Two in one Startups

Hey again guys!

Yesterday I tried Spontano, a Startup from Stockholm, created to be the interphase between customers and events. I got in contact with the company’s founder Ludvig Linse through email. The venture itself is a platform/marketplace for events that haven’t been sold out and therefore have tickets left, which are then offered on the platform for a better price. Like any type of last minute booking sites its target audience is spontaneous, hence the name Spontano. The Website itself targets mostly young active people, therefore the founder was excited to try his new ideas and interphase on me. First we got to try a different website layout, and gave him so pointers why it was good and what was less good.
After this I tried Ludvigs own website which was different in many ways. He wanted me to give him feedback of the customer experience. So what I did was more or less playing around with his sight for 20 minutes and went through all the steps.

And I was impressed. I myself have worked with startups trying to create good working websites, and it always sounds easier than it is. There are always things that the creators haven’t thought about because they are too close to the creation themselves, but in this case I was not able to find any big glitches. It is impressive to have created this in such a short time and I believe that this venture could be very successful if they get its product out there even more.

After trying this I contacted an acquaintance of mine. Who I remembered had created something similar. I did the same for my friend as for Ludvig, I tried his venture as well. It is very similar to Spontano in many ways. That is why it got me thinking of it as I reviewing Spontanos website. It is called Heyeventand it is a platform for events in general. It connects all Facebooks events and enables you to easily find those close to your location. This Startup is the same age as Spontano, but instead the founder, Jonatan Heyman has gotten a lot of traction abroad. The Startup is really successful.

This is also obvious in the customer interaction on the site. You notice right away that the person that wrote the code behind the sight has worked on venture projects before and has created many websites. Here as well, I could not really be of that much of help as I had hoped in the beginning, as the products themselves were already so good. The layout is very modern. The only negative feedback I gave was that the website was a bit to crowed. That it is similar to the new Facebook, too much happening, advertisements everywhere. This compared to a favorite of mine, apples website. I know they cannot reach this completely as Jonatan has a very different product. Nevertheless, I said that he had consider changing the layout a bit earlier and therefore though my feedback on the matter was interesting.

I gave Jonatan as well as Ludvig the feedback about signing up with Facebook. This is just a laze man’s way to solve a coding/interaction problem. I am not a fan of signing up with Facebook, because it only empowers Facebook, no one else earns money or gains anything form this. And it creates a deeper, ‘Big Brother sees you’ issue. All the information that these two sites and many more, give to Facebook is then stored and sold. Nevertheless, I know that many of their customers are lazy and like this feature. So therefore I also understand why their websites carry the feature.

Something that struck me is that both this websites are into delivering events. Spontano those it towards a niche market and HeyEvent towards a broader mass market. It might be beneficial for them both to meet up and discuss merging. I believe this would probably be hard to convince them to do as they have worked alone with their projects, their ‘babies’. Nevertheless, they aren’t really competitors. Hence a merger could empower them both in a growing new market.

https://www.spontano.se/tour

http://heyevent.com/