Calling The Shots
Recap
Inside the previous post, I write about past failure for party app like KickOn, Wigo, Weota, Funnster, and the fact that was a wake up call for me. In this post I will write in more detail about those failure and take the case of YPlan a event discovery platform for studying is failure and give key market insight about Festo.
Overview
YPlan uncover the best events every day so you can get out and Live Your City. Discover, book, go — it’s that simple.
London, England, United Kingdom
Categories
Founded Date Feb 2, 2012
Founders Rytis Vitkauskas, Viktoras Jucikas
Operating Status Active
Funding Status M&A
Last Funding Type Series B
Number of Employees 11–50
Many companies have tried, and are trying, to remove the friction from the event discovery process. The perennial problem of what to do on any given evening may lead you to any number of sources — Google, Ticketmaster, Timeout, Eventbrite, or some combination. But one company is setting out to become the automatic go-to for both discovering and buying tickets for events.
YPlan launched out of London in November 2012, landing in New York in 2013 and San Francisco in 2014. YPlan’s proposition is simple — you can browse local events by date (e.g. “Today” or “This Weekend”), then narrow down by type (e.g. “Film” or “Music” or “Comedy”), and book directly through the app. Events are curated by people working behind the scenes. Some events are available a while in advance, while others arrive at the last minute.
About the Founder
Lithuania-born Vitkauskas founded his first startup at 14, a job that involved assembling and fixing up computers. By the time he was 19, he ran a five-person business “earning some good money,” he said. “But my parents told me I had to get an education abroad, which is what I did. I went to study at a liberal arts-type college in Germany.”
It was there where he met Viktoras Jucikas, his future YPlan cofounder and fellow Lithuanian, in 2003, playing for the college basketball team. “He’s a proper geek, extremely smart, a ridiculous brainiac,” said Vitkauskas. “He was the smartest technical guy on campus. And I was doing my business stuff, always keen on finance, entrepreneurship, that kind of thing.”
YPlan Ideation Stage
The YPlan concept arose during the early ideating stages — one evening, they were looking to take a break from their business planning and do something else instead. They decided to go to a concert in San Francisco, where they were at that time. “After an hour of Googling for what to do in San Fran tonight, we were still Googling,” said Vitkauskas. “That hour didn’t lead us to an event, and we thought, ‘This is YPlan’s core markets may be London, New York, and San Francisco, but it has dabbled in other cities with varying degrees of success.
YPlan Execution
The app was made available for a festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, back in 2013, but it was ultimately too small a market to launch there permanently. And it was also briefly introduced in Las Vegas. The company learned some valuable lessons with its foray into “Sin City. “We tried, but very quickly we learned it’s a completely different market — it’s a tourist market,” said Vitkauskas. “90 percent of our customers are locals — there is no ‘local going-out’ happening in Vegas.”broken, how do we fix that?””
They realized in order to “fix it,” they had to connect “discover” with “purchase.” They wanted to make the purchase as quick as possible from the moment of discovery. Instant. Real-time.
Reflection
Three years on, YPlan is really just in those three main cities. While it is technically available in Dublin (Ireland) and Bristol (England), this hasn’t really been shouted from the rooftops yet.
“Originally, I thought about doing it city-by-city-by-city, but it’s an expensive way of doing it,” he said. “And it takes a lot of time. What we’re working on now is launching in bunches of cities at the same time, and it will be in partnership with other brands and large distribution partners that will help us get up to speed in terms of visibility. Viktoras Jucikas
The Future
There are many related verticals YPlan could expand into. For example, your night out at the theater is normally accompanied by meals, drinks, transport, and so on. Could there be scope for expanding, or even integrating other services?
“We see meals as a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than a must-have, and frankly the restaurant discovery and booking process has been figured out already,” said Vitkauskas. “There are amazing companies like OpenTable that do this really well. We don’t feel like we have a lot to add. There may be some form of opportunity there, but I’m definitely convinced there is not an opportunity to build a billion-dollar business there. And that’s the only thing that I am interested in, in terms of investing the next 10 years of my time.”
Source: https://venturebeat.com/2015/11/29/how-yplan-is-building-a-1b-business-on-helping-you-have-fun/
My reflection on YPlan failure
[1] No ladies on board at the top management position, only a bunch of geek.
In my book this era is over for many reason, at first event planning is mostly a ladies affair, they are more knowledgeable about this market is no doubt that. As for top management, background diversification is just intuitive, common business senses apply here, with a better diversification at the top management level they would avoid many costly mistake and be more reflexive rather then reactive to compensate their lack of market knowledge.
About Festo, ladies are welcome to fulfill top management position is no doubt about that, shoot out for Texas Guinan the nightclub queen of the speakeasy era . As for the lead consortium, we have 21 divisions inside the ecosystem, obviously we want diversification with some emphasis over people that as passion for the game.
[2] Start with the idea of building a billion dollar business.
Is a cliché to say you don’t do it for the money to be successful, but is true you just don’t, if your ambition is to do it for the money in that case you will be better off as a speculator not a entrepreneur.
About Festo, we push the concept further, we build the internet of value to create richness, making money is the old paradigm, we see opportunity in cooperation rather then competition. The major difference is the leverage at the value creation level, when your goal is to create richness you will take a buck and you will x10 the value out of it, when you are in the market to make money aka play the zero sum game you will chase the buck to try making your cut.
We set three vector to create richness, we share revenue, we share equity and we share opportunity.
[3] Competition like Facebook, Fever, etc…High burn rate, loss ~$6.5m last years
Obviously when you compete with Facebook you need a rock solid value proposition for customer acquisition. Pitching *mobile first* don’t represent a market edge over competition because now every serious business is on mobile those days. You need to add other service around your core value proposition to gain customer retention. About the high burn rate, VC where asking for it with their irrelevant metric blunted with wishful thinking.
About Festo, we don’t try to compete over user base growth “UBGs” metric, but on value per user, we partner with our user base for value creation, for Facebook the user base is just a by product. Basically Festo is a *value first* business that growth bottom up with is user base.
[4] Big spending on marketing plot with A list celebrities.
Each is own, not my cup of tea.
[5] Has to few location, only 3 locations after 3 years and poor software.
About the poor software, having external security audit from days one could be a good idea, just saying. Poor market localisation research give them that result, you need to understand local culture, the TimeOut acquisition will help them on that front.
About Festo, Proof of Work is local, Proof of Stake is global and Proof of Trust is universal, more on that in later post about consensus.
[6] Pivoting without navigating, which mean high development cost.
Releasing a MVP and scaling for a large scale production system are two different world.
About Festo, we don’t release any MVP because is just irrelevant to do so, about the fundamental, we talk about a multi chain architecture with SDK + DSL with four core function for DLTs to scale for production any application.
[7] Top management as no clue about the event discoveries value proposition.
Monolith application are not interesting for customer experience because the end user as to navigate over countless application.
About Festo, we want people from the industry on board, the organisational structure is a distributed collaborative system (DCSs), our mind set is to create richness for all stakeholders. We try to recruit people with passion for their game, as my self my passion is the internet of value or maybe I should write modealization to be more on point.
[8] YPlan as more than 1 million download but zero user retention.
All monolith application as the same problem, some are more successful but by the fact they are not a communication medium is tough for them to monetize their audience.
At the end of the days is quite the reason why we are building a “MVE” maximum viable ecosystem, we call the shot “value,value,value” this is what matter for Festo.
To be continued.
