Vendelux’s Reynolds is Making Sure Attending B2B Events is a Success Every Time
I had the pleasure of interviewing Alex Reynolds, Co-founder and CEO at Vendelux. Alex is a 3rd generation entrepreneur and started his career in management consulting at Bain. From there he joined Peek, a series A travel start-up, where he wore all kinds of hats and fell in love with start-ups. Alex spent the last four years building a start-up within a public company, scaling a 75-person, 8 figure revenue business. He left in October of 2021 to start Vendelux with long-time colleague Stefan Deeran.
Thank you so much for joining us!
Thanks so much for having me!
What motivated you to launch your startup?
In building the business at Shutterstock, my now co-founder and I discovered that events, conferences, and tradeshows could be some of the best ways for us to drive impact, when they worked well. When they didn’t, they were a big waste of time and money.
We wanted to make event success more repeatable, but discovered that there was a lack of tools to help us with this challenge. After talking to hundreds of marketers, it became clear that we were not alone. Many companies were struggling with the same problems. That’s when we decided to build a solution!
What is it that excites you about what you’re building?
Event Marketers are often the unsung heroes of marketing organizations. With most other marketing channels, it is easier to show ROI down to the dollar. With events though, there is a large human component, which makes it much more of a black box. As a result, it’s difficult to use data to justify investments in the channel, especially relative to other options.
With Vendelux, we want to empower event marketers to lead and thrive, by helping them show the impact of all of their hard work. This is incredibly exciting to me. To help an entire job function showcase the incredible impact that they have.
What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?
We want to index every single B2B event, globally, every year. This is a huge data challenge. Our information is coming from a variety of sources and needs to be collected, standardized, analyzed, and transformed into insights. This has been our biggest challenge but also our opportunity. If it were easy then everyone would do it!
What are your future plans for your startup?
We break down the event marketing lifecycle into three phases, 1. Exploration, 2. Execution, 3. Evaluation. We are focused exclusively on Exploration right now, and we have a number of new features coming soon that will make it even easier to discover the most relevant events.
Once companies know where to go and who to send from their organizations, then we want to help them maximize the impact while they are at events (Execution), and ultimately measure ROI down to the dollar (Evaluation).
If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
Figure out what someone is willing to pay for as quickly as possible. This is by far the strongest signal that you are on the right track to solving a real problem. Get an MVP out as quickly as possible that can validate willingness to pay, and then iterate from there.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Twitter: @amrvdx
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexreynolds1/
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
