Idea: A virtual event management service. Many companies use event management providers for large-scale events such as conferences, seminars, trade shows, or workshops. This virtual event management service would help you in a similar vein: supporting with event design and planning, marketing and promotion, speaker acquisition, on-site management, and post-event follow-up. It would specifically focus on providing networking, and engagement opportunities to participants through virtual networking rooms, and multi-modality engagement channels.
Problem: Large-scale webinars and online events have become more normalised after COVID, but larger events lack the intimacy, networkability, and engagement of F2F events. Oftentimes, people don't attend conferences to learn, but to grow their network, and have fun. These two essential elements haven't been carried through to the virtual world effectively.
Insight: Although most professionals have become familiar with virtual conferencing tools, there is still an awkwardness that comes with using them in large scale environments. Once you get over 100 people, there is only a one-way interaction.
Validation method: You can try to validate this through B2B marketing and cold messaging. For the B2B marketing, you can try Google, and LinkedIn ads targeting virtual events, and seminars. Internal comms, and marketing teams in the banking, FMCG, tech or luxury industry may be promising. Keywords that you could focus on are: "online seminar tips", "hosting an online event". Your LinkedIn copy could say, "Another boring webinar? Not today". For the cold messaging, you could send messages to people through LinkedIn, and get referrals from your network. The MVP of the product would be you running a Zoom event for a client at a heavily discounted cost.
Notes: The business has many ways to go with many competitors, particularly with the Metaverse looming. The eventual vision for this startup would be to create a new video conferencing platform that is specifically catered to large-scale events. In the interim, you would be focusing on the virtual event management portion of the business, helping drum up the right level of interest and support, and becoming an expert at using Zoom, using and building some Zoom apps along the way.
Why am I doing this? I’m an innovation consultant who helps businesses build new products, and ventures. And I want people to see how easy it is to build, and validate an initial business idea. Hopefully inspiring them to start their own business.
Am I worried that people will take the ideas? I hope they do. These ideas will hopefully make the world a better place. Just remember, “Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything”
For the next month, I’m going to be posting a new startup idea everyday. These ideas aren’t supposed to be final, or even good. What’s most likely is that within a month of testing the idea, the idea would have completely pivoted, but this is a starting point.