Richmond event tech startup OccasionGenius founder Nate Marcus believes “Shared experiences make life better.”
Keeping this vision in mind, the OccasionGenius team spent its time during the pandemic quietly innovating in preparation of a surge in ramped-up travel driven by a pent-up demand for live events.
The platform, created in 2017, pulls in public data from large event booking sites and local organizations’ regional web calendar and feeds it through its system to personalize it for users. Marcus said this kind of premium source of events has never been done before in the events industry.
Marcus recently revealed what he calls the startup’s “game-changing” work and shared how OccasionGenius survived the devastating time when in-person events and travel were impacted during the peak of Covid-19.
When the pandemic hit, Marcus said there was pressure to pivot to a short-term solution to survive. Instead, he and his team decided to look ahead to develop enhancements that would benefit the company long-term.
“It created a singular focus for us, as a company, to make sure we were going to provide what the industry wanted before the pandemic,” he said. “When events came back, I wanted to make sure we were perfectly positioned to be the solution.”
The solution was to give the platform the ability to not just host event information but to allow users to book tickets to those events, as well.
OccasionGenius clients, which include hotels and airlines hoping to inspire consumers to travel to events, can now give their customers the option book events without leaving the client’s site. The updates also give clients the ability to monetize ticketed event content through booking fees and affiliate partnerships.
“During the pandemic, we developed the technology behind Phase 2. We now allow our clients to facilitate native ticketing,” he said. “We are back in 150 markets, and we’ve increased the quality of our event inventory.”
Because the pandemic hit the travel industry hard, Marcus said the startup is expanding its client-base to include dating and babysitting apps and media and newsletter companies.
Marcus said the startup’s mission to bring new experiences to people’s lives is what kept his team focused on coming out of the pandemic successfully.
“We knew that if we could survive this, there would be a huge light at the other end of the tunnel,” he said. “(There is) so much pent-up desire for live events and a huge spotlight on what events are coming back; We knew we had to make it.”