Event planning is a big industry in Nigeria considering the number of events ranging from weddings, seminars, workshops to house warming ceremonies to funerals hosted every week in the country particularly on weekends. Almost everything good has a celebration to go with in Nigeria and this has made the industry big.

To be fair however, those in the business of events planning have not really had smooth sails despite the growth of the industry as one of the challenges encountered has been that of the amount of time wasted and unnecessary money spent on marketing.

However, that is about to be a thing of the past as Nigerian Startup Doingsoon has launched its event discovery and ticketing platform to help organizers promote their events without spending money on marketing or wasting unnecessary time on social media.

DoingSoon which started as an experimental project is a distributed event ticketing system that lets anyone book or buy event tickets through platforms they already use.

The startup launched in December with its minimum viable product (MVP) a distribution system allows it to distribute events created on its platform through various channels to automatically create exposure for events, help organisers reach large audiences and allow Nigerians to discover events online.

While speaking on the platform, co-founder Shina Memud said,  “All over the world, event organisers have always struggled with finding attendees for their events. It is costly, time consuming and sometimes difficult to find the right tool to manage their events.

“Take Eventbrite has an example. They don’t accept local currency for events created for Nigeria, which forces the organizers to request for bank transfers or link to External Payment Options like Paystack. Using external payment options creates the additional problem of managing payments and attendees separately.”

The startup also claims it allows organisers to reach millions of Nigerian with zero marketing costs, request custom information for event registrations, create complex ticket pricing, and manage their bookings and tickets with a simple-to-use dashboard.

According to Memud, “Our business model is quite simple and straightforward. We charge 10 per cent from every successful transaction. We pay out to our organizers the same day the event ends, mainly to protect our users from any fraudulent or cancelled events.”

Currently DoingSoon allows free event listing, but it will be launching paid events this month.

So far, we have hosted 15 events, and more have been added for 2018 from over 100 organisers. This will surely grow as we are working extensively on marketing,” Memud said. “Considering the problem we are trying to solve is universal, we do plan to expand to other countries in the near future, most likely starting from 2019.”

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