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Anthony Rose: Hello, I’m Anthony, founder at SeedLegals and every day I talk to amazing founders on SeedLegals. And today I’m talking with James from Rodeo. So James, tell us about Rodeo. What do you do?
James Mayes: Rodeo is a software platform for event, community and media producers. We aim to aggregate the assets that they have. Most organizers in either of these three spaces currently use a variety of point solutions. We plan to offer them a platform solution and, in doing so, really unlock the value of their data to see what their community or their audience really want.
Anthony Rose: So instead of using Meetup, Eventbrite, Luma, you’re going to have the next generation in events and community platforms, that’s Rodeo.
James Mayes: Yes, the next generation of content, community and event platforms. We’re going to unlock the GDP of interesting. What does Anthony find interesting? Where does he go? What’s he reading about? Which videos does he watch after the event? From there we can do all sorts.
Anthony Rose: And no doubt find events for me in a city for me or online based on the things I like.
James Mayes: Absolutely.
Anthony Rose: That sounds interesting and a lot less work than searching for events manually. If you find them for me, I’m going to do more.
James Mayes: Well, the other thing that I think is a game changer for this industry especially is that when you’re running these things on platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn, they’re gathering all this data on you and then selling it to the highest bidder. That’s fine. That’s the way the tech world operates. What we want to do is look into ways in which we can share some of that revenue back with the community organizers who actually do the work and help make communities more sustainable.
Anthony Rose: So that sounds amazing. Mind the product is famous for all product designers. I’m guessing the next gig is called Rodeo because it ain’t your first rodeo.
James Mayes: Exactly that. Myself, my two co-founders, Josh and Andy, we’ve both had numerous adventures in startup world before. So as you say, we’ve got a little bit of grey hair going on and this is not our first rodeo.
Anthony Rose: What stage are you at and your fundraising right now?
James Mayes: We are prototyping right now. My belief is that pretty much everything in the world of event tech looks like the wrong end of a horse. So a key part of Andy’s responsibility series to help us build something that people actually want to use. I mean, take a look at Meetup for example. When was the last time you saw it meaningfully change? The UX hasn’t changed in a decade but the web has moved on. So just started, to the second part of your question, talking about the raise. We started putting an angel round together at the start of this year, but I got some health news. So we put it on ice until such time as we could go at it with confidence. But one of the early commits was a gentleman who is currently a senior engineering director at Facebook. And his feedback was “I know you as a founder are backing for that alone, but hearing what you talked about, I want to come in for slightly more than usual”. So we’ve got some very, very interesting names lined up already. But then we got to the point where we were ready to press the button and that lift is in need of some partnership with somebody to help with things like tax compliance, legal compliance, and maybe even a few more smarts around fundraising strategy. Hence we’ve been in touch.
Anthony Rose: Who should approach you to use Rodeo?
James Mayes: The first communities that we want to bring on board are things like product and UX, meetups and organizations. Really help us find the things that are wrong. Because honestly, if you’ve ever taken a UXer through a new platform, you know what I mean. They can find the holes everywhere. So we’re gonna start with those communities, but then expand to tech meetups in general, particularly across southern England where we’re based down in Brighton. So we wanna be really accessible and get that feedback and then expand from there. But we’ve got a number of conferences, tech conferences, particularly who said, this is absolutely the sort of thing that we could use. I think a key part of it for them is that when they use something like Tito or Eventbrite, what they get back from that is, these are the people coming to your event. They get names, they get email addresses, they get some receipts. The media hosting capacity that we want to offer them, can develop much, much deeper insights than they’re used to seeing. And that will help them deliver better events for their customers. We also believe we can go further than that and then help to make them more commercially sustainable.
Anthony Rose: So your audience is anyone who wants to run an event or, you know, or be part of an event, presumably.
James Mayes: Event organizer. Yep. Media producer. Community organizer. These are all people who should be able to take value from Rodeo. We will very much be undertaking continuous discovery and we’ll be led by what actually gives the customers value.
Anthony Rose: All right, well at SeedLegals we do lots of events, conferences, we and many startup groups and so on. So, if you’re a solution for that, I’m super looking forward to using Rodeo. So James, how do people get in touch with you and Rodeo to find out more?
James Mayes: james.mayes@the.rodeo.com, or find me on LinkedIn, frankly. I am incredibly easy to find. After having run events for 20 odd years and been fairly noisy on social media throughout, I’m about as easy as it comes. I’m not hard to find.
Anthony Rose: James, that was fantastic. Loved chatting. And if anyone wants to find out more, they know where to find you now.
James Mayes: Fantastic. Thanks so much for the opportunity.
