From pottery lessons to walking tours and home cooking classes, group experiences are a great way to spend an evening in good company.
Occasion, a Chicago-based startup, wants to make it easier for organizers to put on such events by bringing booking, payments, customer service and marketing into a single application.
“If you want to sell shoes or t-shirts online, you can go to a tool like Shopify and set up your store, and they’ll give you an entire e-commerce platform that powers their shopping cart solution,” said founder Aksh Gupta. “But if you are a business that sells services, there’s currently not that many options.”
Occasion was born out of Gupta’s frustrations with booking a tennis court to play with a friend. The two played at a club that only accepted bookings by phone, so Gupta had to call back and forth both with his friend and the tennis club multiple times before settling on a time that both worked and was available.
Wondering why his club still took bookings by phone, Gupta started researching the software booking market. What he found was plenty of solutions for one-on-one services like a hair cuts and beauty appointments, but that the offerings quickly grew more scarce for services that required coordination within a larger group of people.
In that gap, Gupta saw an opportunity. In 2013, he started the work on an all-in-one logistics solution for group experiences that would allow operators to display availability and take bookings directly though a website or Facebook profile.
But given the particulars of the group experience industry, Gupta also saw an opportunity to help service providers reach broader audiences.
“Because you are not going by yourself, there are enhanced social media digital marketing components that we can leverage,” said Gupta. “Let’s say you’re organizing a team event for six of your friends and you don’t want to pay for everybody, but I want to invite my friends to join me. We make that stuff very easy.”
Occasion also integrates with a number of advertising platforms to engage users who looked at an event or class but never ended up booking, and to re-engage customers who’ve attended events in the past.
But the most impactful innovation Occasion brings to the table, said Gupta, is a feature it doesn’t have: a shopping cart.
After testing the product in a number of iterations, Gupta discovered that conversion rates were multiple times higher when customers bought tickets directly instead of adding them to a shopping cart first. Part of that is reducing the number of steps, but Gupta said the omission also makes the experience of booking a class online more akin to its real-life equivalent.
“The shopping cart is a very traditional way of selling products, and you can imagine yourself going through the process of adding products to a shopping cart at Target or Best Buy,” said Gupta. “But you wouldn’t take a shopping cart to a cooking school to book a class.”
Occasion has acquired almost 200 paying monthly customers since its launch in the middle of last year. That success has attracted the attention of a number of investors, including Chicago angel investment firm Hyde Park Angels, whose other portfolio companies include Base, FourKites and InContext Solutions.
On Tuesday morning, the company announced that it has raised a $1.25M seed round led by Hyde Park Angels and joined by Bluestein & Associates, Malwarebytes founder and CEO Marcin Kleczynski and serial entrepreneur Patrick Spain.
Gupta said the company will use the funding to bolster the 7-person team with hires in engineering, sales, marketing and customer success.
In addition to increasing Occasion’s sales efforts and brand recognition, Gupta said the company will continue to expand its core product’s features, and is currently in dialogue with several enterprise software providers to white label Occasion’s software as part of their core offerings.
Images via Occasion.
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