Courtesy / Ben Moore
Eventective CEO Steve Robertson has been with the company since its founding 2003, e helping the Scarborough company grow to become a national search portal.
April 24, 2019
Online events platform, generating a million visits per month, launches new features
Courtesy / Ben Moore
Eventective employees have developed new features for the national event search portal, to filter for things like price and number of attendees.
Eventective.com, an online event planning platform in Scarborough, has launched new features designed to make it easier for users to search for venues based on factors like location, price, number of attendees, and event type.
Founded in 2003, the company is headquartered at 10 Plaza Drive and employs 20 people, including account managers, developers and marketers, CEO Steve Robertson told Mainebiz. The national search portal today lists more than 100,000 venues, 250,000 event spaces and 175,000 vendors, like DJs and caterers, nationwide, throughout the U.S. and Canada, according to its website.
The company was founded by Alan Hyman. According to the website, he was in the process of helping to plan his daughter's wedding.
“Frustrated by the lack of online resources and especially by the fact that there was no one place he could go to see all the available event venues in a particular locale, Alan came up with the idea for Eventective,” the website says.
To get the company going, he turned to a team that had worked with him on two previously successful start-ups. Robertson was part of that team.
Early Google? Not great
“In 2003, Googling wasn’t great,” Robertson said. “A lot of businesses still didn’t even have websites, so the phonebook was still the option.”
The team built a search engine that allowed people to search for venues, and created the ability for venues to input their information.
On the latter, there were no takers, Robertson recalled.
“So we scoured the web and phonebooks and everything to build an index of places to have events,” he said. “Then we evolved to talking with them and working with them.”
At the time, he said, Eventective was pretty much the only website of its kind.
“Since then, others have popped up, especially in the wedding space,” he said.
“There’s a lot of competition in wedding websites, but not for party and meeting websites,” he said. “That’s where we’re differentiating ourselves form the competition. We cross the gamut of event types.”
Along with WeddingWire, GigSalad, headquartered in Missouri, and GigMasters, in Connecticut, are considered top competitors in the field, according to owler.com.
Robertson became CEO of the business in 2012.
The No. 1 mission is to have “great content,” he said.
“Google rewards that,” he explained. “It results in traffic, because Google sees you as an authority.”
Pricing info is key
Imperatives of the online world in recent years have allowed Eventective to add a key feature – pricing.
“Not many years ago, venues wouldn’t share their pricing information,” he said. “They didn’t want their competition to know. But the reality of the online world is, you need to publish how much it costs to have an event at your place if you want to satisfy users. Users are used to getting information instantly. They don’t want to sit on the phone and find out that you’re too expensive for them.”
As a result, the company launched a new tool in early April that allows users to filter by price, as well as location, number of attendees, date and event type.
Also new, over the past year, is a tool that allows users to build their own website for their events.
“If you’re having wedding, you can build a wedding website,” he explained. “We have themes for each type of event.”
The company is now working on next-level design for the feature.
Whereas the company began compiling listings by scouring phonebooks early on, a transition began to occur around 2009, when venues began seeking out the website in order to list themselves.
“That said, we are still scouring the web for businesses that do events,” Robertson added.
The website receives 30,000 visits per day, for nearly 1 million per month. Traffic rates differ through the year. January, for example, is busy: “Over the holidays, everybody gets engaged and plans the family reunion,” he said. “So our traffic goes through the roof in January. In July, traffic is lower.”
Year-over-year traffic has grown at a clip of 20% to 30% per year, he said.
The revenue stream from subscriptions that venues pay to be listed has grown at a clip of 20% per year.
The majority of users are individuals; it’s estimated that 5% to 10% are professional planners.
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