Lee:
Welcome to the Event Engine podcast. This is your host, Lee. And on today’s show, we have the one, the only. It’s Mr. Tim Davies from, well, Event Engine. Tim, how are you today?
Tim:
Very well. And it’s good to finally be invited on to my own podcast.
Lee:
Well, you’ve been on before.
Tim:
Well, I have.
Lee:
It was just that long ago. Yeah. It’s faded into distant past. But folks, we’ll make sure that we do put links to previous episodes where Tim and I have collaborated. So for the folks who don’t know who you are, Tim, which shouldn’t be very many, could you just give us a little potted bio of who you are and what you do within Event Engine?
Tim:
Sure. I’m Tim. I’m one of the cofounders, along with Lee of Event Engine. We started the company in 2016, and we essentially provide a whole bunch of web tech for events, solve problems help people build websites and connect with one another and stuff like that. My role is very much non-tech. I’m the guy who will go out and have conversations and find out what people’s problems are. And then I will throw curveballs galore at Lee and the team to say, Here’s a gap, here’s something that needs to happen. I’ve got no idea how we’re going to be able to do it, but can we do it? And we’ll have fun making it happen.
Lee:
We will. And actually then on that, let’s talk about one of those gaps. We had a conversation a few months ago now about planning for an upcoming Expo, and you highlighted something that was obvious in hindsight, but that’s the thing, isn’t it? We often don’t recognise the problems that are staring us in the face. I don’t want to spoil anything. Why don’t you just share what your overall thought process was? So set the scene and then tell us your overall thought process now. Now and again, might ask you a few questions to expand ground on something.
Tim:
Cool. So we are part of the EventTech community. We’ve been around, like I said, since 2016. Event Tech Live and all that community They’re our buddies. The show EventTech Live is something that we’ve exhibited at for several years. This year, I went to Adam Parry, the owner and organiser of Event Tech Live, to say, Look, I’ve got this nagging problem that happens each year. My suspicion is it’s not just happening at Event Tech Live. I think it probably happens at other events as well. If you think about the period towards the end of an event Some people call it the Wind Down or the Afterglow. But let’s be honest, it’s when the energy starts leaving the room because the visitors are doing this trickle of an exodus where visitor numbers are halving every 15 minutes or so. You can see at all the exhibitor stands, exhibitors are checking their phones. They’re looking like, Thank goodness, this is nearly over. Some aren’t. Some are properly engaged and they’re still buzzing with energy. Arguably, they should be because that time still represents significant investment. But if you take Event Tech Live, it’s a two-day show, and then run about the 2:00 PM period on day 2, that’s when that energy shifts.
Tim:
That still represents between that point and the end point when the doors close, that represents somewhere between 15, 20% of your time at the show. That represents for me as an exhibitor, 15 to 20% of my investment, not just my time, but obviously money in the stand as well. Add that up right across the whole hall. That’s a lot of investment in that hall that is in that 15 to 20 %, where a lot of exhibitors are checking out, they’re disengaging. Maybe they’re writing emails, maybe they’re sending a message to their loved ones to say, Hopefully, I’ll be back before I was expecting, or whatever it might be. Now, if you think about what else an exhibitor wants to do at an event, someone like me, I take that time, and I have done each year, as an opportunity to go and do some networking, to meet some people I’ve never met before, essentially, be on the lookout for potential partnerships. Now, that is not the top objective of exhibiting at an event. It might be for some people, but I think for most people, when they invest money at an event in an exhibition stand, their top priority is, I want leads in sales.
Tim:
That’s obvious. My realisation was that most expos, as far as I can see, put in infrastructure to achieve that top outcome of sales and leads. And any secondary outcome, any secondary objective, such as help people build partnerships, is almost like an afterthought. Typically, the technologies to help people communicate and match up at events will be geared towards the primary objective of sales and leads, not partnering. If you think about the questions that two exhibitors might ask one another, that might be stuff that’s more sensitive, more I don’t quite want to tell the public this stuff. For us in tech, the questions we might want to ask, and Lee, this is where you might want to add in a bit of meat to this bone, but it would be, for example, what are your coding standards? What technologies are you actually using? What platforms underpin everything that you build on? How Integratable actually actually are you? Do you just say you integrate with anything because you use Zapier? And these are the things which an exhibitor at Event Tech Live might not want to broadcast as part of their sales material to a potential buyer, but it It will be information that’s relevant to someone who is going to want to partner with them.
Tim:
I went to Adam Parry and said, I think there needs to be a different type of networking going on where matchmaking can happen, but hidden, below the surface where the visitors, the attendees, don’t get to see what’s going on. In fact, other exhibitors don’t get to see what’s going on unless they opt in to say, basically, Yeah, fine. I’ll show you yours. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. We set about creating something that we now call Rondayvoo Match, which does exactly that. It’s already launched for Event Tech Live 2025. It only launched just three days ago. Then we found that 50% already of exhibitors at Event Tech Live have said, Yeah, this is something I want. I’m opting into this. 20% have actually already completed their profiles to say, This is who I am, and this is the other exhibitor I want to partner with. It’s actually quite an exciting time right now. One of our ideas is coming to life.
Lee:
It’s really exciting, but it’s also, to me, blazingly obvious in hindsight. Let’s set an example here. Perhaps you are a web agency, so you provide Let’s take Event Engine. You provide a platform, a web building platform. We would, in our literature, say to people, Hey, we provide websites. We can design and build websites or provide you or build it. That’s our public-facing persona. However, and we don’t mind admitting this, behind the scenes, we actually partner with designers because we don’t have professional designers in-house. We will to partner with epic design houses all around the world to produce beautiful designs. What we might put in Rondayvoo Match is we do provide websites, but we’re looking to connect with partners who are designers or design agencies who can provide that service to us. We’re bringing our clientele to them and vice versa. These might be designers who can’t produce the web development themselves or the websites and would therefore want to partner with us. But that’s not really stuff I would want to put on my exhibitor profile that attendees are coming because an attendee doesn’t really care how I do it. The attendee is interested in, Can this company provide me with their experience with a nicely designed website built on a powerful platform that they can easily edit?
Lee:
That’s all they care about. How we do it, they don’t care about. So that’s where this system comes into play for us, where we can be honest. I mean, when we say honest, we’re not hiding anything from the public. But at this point we’re just saying, all right, well, this is us. This is us behind the scenes, as it were. And who else could we fit in with to support them or vice versa?
Tim:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the other things that led to this is some frustrations that we have had as a business over the last year. One of the hats I wear is Director of Partnerships. I’ll go out and start pressing the flesh with various people to see whether or not there’s any scope for partnering together. We tend to think that, Well, that begins with chemistry. Do I actually like this person? Do they seem trustworthy? All this stuff. And of course, that’s vitally important. But what we have found more than once is that there might be some chemistry, but once you start to look under the hood of one another’s what they actually do and how they go about it, it doesn’t take too long before you can see there’s really no scope here for developing things because we got different maybe coding philosophies standards.
Lee:
We do have a good example of that. Sorry to jump in there, mate, but I remember you introduced us to a company. You obviously had a good relationship, so there was certainly a vibe there. But when we went through the API documentation, organisation, we recognised that the way their API was built wasn’t something that we would easily be able to integrate with, et cetera. So it would probably create more problems than it would solve for clients. So this felt like it wasn’t something we would want to progress any further with. But if we’d have had access to that at a much earlier stage, that’s not to say you wouldn’t still continue that relationship as a networking relationship. But at least we knew at a partner level, we’d have known earlier on we don’t really want to touch that business because of the way they’re going about things, their lack of API or their lack of documentation or the methods they are using.
Tim:
Yeah, exactly. I think it’s also worth mentioning how easy We see Event Tech Live, and we have made it for exhibitors to engage with this whole thing. Event Tech Live uses the fair platform. We’ve made a very simple will opt in for exhibitors to decide for themselves, is this something you’re interested in doing or not? It’s a simple task, and they can just click yes or no. And if they click yes, then they are taking into the Rondayvoo match platform to fill out their profile and get on with it. It’s as smooth as possible.
Lee:
I think that’s testament to fair. So fair makes it very easy. They’ve got good documentation. We have the chemistry as well, so we’re able to work with them. And all we did there was created a task that automatically went to all the exhibitors. We asked them, What email do you want to use for this to opt in? They fill in their email and then they receive all of their access details. That way we’ve seen, as far as we’re concerned, unprecedented opt-in. 50% of exhibitors within three days is a phenomenal amount of people to opt into something where they only really have a paragraph of the concept as well. That show the power of the concept. Then to have people then continue to go through and to then fill in those profiles is nice validation for us. But again, going back to fair, fair making it that easy and being able to have that integration with them and with their API, etc, has certainly made it easier for us to gather exhibitor information. I think if we were to look at fair as a product outside of Rondayvoo Match for other for other organisations, for exhibitors, et cetera.
Lee:
So we would definitely recommend the fair product for your exhibition or event to get data from your exhibitors. So looking beyond EventTech Live, this is something that we’re proving here and we already feel is validated, like I said. But how do you see Rondayvoo match a service like this, benefiting other event organisers, other exhibitions, et cetera?
Tim:
Well, I think EventTech Live It’s the perfect training ground for experimentation. It’s obvious, really. It should be that. You see all sorts of tech in play anytime you go to Event Tech Live. Every year, there’s another piece of tech that you’re engaging with in order to get the most out of the event. It’s one thing for us to be excited two weeks out before the event to say, Wow, look at this take-up. Clearly, exhibitors are interested in this whole concept. It’ll be a completely different thing altogether after the event to measure, Well, how well did they actually engage with it? What are the stories that are coming out of that? And to see what case studies there may or may not be. Obviously, that’s going to be very interesting for us to take a look at at the end of Event Tech Live to determine whether or not this is something that we could broadcast to other expos and say, Look, have a think about that wind down period at the end of your event. Are your exhibitors wanting to get the most out of partnering during that time when the visitor numbers are shrinking? Ask them, Would they be interested in having a tool like this that’s in the background and not visible to the visitors to help them achieve their partnering goals?
Tim:
It is an exciting time. It’s also a very interesting time. I’m watching this very, very closely.
Lee:
Awesome. Well, thanks, man. What? Keep that here. Yes. All right. Well, Tim, thank you so much. It’s always great to have conversations with you when you share all the different ideas that you come up with. Many of them we don’t do because we have chats with other people and it’s either going to be super complicated and take years to develop or there just doesn’t seem to be an appetite. But this was one of those where people were just like, yeah, Yeah, man, I want to be able to talk to people. I go to events and I feel like I get a few leads in that. It’s a lot of money and a lot of time. There’s all these other people in the room I’m missing out on. Being able to add more value seemed to get people excited, and that got us excited. That got me and the team excited to develop this product. So we’re really, really super proud. And folks, you can go ahead and check it out over on eventengine.tv. But Tim, before we go, what’s the best way for people to connect with you? And then we’ll say goodbye.
Tim:
I’m always on LinkedIn, so you can find me there. Just Tim Davis, D-A-V-I-E-S, the Welsh way. Or there’s a contact form on eventengine.tv.
Lee:
Which goes to Tim. It goes to me. And I’ll ignore it. So folks, thanks very much. Leave your comments below if you’re watching on YouTube. If you’re not watching on YouTube and you’re listening in, then come over to YouTube and leave your comments below. Tim, thank you so much. Pleasure. Bye.
