FaveQuest named “Startup to Watch” by the Ottawa Business Journal
When you're head down and in the trenches building a dream company, applying for various awards never quite makes the list of priorities. Which is why this "Startup to Watch" recognition from the Ottawa Business Journal is so welcome. It just happened out of the blue.
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