We work closely with customers, get to understand their business and develop solutions they love. The service has been the marketing and it has worked very well. The customers all come back and we grow together. We love it and they love it.

However, we were missing a great deal of the market that can't afford custom mobile solutions. Most solutions are too expensive and complex. After hearing this from many potential customers we decided to do something about it and developed MyEventApps. It allows event based organizations to get their own true native iPhone and Android apps for $750/year! We think this changes the game.

See what the Ottawa Citizen had to say this about this revolutionary product. The story got picked up all over the web including blogs and other papers like the Vancouver Sun. Our phone was ringing off the hook on Friday with interest from spas to malls and cleaning services. Things are going to get interesting.

If you wish to keep up with our story, please enter your email to the right and you'll get updates in your email when we have something interesting to share.

Ottawa Citizen, November 30, 2011

OTTAWA — An Ottawa startup is looking to democratize the business of building applications.

FaveQuest and its founder Allan Isfan has released its web-based MyEventApps program, which allows smaller businesses to create iPhone and Android apps in seconds.

To create an app for both Android and iPhone, a business needs to pay FaveQuest an annual fee of $750 …. click to read more

That's a crazy summer and we can't complain. There were also some deals we didn't get and some festivals that wanted to use our tools but couldn't afford the price. You either say "too bad" or you realize … wait a minute … there's a pattern here. What if we could serve the thousands of festivals and events that don't have multi-million dollar budgets? And that's what we're going to do with a focus on the biggest hole in their web strategy – mobile ( with a sprinkle of social). While we will continue to take on large projects, we're building a new mobile platform that will allow us to spin straight forward event apps in hours rather than months and for a price smaller event organizers can afford.

It is time to scale our company and clean up. Let's see if we can truly earn our "Bootstrap Award" and "Startup to Watch" accolades.

If you're a startup, I hope you gain some useful insight from our story or at least feel a kinship. We're all a bit crazy but we're not alone.

If you're a potential customer, I hope this helps you get a feel for our company.

Back to the story. As a startup we were in rough shape. We had been going for the home run but the pitcher (i.e. the big hairy customer) went straight for the head … boom, we're almost knocked out. It was tempting to rush the mound but our biggest worry was how to survive and not how to get revenge. We had built a great solution and had to find a new customer …. quick or the company would collapse.

Branson Saves the Day … sort of

When my friend Mark Saunders (owner of Saunders Farm) invited me to a breakfast event with Sir Branson for the launch of Virgin Radio in Ottawa, I jumped at the chance. We had been working on a s/w platform concept for radio as well as a "change the world through kids" concept called Zoogeez so the timing was perfect. I had both presentations on a thumb drive with my business card taped to it ready to hand it to him.

Richard walked in to the breakfast area and headed to the coffee bar. I ran to meet him and introduced myself. I got to the point immediately (as I had been trained by folks who know him). We chatted for about 5 minutes, mostly about the charity stuff. He told me about Virgin Unite, I told him about Zoogeez. He was extremely generous with his attention, accepted my thumb drive and then got pulled off by the media folks to get on the radio.

The Power of Relationships and connections

While still on a high and getting my picture taken with a few Virgin Angels, Mark Monahan, executive director of the Ottawa Bluesfest walks by. I'm was and still am a HUGE fan of Bluesfest. It is one of the biggest music festivals in North America with nearly 300 acts over almost two weeks. I book my vacation around Bluesfest.

Mark Saunders introduces me (dude knows everybody). I give Mr. Monahan my quick elevator pitch and without knowing it, set in motion a major company transformation. A few weeks later, we close a deal to deliver a prototype of our Social Video Calendar … a pilot project to see what happens.

Your Team HAS TO BELIEVE

It turns out that the only thing we were able to pull from the previous project for the media company was experience and knowledge. We had to start from zero on the software. Yikes! And funds were very low.

Time was also extremely tight … nearly impossible really. We approached a developer, Allain Lalonde, who had shown up to a presentation Bill and I had done to the Social Networking Think Tank months earlier. He had challenged a number of our assumptions and both Bill and I thought he was sharp. You simply can't build a start-up with lemmings.

Over lunch, we explained what we needed. Allain had a full time job he didn't intend on leaving so this would have to be in the evening and weekends. Sound familiar?

We heard the golden words "I'm in". Woohoo!

We didn't even discuss payment!! "We'll figure that out" (BTW, Allain is our lead developer and is getting paid

We were back in the game. Stay tuned for part 3 to see what happened.

Rewind back a few years to a meeting with Richard Branson, now rewind some more ….

Some of the biggest Risks are not Risks at All

I quit my job at Nortel in the late 90s just as that company was taking off to join a startup called Catena Networks. It was super early days and they were in stealth mode. I was one of the first dozen guys asked to join and they couldn't even tell me what they were doing or what my job would be until I accepted. But I knew the founders and some of the early employees and I knew it would be awesome. So over beers at the Old Mill in Ashton pub, we chatted and shook on it.

Not soon thereafter, the entire Nortel division I had worked in was laid off and we had a career fair at Catena. We became the Noah's Arc of the tech community during the melt-down. Times change quickly.

The First Risk is the Hardest

We built Catena into a serious business bringing in $100M a year. During this time, my wife and I sold our house, built a new one and had our third child in the middle of it all. In 2004 Catena got acquired by Ciena, a public US firm for nearly $ 500M. I stuck around for a bit to finish some projects and I cashed out in 2006. It was a bit easier this time. Scary but exhilarating. It seems I caught a virus … of the entrepreneurial kind.

The World Won't End, even when you make Stoopid Mistakes

I managed to line up some consulting and also joined Skypoint Capital, a local Venture Capital firm, as an Entrepreneur in Residence. I got to sit in on pitches and share my thoughts with the partners which was cool. I also started to toy around with new ideas. I'll never forget the opportunity Leo Lax, CEO of Skypoint, gave me.

I decided audio personalization was the future … I wanted to build an engine that would create a "radio station" just for me. Not just music … which had already been done by the likes of Pandora (which I loved) … but everything. I would tell it what I'm interested in ..type of music, type of news and so on and it would assemble this for me on the fly. If I skipped something it would learn and get better. Pretty cool, unique and possibly compelling.

I assembled a senior team, put together a board of advisors (this was a good move … highly recommended), built some prototypes, tried to raise money and ran the idea by some large media companies with the content we wanted to tap. We were told "do this for video and it might have legs, especially if you can make it social".

What were we thinking?

We had previously incorporated the company as MyDyo … my radio, my video .. MyDyo. Made sense but nobody could pronounce it. We forged ahead. Our friends at BitHeads provided us a developer for four months and with our lead developer, Dave Rooney, we built a video personalization Facebook app (Luc Levesque from travelpod had convinced me Facebook was going to be big . We showed it to an exec at a MAJOR media company and she loved it. We connected with the folks in one of their major divisions and worked closely with them to build a branded version for them with their video content.

In the meantime, I worked on the 52 page legal contract with the purchasing department. Trying to save paper, I printed two copies of the document double sided, signed them and mailed them overnight. A few days later, the dude in the purchasing department says "sorry, we can't accept double sided contracts … can you please re-print single sided?". What are you going to say … no? So I reprinted two copies of the 52 page document on my poor little ink jet printer and sent them off. Then things got quiet.

Be ready to get screwed … it will happen

We launched the app quietly in late December 2008 anyway since the folks we were working with really wanted it out … and so did we. The contract had been negotiated and all details had been agreed to … slam dunk, all we needed was a signature. We were on top of the world.

The incredible founders of this media company had died earlier that month and with the crappy economy, entered a major restructuring. Our key champion was gone and their lawyers raised flags about the legality associated with the video content they licensed from others showing up in Facebook. The plug was pulled.

It never got resolved. We were done. We owed people money, we had no jobs and no revenue but we had some cool video technology and a badly bruised dream. Skypoint ended up not raising their new fund and I gave up on trying to raise money. We were in the corner, bleeding and dizzy, close to pulling the plug on the whole thing.

Lessons Learned

Pivoting to social video was a good move (as you'll see later) but getting blinded by "the big win" was a mistake #1. We focused on this one customer and the rest of the attention on trying to raise money, mistake #2. Furthermore, the company had been assembled with top execs but few developers … we were going for the VC play, mistake #3. Mistake #4? Picking a name no one could spell and say.

How did we rebound, got named a "startup to watch", won a bootstrap award as well as some marquee customers? Stand by for part 2. It has some good lessons and dash of Branson.

Does any of this sound familiar? Anyone want to share juicy startup stories? Go crazy in the comments!

2011 Is Looking Great

We are feeling extremely positive about 2011. After toiling away on a few other ideas for the last few years, we launched a simple festival solution in 2009 and our full festival platform in 2010.

We're hitting our stride with major festivals. The deals are getting easier and are closing faster. Our existing customers are recommending us to others and we have some success to point to.We are quickly adding customers and ramping the business but doing so carefully.

We've been fully self & customer funded from the start which is pretty fantastic (though scary at times). It is also hard earned money and we're not looking to raise money for the time being so we have to use it very wisely.

Now to Scale: Festival In a Box

We're now making a big bet. If you're familiar with the e-commerce platform Shopify at all, "Festival in a Box" could be thought of as Shopify for Festivals. It is a fully hosted solution with all the basics and extras a festival might need: a new theme based website, a Facebook app for their Fan page as well as mobile apps.

It starts at around $50/month for the basics and goes up from there. Most festival sites pay more than that just for hosting. If a customer wants a custom theme or features, they can hire us or anyone else they desire to perform the customizations.

We think this will do well and really help small festivals, country fairs and any other event driven business capitalize on the web, social media and mobile … something they typically haven't been able to afford. We've signed up Music and Beyond as our first beta customer (new FaveQuest based site coming this spring) and more are in the pipeline. Fingers crossed.

Thank YOU!

Thank you to all our fantastic customers, the Ottawa Business Journal as well as our many supporters for believing in us. We're you're up in the middle of the night working on cash flow spreadsheets or testing new features, it really helps.

Cheers,

Allan Isfan, Co-Founder and CEO

@isfan

Our apps include advanced features like:

• create you own calendar
• video associated with most events
• Facebook login
• see what shows friends are attending
• posting events to facebook and twitter
• Facebook "like" button: we're the first in the world to do this!!!
  
• event and location check-in which can optionally be posted to Facebook

For more on our mobile solution, please click here.

Elevator Pitch

A quick elevator pitch followed by a meeting a couple of weeks later and some late night phone calls and a deal was done. FaveQuest launched a beta version of the Social Video Calendar in 2009 as a drop in widget in the existing site. Tens of thousands of music fans used the advanced tools to watch over 226,000 videos and build and share their calendar with friends. We knew we were onto something.

Success Breeds Success

Bluesfest brought on FaveQuest on to design and rebuild their entire website, a Facebook app and an iPhone app. Traffic on the site grew by 30%, time on site went from a minute to over five minutes and with that also came a new sponsorship from the National Gallery of Canada (yes, a website can be a revenue generator instead of a cost center).

The Relationship Continues

We have also developed some very specialized tools for Bluesfest to help them manage their operations. For example, the FAB (FaveQuest Artist Booking) tool. With a multi-million dollar budget and hundreds of artists, tracking offers, contract details, contract status, riders, budget and so on can be very tricky to do with a spreadsheet. Ottawa Bluesfest now uses our FAB product to perform all artist bookings.

Another big nightmare for festival organizers is trying to track, keep up to date and allow necessary staff to access key contacts for all bands. Some bands have 8 or more people that need to be reached for various types of reasons. We built a specialized tool call FACT (FaveQuest Artist Contact Tracker) to solve this problem.

FUN FUN FUN!

During the festival, the two co-founders of FaveQuest, Allan Isfan & Bill Love, in addition to several others, become roving reporters interviewing fans, staff and even musicians. It comes with an access pass! A dream come true.

We truly <3 Bluesfest and will be forever grateful to Mark, Mike, AJ, Sarah, Tammy, Nathalie, Allison and the whole team for believing in us and giving us a shot that changed the entire course of our company.

The integration goes ever further:

• Fans can log in to our Social Video Calendar and Mobile apps with their Facebook credentials
• We embed many of the popular Facebook plugins like commenting and "like" buttons
• Our content management system can automatically create Facebook events through the Facebook API. This is absolutely HUGE for large festivals that simply can't manage the manual process
• We're working on some other very exciting Facebook elements but must keep them under wraps until we launch them for Just for Laughs this spring.

For more on our Facebook apps and integration, please click here.

Grow a Mo for Movember and change the face of men's health …

What is Mo you ask?

"The Mo, slang for moustache, and November come together each year for Movember. Movember challenges men to change their appearance and the face of men’s health by growing a moustache. The rules are simple, start Movember 1st clean-shaven and then grow a moustache for the entire month.  The moustache becomes the ribbon for men’s health, the means by which awareness and funds are raised for prostate cancer.  Much like the commitment to run or walk for charity, the men of Movember commit to growing a moustache for 30 days." 

Movember takes place across the world and has raised over $100 Million dollars so far and Canada was in third place overall in 2009 with $7.8M. Our goal for 200 is $10M and we need your help.

How can I help?

Glad you asked. Two simple ways you can help :

1) Join my MovemberYOW team and grow a mo

You'll be part of an amazing community with tons of events throughout the month of November such as the big Nov 1 shave off, the end of November Stache Bash and many more. Note that we've also challenged the team from Austin, Texas whose butt we're going to kick. It seems that Jacksonville, Florida has challenged us as well … we'll take them both on.

The more people I can get on board, the more lives we can impact. I am asking you to join my team and either grow a moustache as a Mo Bro, or join as a Mo Sista to help recruit other gentlemen.

To join my Movember team go to http://ca.movember.com/register/75362 and follow the steps.
Once registered you'll be sent all the information you need to raise funds and start growing as part of my Movember team.

Note: we are working very closely with the MovemberOttawa team and will be participating in all of their events. Our own focus will be to leverage the web as a way to complement what they are doing off-line.

2) Donate to prostate cancer

Go to http://ca.movember.com/mospace/515608/ and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account
or write a cheque payable to Prostate Cancer Canada, referencing my name or Registration Number 515608 and mailing it to:

Prostate Cancer Canada,
Suite 306 145 Front Street East
Toronto, ON
M5A 1E3, Canada. 

All donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Cheers,

Allan Isfan
Team Captain, MovemberYOW
twitter: @movemberYOW
email: movemberyow@gmail.com

If you are a festival organizer, this should leave little doubt regarding the importance fans place on your website. People use your website to make important purchasing decisions, and if designed properly, share that with their friends.

A Bit of Context

The Ottawa Bluesfest ran from July 6 to July 18 2010 and included over 250 shows. Total attendance was in the hundreds of thousands making this festival one of the biggest in North America. Some of the headliners for 2010 were Iron Maiden, The Flaming Lips, Arcade Fire, Roger Hodgson, Rush, Santana, Weezer, Drake and many more. It is a big deal.

I'm not at liberty to share exact numbers but will give you the rough scale of some of the typical numbers people look at. Not all these numbers are a measure of the success of the site but they will give you a sense for the scale of traffic.

Some Numbers (all approximate)

Launch Day April 21:

We launched in the middle of the night and the site started getting visits right away. People are rabid at this time of year waiting for the band announcements. It is actually kind of crazy. Here are some launch day numbers:

• Visits: 100k
• Uniques: 75k
• Pageviews: 600k
• Videos/bios viewed: 30k
• Avg. Time on site: over 6 minutes

The majority of people were spending time checking out the Lineup and watching videos and even starting to build their own calendars. Much of the traffic came between 10am and 1pm so it was very spiky. Even though we did tons of load testing ahead of time, we didn't anticipate how spiky the traffic would be.

Luckily we had decided to host the site on Amazon cloud (AWS) and used a separate Content Distribution Network to serve up graphics.  The site got slow around 10am and we found ourselves having to quickly bump up the memory associated with the database, bumped up the size of the server and even added a second large front end server. The site quickly stabilized and we were off to the races. Now we know exactly what is needed for next year.

Overall (April 21 – July 18)

• Visits: over 1 million
• Uniques: over 500k
• Pageviews: over 6M
• Videos/bios viewed: over 300k
• Number of total events added to "my calendar": over 250k
• Avg. Time on site: ~ 5 minutes

The scale of overall numbers from site launch to the end of the festival are pretty stunning. This really demonstrates how heavily people use the web to explore festivals.

I'm happy to share more data within reason so please let me know what else you want to know … lots more important stats. For example, we have a share button that allows people to share events on Facebook, twitter or by email. Are you curious to know what the breakdown is between them? Wondering about mobile browser breakdown? Happy to share that too.

Also, we give people the opportunity to log in to the site using an existing account such as Facebook, Google, Twitter or Yahoo or create an account directly on the site. Interested in the breakdown? Results might surprise you.