Any time you go to a conference, whether as a sales and marketing exercise, or as an executive speaking, there is a cost associated with it. For the former, it includes the cost of the venue and a booth plus hotels, travel and meals for employees manning the booth. For executives, it’s time away from the office, the cost of a ticket to attend, and travel expenses. How do companies justify the cost of attending these events?
Until now, it was quite difficult to do, but Sproxxy, an early-stage company, is trying to change that by building a platform to manage conference-related activities while helping clients understand the ROI of attending these events. Today the startup officially launched after raising $1.1 million to get the company off the ground.
Melanie Samba, the founder and CEO of Sproxxy, was 20 years into her career in marketing and communications, managing 12 executives who attended a total of 80 conferences a year and managed it all in Excel spreadsheets. He wasn’t looking to start a software company, but he had a kind of inkling that there had to be a better way to handle this information, and he would later launch Sproxxy to build the platform he envisioned.
“We are positioned as a conference information platform. And what we do is quantify the activity of the conference. So we help brands demonstrate the business impact of attending conferences and knowing the ROI or the value of speaking, sponsoring and attending an industry event,” Samba told TechCrunch.
He says this can involve pre-planning, including finding the right conferences to attend, working across departments to coordinate around attendance, and post-conference analysis, which includes figuring out whether it was worth the cost in time and resources to attend. He says at the end of the day, the company is focused on providing data, analysis and insights about what the company gained (or didn’t) by participating.
After coming up with the idea, Samba hired a company to build the initial version of the software and was able to sell its first license to a company that managed 60 clients on the platform. Last year, it decided it was time to bring development in-house and rebuild the product. Today, it has a team of three engineers and a product manager.
He says there seems to be demand with a pipeline of 1200 companies he processes and hopes to get on the platform. The target market is mid-sized businesses to businesses looking for a way to manage this process.
She said that as a solo black woman founder who is also the mother of a young child, she worried about the fundraising process. He had good reason to be. Black founders, regardless of gender, raised less than 1% of all venture capital invested in 2023. He said the challenge was getting into the room and helping investors understand the value of the product.
He eventually found Ivy Ventures, a company that invested a modest $500,000 to get Sproxxy off the ground and later added another $600,000. Samba aims to raise a total of $1.8 million and is well on its way to that goal, while discussing the remaining money with other investors to complete the round.
