When a group of friends gather, the first thing that comes to mind is : Party! Although night life has considerably increased in metros and towns alike, the problem of finding events always existed. OyeParty, founded by Ranjan Kumar and Burhanuddin Pithawala just solves that problem for us. Currently operating in Bangalore,Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai – they provide updates and ticketing convenience for Nightlife events and parties in finest pubs and discos. Apart from that, one can find restaurants and request the team to organize events for special occasions. Recently, OyeParty has demoed in Startup Saturday Bangalore. We bring to you an exclusive interview with Ranjan Kumar. Read on!
From a background of working at ONGC/ITC, venturing into nightlife events & parties is a big shift. Tell us how the idea came about?
Like-minded people sharing similar passion create value and so was Oyeparty’s story. Me and Burhan co-founded this company as we both are party enthusiasts and love to explore good parties and hangouts. However, due to the market being unorganized, led us to disastrous evenings at times. We researched on ground to around 600 places in Bangalore to understand the problem statement and speculate solutions. Next, Oyeparty was born over a mug of coffee watching movie. Oyeparty pronounced as “OYE” Party signifies the importance of just going out and having a great party.
Early success in terms of proof of concept was encouraging. Day 1 of launch of website we got around 400 hits. The next big was new year season when we covered around 17 clubs & resorts in Bangalore. More importantly we had 45000 hits in Dec’12.
This gave us strength to expand in 4 more cities – Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai.
We take our pride to mention having 1400 registered users and strong social media connection with our customer.
Currently, your Facebook likes for Bangalore page is close to 6700, in just an year. What is your marketing strategy?
While Content remains the king, our marketing strategy has always been to reach out to customers with essentials first and desirable later. In terms of reaching out to the customer, our strategy has been to blend the social media touch with on counter experience and again leveraging it to social media. “Likes” and “Follows” are a byproduct of this.
We are also quite active on other social media sites and believe that it is essential for every startup to score high on the social quotient. Our Creative team runs various novel campaigns around partying which has helped us get a good fan following in a short time. In addition, SEO & SEM also contributes to the core of marketing.
As an entrepreneur, what are the hurdles you had to face while launching this startup?
I believe that the biggest hurdles that we faced during the early days were to convince ourselves to take the plunge and get going with our idea. There was an obvious gestation period when we had to convince friends and family who asked if it’s worth to leave a plum job and run after dreams. However, your innate desire to create something proves very important in such instances and that has helped us to always think that we can make it big.
Is the feature to buy tickets online currently live? I registered as an user and couldn’t find any “Buy” button near the events?
Events are a dynamic entity and the features like tickets may not be applicable to all events. The site is live and already caters to event tickets for various events, but as I said not all events may be ticketed. For events which don’t have ticketing, we have built Guest list provision where you can book free passes to the chosen event and hence avoid any last moment on counter surprise. Clubs and Lounges are any day more interested in bar sale than cover or entry charge or stag/couple for that matter.
What are the upcoming features in OyeParty?
Our vision is to be one global social media platform encompassing all horizons of Nightlife events industry . Soon we are coming with the Ver 2.0 of our website and the android app. Our aim is to make this market more organized and create a platform where people can find their interests and interact around their common interests like – good events, artists and more.
OyeParty recently demoed in Startup Saturday Bangalore. Please share with us the experiences of participating in the session.
It’s a great feeling to be able to gain the platform at Startup Saturday Bangalore. I had attended a few sessions as listener and had hoped to present my idea too. The welcome opportunity came this Saturday and the experience was amazing. My Demo felt more like a rollercoaster ride where every step was met with many questions and for me answering those questions helped the audience to understand my idea better. At the end of session, I also got some personal feedback from many enthusiastic entrepreneurs and some ideas were insightful.
What does your typical day look like? What is one good and bad thing about being an entrepreneur?
Our day starts with a usual starter meet where we discuss who is doing what on the day. Our organization structure is very lean and our team is great at planning and execution. Then we work in small groups or individually in our areas. The team gets together frequently over tea/ smoke to discuss problems, celebrate achievements of every member and finally sharing insights that you had with each other. Typically day ends up in some happening party socializing and understanding customers on spot.
What better can it be if you gotta learn and earn while partying? The best part of being entrepreneur is to do what you love to. The hard part of being an entrepreneur is self management at other aspects of your life. A very bad thing is that you can’t plan a vacation 🙁
What do we think of OyeParty?
Attending parties is fun. Not finding them nor organizing them. OyeParty takes the painful part of partying away – with their platform, one can find all the events in their city and buy tickets online. For special occasions, they also undertake event planning to take away your stress. A very good feature is crowd sourcing restaurant and event information. The tremendous growth in user base is a firm indication that OyeParty will only positively grow in the coming years.
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Photo Source: Pataphile
