Why did you decide to take part in the Varsity Pitch? [a competition offering college and university students and recent graduates the chance to win £10,000 funding for their business idea]
I’m a huge supporter of entrepreneurship. Plus, it’s an opportunity for me to see the next generation of founders that one day I’ll be asking for a job! It’s encouraging young adults to embrace entrepreneurship, to generate their own business ideas and to potentially start businesses. It’s nice to see entrepreneurship trickling through business and into the education system.
What kind of qualities will you be looking for in the contestants?
The number one thing I’ll be looking for is passion. I know from working with the founders here at YPlan that you need to have belief in your business concept.
You do also need to know your business plan, your market and your customer. But, for me, it’s about finding somebody who’s identified an opportunity that is unique and disruptive and that they have passion for.
In March, YPlan was named the UK’s fastest growing tech startup. What is it about the business that has helped it to grow so fast?
One of the reasons I joined the company is that it’s such a fantastic concept: to be able to discover and select events that are happening around you at the last minute, that really identifies a customer problem. Truly fantastic startups out there have identified something missing in a certain industry, like Uber or Airbnb, for example.
That’s how YPlan started out, when our founders were in San Francisco. They were looking for something to do that night and didn’t know the city that well. They spent most of the evening Googling to find out what was going on. And then, when they found something they wanted to go to, they spent about an hour trying to get tickets for it.
YPlan has created a business model that has customers at its heart, where the booking fee is shown upfront and the service is as user-friendly as possible. We tried to do some cool things with the marketing as well. For example, we’ve moved away from a tagline of ‘Tonight’s going out app’ to ‘Live your city’. The latter is testament to what we feel the brand offers if you’re a local in, or a visitor to, some of the best cities in the world.
Our core market, 18- to 40-year-olds, really want something a bit different.
It sounds like your users are quite a broad group, how do you ensure you are serving them all?
Going out doesn’t have any age barriers and we want to be adopted by the widest demographics we can. We have tickets for nightclubs and immersive theatre that might be more attractive to those in their early 20s. But we’re also doing a push into the West End theatre, which is quite an archaic market in terms of discovering tickets and finding out which shows are on. We hope our traditional [younger] audience discover things about the West End and we also hope we can provide a more user-friendly way for older users to buy theatre tickets.
A lot of our customers have what we call different ‘use cases’. For example, I might go out for date night with my wife, then I might go out with my golf friends for a different event. Then if my parents are in town I might take them to the theatre. So even though I am a certain demographic, and have certain interests, my going out preferences are very varied.
How has the business changed since it launched in 2012?
When YPlan launched we were mobile only but we felt that a lot of our audience were still using laptops to search and discover events, so we launched our website [in addition to the mobile app] in April.
All of our user experience and content was developed for mobile – whereas most companies have done the reverse and adapted their desktop content for mobile.
We’re also looking to expand into new cities. So we have recently, quietly, launched in Bristol. Bristol is a great cultural city, it’s got a vibrant art scene and great underground music scene. YPlan is live there now and we will do the big launch later this year. We’ll also be launching in Dublin and Manchester in the coming weeks.
What are most common mistakes you see in business marketing?
The biggest mistake is not understanding your customer. Truly understanding how they use your product or service, and also what might be missing, should really shape the development of both your products and marketing and communications.
We’ve got the luxury nowadays of having exposure to a lot of data and we’re trying to use that data, such as conversion rates, to understand different opportunities for reaching customers and to ensure that a customer’s lifetime with a product is thought about. People put a lot of attention, resource and investment into acquiring customers, but they don’t put the same level of detail and attention into customer engagement. Your customers are your number one marketing tool, in terms of word of mouth.
What are the challenges of marketing in a new country or city? [YPlan has launched in New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Edinburgh]
One of the main challenges we have at YPlan as we continue to expand is understanding the differences between the London customer and our customers in other cities, and making sure we’re delivering an experience and offering the events they want.
We do a lot of background research into a city before we launch there. Also, we have customers on both sides of supply and demand. We have to find the right event partners to work with and make sure we’re serving them as best as possible, by putting bums on seats. And we have to ensure our traditional customers can discover events they want to go to and that are relevant to them.
Ian Macleod is a judge at the National Association of College and University Entrepreneurs’ Varsity Pitch competition final on 19 November
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