Where everything is event worthy

You will find it here – everything from an obscure gully cricket match in Peshawar, a small tea party for a bunch of friends in Osaka to big-ticket events such as the annual Summer Sizzle with 2016 US presidential candidate and former Florida governor Jeb Bush in Iowa.

For friends Amit Panchal and Ruchit Patel, everything is – literally – event worthy. The two manage what is arguably the world’s largest repository of city events (allevents.in).

“This is a user-driven platform and easy to access through a Facebook account. Users can create a new event, which they are organising and share details about an event that they plan to attend.

This way, an event gets popular beyond one’s Facebook contacts. And on top of it, it is free to post or access the event database,” says 26-year-old Panchal. 

allevents.in was jointly developed by Panchal and Patel four years ago with about 5,000 events of 100 cities being listed on it. “Our portal had reached 500 hits per day by the first month of launch in April 2011. Soon, it grew to three million events by the end of the first year,” adds Patel, who lives in Gandhinagar.

Today, allevents.in lists 25 million events happening in 35,000 cities spread across 220 countries, making it one of the largest event aggregators. allevents.in provides listings and comprehensive details of events as per specific geographies with a special focus on discovering local events. 

Its popularity can be gauged from the fact that it has partnered with Bhutan Tourism to promote its cultural activities and at the same time it provides city plug-in for apps such as MakeMyTrip and Indore City app to inform people about events happening in their respective cities.

For someone who was rejected by most recruiters during campus placement in engineering college in 2010 before a local IT company picked him up, Panchal has indeed come a long way.

“My family was very happy. I would be the first to do a job in my family,” Panchal recalls. But within two months of training he was shown the door by the company.

The jobless youth had no alternative but to follow the family tradition of self-employment. He started an IT services firm, AmiTech Business Solutions with his engineer friend, Patel, 26, as a partner. 

But the idea of creating a ready reckoner of events came to him when he struggled to locate lectures happening in the city. “I was curious to listen to successful people and was keen to attend their talks and speeches. But because of lack of any single-point information, I missed many. So, we created a platform detailing all-events-in-city - as the name suggests,” he adds.

The platform has categories of Business, Concerts, Festivals, Music, Sports, Parties, Exhibitions, Meetups, Performances among other events. “It's a user-friendly platform and can be accessed by a Facebook ID,” adds Patel.

Starting with a seed capital of ₹10 lakh, which they had earned from earlier IT business, they rented an office. Server cost and salaries are still the biggest component of overall costs. 

The revenue comes from Google Ads as well as paid featured event postings by organisers such as dramas, public events, shows and concerts.

The total revenues were around ₹6.3 crore (about $1 million) last fiscal and continue to grow rapidly.

The company has a team of 15 members, most of them based in Ahmedabad, while it has representatives in Bengaluru, Egypt and Singapore.

The recruitment process, as Patel explains, is unconventional too. Selection of candidates is not done on the basis of certificates or marks obtained, but by the ability to crack a set challenge and a test of persistence and commitment to work.

“We give them a week's time to solve some of the toughest challenges in their functional areas. This tests every aspect that we look for. Grades or academics do not matter much. Our last recruit was a 12th standard drop-out,” says Panchal.

Having a successful business model and extraordinary global reach, allevents.in now plans to venture into the ticketing business. “There is potential and also the need. For many events for which tickets/passes are required, our platform ends up providing only information. We want to expand our offering and start ticketing on our platform like bookmyshow.com and others,” adds Panchal.Right now, the duo aren’t keen on external funds from private equity players and venture capitalists. “Our core team has three people and we are earning by learning. We don’t want investor interference. Therefore, we are not raising funds,” says Panchal.