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Whenever you go to a conference, whether as a sales and marketing exercise, or an executive speaking, there is a cost associated with it. For the former, this includes the cost of the venue and booth as well as hotel, travel and food for the booth staff. For executives, it’s time away from the office, including ticket costs and travel costs to attend. How do companies justify the cost of attending those events?
Until now, it was very difficult to do, but sproxyOne early-stage company is trying to change this by building a platform to manage conference-related activities, while also helping clients understand the ROI of going to these events. The startup officially launches today after raising $1.1 million to get the company off the ground.
Melanie Samba, founder and CEO of Sproxy, spent 20 years in her career in marketing and communications, managing 12 executives, attending a total of 80 conferences a year, and managing it all in Excel spreadsheets. She wasn’t looking to start a software company, but she had a feeling there had to be a better way to handle this information, and she would later launch Sproxy to create the platform she envisioned. Was.
“We are positioned as a conference intelligence platform. And what we’re doing is measuring conference activity. “So we help brands prove the business impact of attending and speaking at conferences, sponsoring and knowing the ROI or value of attending an industry event,” Samba told TechCrunch.
She says this can include pre-planning, which includes finding the right conference to attend, inter-departmental collaboration to attend, and post-conference analysis, which includes figuring out whether it is worth attending. Worth the cost of time and resources. She says that at the end of the day, the company is focused on providing data, analysis and insight into what the company gained (or didn’t) achieve by participating.
After coming up with the idea, Samba hired a company to build an initial version of the software, and was able to sell its first license to an agency managing 60 clients on the platform. Last year, they decided it was time to bring development in-house and rebuild the product. Today, he has a team of three engineers and a product manager.
She says there is a demand, with a pipeline of 1,200 companies she is working with and looking forward to joining the platform. The target market ranges from medium-sized businesses to enterprises looking for a way to manage this process.
She said that as a single Black female founder who is also the mother of a young child, she was concerned about the funding process. He had good reason to be so. Black founders nurtured, regardless of gender less than 1% of all venture money invested in 2023. He said the challenge was to enter the room and help investors understand the value of the product.
Eventually they found a company called Ivy Ventures, which invested a modest $600,000 to get Sproxy off the ground. The remaining $500,000 came from industry angels and Techstars. Samba aims to raise a total of $1.8 million and is moving toward that goal, while discussing the remaining funds with investors including Ivy to fill out the round.
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