies from 3500 to 200000 INR depending on the city, size, and tenure a venue chooses. While, for B2C users (Venue Seekers) who need assistance in discovering and shortlisting the best-suited venues for their events, VenueLook service is totally free.
Venuelook - User Acquisition
While speaking about Venuelook’s user acquisition, Ruchi said that Venuelook acquires its customers mostly online, both in an organic way and through paid ads. Users came first, partners followed and premium partners came 9 months after MVP (Minimum Viable Product) launch. While the company has many growth hacks in place now, in the early days, the entire focus was only on serving the first set of users and partners in the best possible way, giving them real value for money, and that eventually helped VenueLook in terms of establishing trust and good reputation in the industry.
When you are bootstrapping, you have to be very resourceful as the constraints and risks are many, you don’t have the luxury to make mistakes and learn from them. Every communication/pitch matters, every meeting is important, every conversion and every penny counts.
Lakshya Singh
Venuelook - Startup Challenges
For Venuelook there have been multiple challenges - hiring being the biggest one. According to Ruchi, It is still difficult to find the right people with the right kind of values and entrepreneurial spirit.
We kept ourselves afloat by following lean principles, keeping our costs strictly under control and breaking-even.
Venuelook - Funding and Investors
Venuelook has recently raised pre-series A funding from a group of Angel investors.
Getting funded is a wonderful experience, quite motivating, providing us the exact levers we needed to grow Venuelook faster.
Venuelook - Growth
Venuelook is emerging as the fastest-growing venue booking marketplace. The company, which was earlier distinguished as an O2O platform for venue aggregation, recommendation, and booking, has further forayed one step further into the event-planning industry on January 24, 2020. With the addition of this new wing, Venuelook started to provide end-to-end event planning services right from venue booking to organizing an event with just some clicks. The company announced this development through a press release dated 24th January 2020.
Often while planning an event, the biggest hindrance one faces is the time taken to finalize and book an event venue and then there is the hassle of running behind various vendors (often freelancers) to organize and deliver the event without any gaps, on time. As a solution to the unorganized segment of event planning and event management, VenueLook has come up with a platform where people connect instantly to a professional Event Manager who helps them get end-to-end event experience - dream venue and event planning services – decoration, catering, artists, return gifts, etc. all under one roof, as per their needs and budget. Event planning services are currently customizable and will soon be standardized for booking through the platform with 100% transparency and commitment to a quality experience.
Commenting on their expansion, Ms.Ruchi Garg, CEO, Founder, Venuelook said, ‘We have received a lot of love from our customers since we began our journey. Often our customers asked us whether we also provide event planning services. After creating a strong foothold in the venue booking industry, we are glad to announce that now we are extending our existing portfolio by venturing into event planning services.”
The company is constantly working towards making event organization simpler for its customers. In 2019, it added e- invitation facilities for the users so that they can easily invite their guests. Also, VenueLook is using proprietary aggregation and AI-backed algorithms to help identify and match customer requirements with the best venue options available, thus simplifying the venue discovery and booking process for weddings, social and corporate events.
The growth milestones achieved by the company to date are -
- 20000+ venues listed on the platform
- 3 Lac+ happy customers
- Presence in 30+ cities
Currently, the company is headquartered in Noida with a regional office in Mumbai.
Future is definitely very exciting and we are looking forward to it.
Venuelook - Competitors
Top competitors of Venuelook in India are:
- OYO's Weddingz
- BookEventz
- Megavenues
- Venuelocus
- VenueMonk
- VenueFinder
- Hire Space
- Venue Khojo
Besides, team Venuelook looks up to international players in the event space like Cvent, XOXO group, Honeybook and Kapow.
Venuelook - Future Plans
The company plans on going deeper in Tier-I cities and expanding in Tier-II cities soon.
FAQs
What is VenueLook?
Venuelook is an O2O platform for venue aggregation, recommendation, and booking. It makes venue discovery and booking process easier for weddings, and social and corporate events.
When was VenueLook founded?
VenueLook was founded in 2014.
Who is the CEO of VenueLook?
Ruchi Garg is the CEO and Co-founder of VenueLook.
Who founded Venuelook?
Venuelook was founded by Ruchi Garg and her friend Sovit Upadhyay.
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