Eventful, originally named EVDB (Events and Venue Database) and founded by Brian Dear in January 2004, is one of San Diego’s startup success stories. CEO Jordan Glazier came on board in April of 2006 and brought with him International business development skills and 4 plus years of management experience at eBay. I recently sat down with Glazier to get a behind-the-scenes look at the past, present, and future of Eventful.

According to Glazier, Eventful’s primary goal is…

…to have the largest and most comprehensive selection of everything that is happening on the market.

That’s a pretty all-encompassing statement, but Eventful is using three distinct sources of data to accomplish that objective. They’re constantly crawling event data from across the web, they’re pulling in data from partner feeds, and of course there’s the user created events—which at any given time accounts for over 100,000 distinct events. According to Glazier, Eventful’s main competition doesn’t include the seemingly obvious (a Yahoo property), Zvents, or Meetup, but Print and the old-fashioned resources available for discovering events. He sees Eventful’s greatest battle to be changing the accepted norms for where people find event-related information.

Of course Eventful aims to support users’ preferred method of finding events, whether that be online, via email, or on their mobile phone. In the race to be relevant to a mobile lifestyle, Eventful recently released an iPhone application. Glazier admits the development team opted for a quick deployment over a robust feature set, but that future updates will add in additional functionality.

One feature that is available both on the website and via the iPhone app is Demand—which appears to offer the greatest opportunity for revenue and new user registrations. Glazier says that no other service is offering users the same opportunity to self-identify themselves as a passionate fan, or offering performers the same access to their passionate fan base. Here’s how Demand works:

  • Members can “demand” that any entertainer perform in their city.
  • Performers can work with Eventful to get access to a performer dashboard that shows them a myriad of metrics related to location demands and user demographics. They can also use Eventful widgets to display “Demand It” buttons across their various web properties (eg. MySpace home page). Bonus: the widget automatically locates the “Demand It” request.
  • Eventful builds relationships with music and event promoters who pay to use the Demands service for information on where to schedule events.

Essentially Demand is designed to be a win for everyone. Performers and bands get solid data on where they should tour, members can demand that their favorite band plays in their city, and Eventful makes a profit from their relationship with the event promoters. Supposedly the system works. Take, for instance, Paramore who reportedly had 40,000 Eventful users demanding them before becoming an official Eventful performer using the Demand service. Now that they’re on board, Paramore has seen the number of users demanding them triple, and they now have the ability to message every fan (not that they should), which is something they can’t do on MySpace or Facebook.

Quick Stats

  • $10 million in series C funding (total funding = $19.6 million)
  • 8 million registered users
  • 55,000 performers using Demands
  • > 75,000 events resulting from Demand service
  • > 100,000 user created events at any given time

To Watch or Not

Glazier was to reluctant to provide any concrete financial information, other than the already public funding figures, but he says that the team is working extremely hard to drive revenue and turn profitable by Q4 of 2009. They plan to do it through syndication of event data to paying customers, online and email advertising, and integrated sponsorship with music promoters.

In addition to a strong business model and a new partnership with Ticketmaster, Eventful also appears to be recession proof. While other web startups are hibernating funds for a brutal economic winter, Eventful is hiring—a fact that Glazier pointed out on several occasions. Eventful isn’t going anywhere. They’re focus may have shifted a bit, but they seemed to have found a comfortable niche with monetizing performer demands and simultaneously satisfying their users’ performer-related wishes.