For businesses vying for customers’ attention, hosting events may get people in the door. But who are those people? And will they come back next time?
A Twin Cities startup called Dojour started as a way for city dwellers to track events at their favorite venues, like the brewery they go to for live music or the store that offers cooking classes. The app organizes them by date or theme in a stream like other social media applications.
Working with the businesses that populate the app with events revealed the challenges those event planners face in tracking their success. So Dojour founders Conor and Timmer O’Phelan are adding tools to track the data that can decipher which events attract which people and how often they show up.
Conor O’Phelan, a user experience designer, planted the seed for Dojour while living in Chicago and trying to keep track of the various events and attractions of a new city. He noticed a pattern: He kept missing news of experiences he would have liked to attend.
“I frequented these places but didn’t follow them on Facebook and didn’t figure out when things were happening,” he said.
To create the kind of experience he wanted, Dojour needed to recruit businesses hosting events. So far, they have about 250 businesses on board and 3,000 users. To get there, they’ve listened closely to what businesses want, and that’s the track they’ve followed since.
First, O’Phelan said they had to make posting about events easier for businesses, which were leery of signing on to another platform needing constant attention, like other social media accounts and a website.
“We didn’t want to be another one of those,” he said. “We wanted to be the first place people posted their events.”
Businesses can post event details and conduct ticketing through Dojour, which is compatible with website management systems, Google, and Facebook. Dojour then pushes the updates to those other sites, making the process easier for event planners. For events that sell tickets, Dojour takes a fee of 3.5 percent plus a dollar.
O’Phelan said he’s excited about the possibility of helping businesses improve how they track which events are most successful and use that data to make marketing decisions.
“Right now that data is all over the place or not there at all,” he said.
Businesses on Dojour span multiple cities and are concentrated in the Twin Cities and Austin, Texas, where co-founder Timmer O’Phelan lives. In the Twin Cities, businesses using Dojour include theaters, art galleries, cooking classes, breweries, and others.
As a member of the first Lunar Startups cohort, Dojour has been able to tap into a network that makes the startup life a little less lonely and helps with the facets of business where O’Phelan is “not as well-versed,” like marketing.
The year-long Lunar Startups program in St. Paul announced the companies making up its second cohort in February.
