EEVET’s chatbot EVE will act as your personal concierge. EVE will help you fail less, and save you tons of time scouting for, reaching, and signing acts or venues for your next event.
Co-Founder, Ben Hodge
Name: EEVET, Inc
Location: San Antonio, Texas
Website: https://eevet.com
Product / Service Offering: Live entertainment
Co-founder Interviewed: Ben Hodge
Other Key Management Team Members: Amanda Martinez, COO; Alex Massey, CDS; Thomas Alcala, CTO; Aaron Pena UX/UI Developer
This article is part of our Business Startup Spotlight series featuring entrepreneurs and their companies. We hope that these founders’ interviews will inspire and motivate you as you undertake your own entrepreneurial journey.
Tell us a little about yourself with a focus on what motivates you.
Solving complex problems in areas we are passionate about, such as music, drives us to the edge of available technology to retrieve effective and reliable tools and resources for positive industry change.
When did you establish your company and where did the idea originate?
The company began in February 2016 when founder Ben Hodge conceptualized using escrow payments to effectively manage event payments.
What need or needs does your company seek to fill for its customers?
For our customers, both artists and venues, the biggest problem is an empty room. We help them solve that problem by collecting exabytes of data which we feed to an Artificial Neural Network to help them book full room shows. EEVET discovers patterns within the music industry and delivers accurate booking recommendations.
EEVET can be used by musicians, artists, and is an especially adept tool to help talent buyers handle more dates in less time than traditional methods.
5 Questions to ask when writing a company mission statement.
What is the one thing that sets your company apart from its competitors?
EEVET is unique from our competitors through our focus on enhancing our customer’s’ event experience with automated statistical validation as a tool for cooperative success.
EEVET’s chatbot EVE will act as your personal concierge. She allows talent buyers and booking agents to easily find talent, create events, automatically process all workflow documents, release payment from her internal escrow feature, and receive and publish reviews of both the vetted artists and venues alike.
With her trained neural network, EVE, will help to predict the best artists or venue for your needs, backed up by real time data and analysis. In a word, EVE will help you fail less, and save you tons of time scouting for, reaching, and signing acts or venues for your next event.
What was the biggest challenge you faced while getting your company up and running, and how did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge was gaining traction with close to nothing. As Founder, Ben Hodge, spent four years learning how to program while booking events to create our MVP Event Escrow.
What steps have you taken to secure funding for your company and what, if anything, would you do differently if you had to start over?
We are 20% of the way to a $425,000 seed round to finish the natural language processing portion of our AI. We may hire more sales and marketing to handle demand if we do anything over.
The Funding Life Cycle: Seed Stage
Have there been any questions you have had as an entrepreneur of a fledgling startup that you had a particularly hard time finding the answers to?
We pitched in 2016. The CEO of Legalzoom stated, rather than asked, if we were charging too much for our service. The crowd turned on us during the pitch despite being 4 percentage points below industry averages.
What challenges, if any, are you grappling with?
The usual day-to-day problems of management and operations, but nothing our team can’t handle.
What is the most helpful tip or “hack” you’ve ever learned, stumbled across, or been given?
We use Piktochart for one-pagers that help with sales and pitch follow-ups.
Want to learn about other businesses in the spotlight? Check out our Business Startup Spotlight Series.
Are you familiar with other startups you believe should be spotlighted? If so, we would like to hear from you. Tell us about them, sharing your comments below!
Sandra Sloan
Sandra has previous supply chain and business operations experience which she is leveraging as an author with FundingSage focused on spotlighting entrepreneurs and their startup efforts.
