Attending a sales and marketing conference or an executive speech costs money. For the former, it includes space, a booth, accommodations, transport, and meals for booth workers. Executives must pay for tickets, travel, and time away from work. How do corporations justify event attendance costs?
It was challenging before, but Sproxxy, an early-stage firm, is providing a platform to manage conference-related activities and assist consumers in determining the ROI of attending. After funding $1.1 million, the venture started today.
After 20 years in marketing and communications, Sproxxy founder and CEO Melanie Samba managed 12 executives attending 80 conferences a year on Excel spreadsheets. She didn’t want to establish a software firm, but she had an epiphany that there had to be a better way to manage this information and founded Sproxxy to develop her platform.
We are a conference intelligence platform. Our task is to measure conference activities. Samba told Eltrys that they assist organizations in establishing the commercial benefit of attending conferences and the ROI of speaking, sponsoring, and attending industry events.
She suggests pre-planning to discover the proper conferences, cross-department teamwork to arrange attendance, and post-conference analysis to determine whether it was worth the time and resources. Ultimately, she argues, the corporation is focused on data, analytics, and insight into what it earned (or lost) by going.
Samba hired a business to construct the first version of the software and sold her first license to an agency with 60 customers on the platform. She chose to revamp the product and bring development in-house last year. She now has three engineers and a product manager.
She has 1200 firms she is working through to add to the platform, indicating demand. The target market is midsize to enterprise businesses wishing to handle this process.
A lone black woman entrepreneur and mother of a small child, she is concerned about funding. Her rationale was valid. No matter their gender, black innovators raised less than 1% of 2023 venture capital. She said the problem was getting investors in the room and explaining product value.
She formed Ivy Ventures, which funded $500,000 and then $600,000 in Sproxxy. Samba is on track to raise $1.8 million while negotiating the remaining funds with investors to complete the round.
