Felix Haas
amiando

amiando is the European pioneer in online event registration and ticketing. It provides the platform for tens of thousands of event organizers to handle operations that range from invitation management, online promotion, and attendee registration to integrated billing and entry-management. amiando has received several awards, including a TechCrunch Europas European Startup Award, a BITKOM Innovators Pitch Award, an eco Internet Award, and a spot among the Red Herring Top 100. amiando was acquired by XING, a business social network company, in December of 2010.

amiando was founded in 2006 by Felix Haas, Dennis von Ferenczy, Sebastian Baerhold, Markus Eichinger, Marc Bernegger and Armin Bauer. Felix Haas is CEO of amiando and began founding companies when he was a university student. He owns multiple patents and is a frequent speaker on internet innovation.

Pedro Santos: My first question is how did amiando start from the idea to its launch?

Felix Haas: From idea to launch: It was back in 2006. The last year of university study I spent in the Silicon Valley and came back to Munich at the beginning of 2006. I assembled a couple of friends of mine in my living room to talk about business ideas and business plans. That was while we were doing our final university theses. We were close to finishing our studies. We sat in the living room every day to talk about business ideas. One of those ideas, by the way, was to start an airline: We wanted to start an airline based on micro jets, very small private jets, in order to offer a point-to-point air taxi throughout Europe.

That plan didn't go far. We then switched that to a restaurant franchise and to all other kinds of ideas. It was a very fun period because we were all still studying and it was a really creative time in my living room every day. Then, together with two of my co-founders, we organized a big party in the garden of my parents.

The party was on the first day of the soccer World Cup in 2006, which you might remember. The whole of Germany was crazy about soccer. It was Germany against Costa Rica.

We invited one hundred friends, but it turned out that four hundred came. It was a great party. Friends invited friends and then friends of friends of friends—it became viral a little bit. The problem was that we didn't have a chance to track who was coming and who already paid their €10 for the beer and the grill.

So it was a mess. And afterwards we had a big loss financially because we didn't collect the money from all the people because we just didn't know who paid and who didn't, or even who was there.

The days after that soccer-watching party we sat down in my living room again and then we had an idea. Hey, why not build a tool for invitations so everybody can manage and organize events online and can send party invitations.

Then Facebook. I'm not sure if they already had an event function, but if yes, nobody knew Facebook or very little back then. It was not as well known as today. There was no really easy way to invite people to events back then. So we dropped the airline thing, focused on that idea and sat down every day in my living room to build a prototype.

We had six founders, four of us are programmers and we sat down and coded the first prototype of amiando, which was really ugly because none of us were designers. We were all coders and logical guys. Nevertheless, the system worked so that you could track your own events page and then you could answer yes or no or maybe.

So it was very simple functionality, but it worked. It was not really yet a business. It was more like, okay, it's functioning and let's see what we can build out of it. Of course, there was this dream that this thing would go viral, but primarily it was still a fun thing also because we already had some job offers in parallel. You know, we all finished the university and Dennis and I already signed with a very well-known consulting company. So life was good. We were not yet sure if jumping into the risky option of creating a company was the right thing.

By then, I organized a founder who joined us from Zurich in Switzerland, Marc, and looked up a good, old friend of mine, Dennis, who came from Berlin back to Munich to join the amiando team. The point of no return was when a headhunter called from Spreadshirt,¹ which is a kind of like a European CafePress. And Lukasz Gadowski is a quite well-known entrepreneur from Germany and now our business angel. The headhunter wanted me to become VP of engineering of Spreadshirt. So I came into contact with Lukasz and only talked like two minutes about the job: “The job is very nice, but here, Lukasz, have a look at amiando.” He thought it was a very nice business idea. He invited us to see him and there was an immediate chemistry between us and him; as such he immediately offered to be lead investor for the seed round.

With that backing, we suddenly we got offers from all kinds of business angels, including Dennis's partner from McKinsey. We told him, “We want to do our own company.” and he was very supportive and even became a business angel for amiando. Our supporter network increased and we picked up another five or six business angels. So, we had a very nice round including Lukasz Gadowski, as I mentioned, from Spreadshirt, or Stephan Glaenzer from London, Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz from France, and several others from Germany.

During university studies, I worked with Wellington Partners Venture Capital company as a student. So I knew them, and they knew me. They somehow heard that we're going to start a company, so they invited us to pitch it. It was on a Friday. They said, “Hey, we hear you are doing a company. We hear you already have seed funding, so please come and visit us on Monday, very informal, for coffee, and tell us about it, okay?” We were “Okay, sure, we'll come by on Monday.”

On Monday, after the weekend, we stopped by Wellington, opened the door and it was ten partners, waiting for a formal, official two hour pitch.

So, we went to the partners meeting and pitched there for two hours. They offered us a few €100,000 in seed funding afterwards, this was really an efficient and lean process. We then had everything needed to start: Founders team, a great investor team, and a compelling idea, centered around birthday invitations and private parties. We decided to trash all those jobs offers and to go for amiando. So, we jumped into it, and that's how we started with the first version of amiando. We launched on December 8, 2006.

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Santos: As you said, you have six founders. Why so many founders, and how did the team dynamic work in the beginning, and how did it change over time?

Haas: Yes, it's a lot of founders. But the secret was that we were very complementary in our capabilities. So, we were able to really step on the gas, just full speed from the very beginning. As I mentioned, like with Markus and with Sebastian, we already brainstormed ideas throughout the last year or so at the university. Armin, the CTO, I got to know as I was introduced to him at the worldcup party that I mentioned earlier. A joint girl friend of ours introduced us to each other. Dennis joined the team very shortly afterwards. Marc joined fulltime in early 2007.

Santos: In the beginning, as you said, you launched focusing on birthday parties and private parties. Now it's completely different. How did it change? How did you realize that your focus shouldn't be there and ended up doing the events as it is now?

Haas: Yes. We initially started with a private focus. It was full of wishful thinking that we would dominate the world within a year. [laughter] Because everyone has a birthday, it must be viral, right?

Santos: Yes.

Haas: Most of the people do birthday parties, so our idea was that this is a viral driver for our growth. The assumption was correct, because on average people invite thirty-four people to their birthday parties. Of those thirty-four average guests, about seven to eight can remember amiando as the tool for the invitation and then use it for their own party invitations. So, it was a really nice viral funnel. But the problem, which we didn't think about, was that everyone only has a birthday once a year.

So, you have an average delay of half of a year for the next generation of users. That was a problem, and that became evident a few weeks after it launched. So, as you can imagine, that initial good mood and happiness turned into something like, “Why did we do this? Why didn't we just take those great job offers?” That kind of thing. But then in February 2007, almost three months after we launched, within a week, two professional event organizers called us. One was the chief of a very well-known nightclub here in Munich. He said “I was invited for a birthday party for a friend of mine with your amiando tool, but I would like to use amiando to do an online pre-sale for my professional parties. I want to do an online pre-sale. I want to sell tickets. So, please, can amiando do it more professionally, less-private stuff? If you do it more professionally, add something with ticketing, add professional money management and so on, then I will use you guys to sell tickets for my events in my club.”

He hung up and we were thinking about this and then again a second professional event organizer called and it was the conference organizer for the Next Conference in Hamburg in our building, a very well-known conference in Germany.

They called us and said, “Hey, I just heard about amiando. I was invited to a birthday party. We would like to use amiando for our conference, but can you please do it a little bit less-private, a little more professionally? Please add money management, add ticketing, and invoicing, and so on, and then we will use you guys for ticketing for the conference.”

Then it was like “Hey, cool. This is a much better business model”. So we sat down again. We worked six days a week, sixteen hours every day, and then coded again and changed amiando from this private focus to include more professional functionality with ticketing. That's how we launched it in June 2007, three months later, four months later.

Santos: Interesting.

Haas: I think it was very good that we were agile at the moment—that we didn't stick to the original business model hoping that at some point things would change. Luckily we trusted our customers who gave us the hints and the feedback that we had to change our focus and that's what we did.

Santos: That's an interesting lesson. Now in 2011, how many events were already organized in amiando in total? Do you have any idea of the number?

Haas: It's a six-digit number. Six digits.

Santos: Just to have an idea of the scale: When did you decide to internationalize and how did you start doing it?

Haas: That was actually really quick. After a few days, in June 2007 when we launched the ticketing, as we just mentioned, I got into contact with Loic Le Meur. He's a well-known blogger. He's running the LeWeb conference.

Santos: Yes. I want to interview him as well.

Haas: Actually I've had a few interviews with him when I tried to get in contact with him. Back then I didn't know him, so I sent him a few e-mails saying that LeWeb is a great conference, “Can we help you guys sell the tickets online?”. I didn't get any reply, but I was really sticky so I asked all our business angels, “Hey, can you introduce me to him?”. So I approached him from multiple angles, but still no reply. Then I found out that he's a pilot as well so then, “Hey Loic, I just heard that you're a pilot as well, so maybe you we can talk.”. Finally he sent back “Okay, I give up. I tried to ignore you. Let's chat.” So then I talked to Loic and we convinced him that amiando would save him a lot of time to sell the tickets for LeWeb.

Then at the end of the call he demanded that amiando's shop is available in both English as well as in French - it was only German back then. Everything was German. I promised Loic that this is going to be no problem: “The week you want to start the sale, everything will be in French and English.”

Again, seven days a week, sixteen hours a day. Armin coded day and night in order to convert the platform into a multilingual system. We asked our private friends to help us translate pages on amiando. Suddenly amiando was available in French and in English. Then it was just a matter of a few days to do the Spanish version. So, that's how we got to our international and multilingual platform.

By the way, LeWeb also almost caused a severe shutdown of amiando services. Due to quickly rising ticketing volume due to LeWeb, amiando's payment processer threatened to shut down all credit card acquiring services within 48 hours, which would effectively put amiando offline. Luckily, Sebastian was able to handle the situation by negotiating contracts with a new payment processor within the given deadline.

LeWeb was a very important driver. It was a very important first customer because it provided amiando with a lot of visibility and credibility, and it led to many, many more events.

Santos: Yeah, I can imagine. LeWeb is the biggest conference in Europe probably now. Do you go only by word of mouth or do you actively market in specific markets? I realize that you did, for instance, some events in the US, which is not your main market. I suppose Europe is your main market—or am I wrong there?

Haas: Yes. Europe is our main market. Well, our growth marketing consists of a portfolio of several things. Of course, the viral driver is very nice. When people use amiando, they see amiando and the beautiful thing about our product is that people really see that this is amiando.

Santos: Yeah.

Haas: So, event organizers buy tickets and they think “Hey, that's a cool thing. I'll try this out.” That's a very important thing. I think in hindsight, we waited too long to really work with that. We just started to optimize that funnel, like, two years ago. But we should have done it very much earlier. I think it would have supported our growth more. But, okay, that's just how it is. It's a lesson learned. Then, of course, we have traditional search marketing, advertising, search optimization. Then we did a lot of PR. It was a very strategic thing that enabled us to grow. I was traveling like mad and gave speeches to make sure that amiando was always somehow mentioned somewhere and is present. PR was a great driver in early visibility. The visibility was very important in the early days to get more events.

Then it kind of spiraled, so more and more events generated even more events. It was very beneficial that we had several founders, so, we could split the workload among us and jointly work at a really high pace.

Santos: One very specific thing with amiando—I believe it is the only tool that has the viral tickets.

Haas: Yes.

Santos: How did that idea come about and how did you implement it? Because it's quite an interesting concept.

Haas: Yes. That's also a very interesting question, because also this is linked to Loic Le Meur. He said “Hey, you should build something where people can turn into events promoters themselves.” So, Loic was the guy who gave the original spark of the idea. As a team we then developed it, and put it to market.

So it was driven by customer feedback. I think we did a great job of just listening to what guys like Loic were telling us and also other event organizers. Loic wasn't the only one who provided very good feedback. We then just did it.

Santos: It's an interesting tool.

Haas: People were telling before that, hey, it would never work, and don't even spend time with that. But that's entrepreneurship: To make your own decisions on what is really worthy of working on, and what is BS. Sometimes external advice is helpful as it prevents you from doing unnecessary or stupid things. But in other cases, you have to ignore external feedback.

Santos: When did you actually become aware of Eventbrite? And how did that, if at all, affect amiando's strategy?

Haas: Some time in 2007 we heard of Eventbrite for the first time, and thought that this is quite similar. Back then they were still calling it MollyGuard and they later changed the name to Eventbrite. We fretted a little bit because back in 2007, 2008, and 2009, Eventbrite copied almost every feature of amiando. To me it was quite clear the first time I saw them that they were going to be one of the main competitors in the US for us.

Santos: Yeah, they became quite well known very quickly. Did it change anything for you, or was it just yet another competitor?

Haas: No. Well, it maybe changed the awareness a little bit or the sense of paranoia. Do you know what I mean?

Santos: [laughs]

Haas: You have to be paranoid a little bit. You have to make sure that your organization is constantly paranoid about threats like competitors or other things. Don't overdo it, don't be frightened too much. But make sure that everyone's like “We have to crush our competitors”. You have to make a decision: Do we want to battle them in the US or do we want to enforce Europe? So, of course, we always spent time with our competitors. However ultimately, you also shouldn't overdo it. You shouldn't spend one hour a day looking at what your competitor is doing because the most important thing is to do something good for your customers.

Santos: On to the customers. In August 2010 you actually launched the free tickets for free events, which weren't available then. What made you come to that conclusion?

Haas: Yeah. Dennis digged into our data in summer 2010 in high detail and afterwards we found that free events are a really important driver for growth. Although we don't earn any money with them because they're free, they are an important driver to get more ticket buyers into the platform, which then in turn, for a certain percentage, turn into event organizers themselves. So it's an important driver and we realized that it makes more sense for us to make it free for free events. It had a revenue impact, which was planned, but on the other side now, on the long term, we will have very healthy growth.

Santos: In 2010 you were recognized by the World Economic Forum as the technology pioneer of 2010, which is quite a big honor. Did it have a huge impact on the company in terms of visibility, or was it just, you felt, a recognition of a job well done?

Haas: Yeah, definitely. We had some really great moments in our journey, one being the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2010. I also once hosted Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook into the amiando office for a very nice evening in October 2008. So both things, of course, make the team incredibly proud and really help to form the unique culture of amiando, which is why we're really passionate about what we do. Of course, having Mark Zuckerberg in the office was fantastic also for the IT guys - they were motivated for months.

Santos: Yeah, I can imagine.

Haas: It's very interesting to see how Facebook is changing and growing. Also, the World Economic Forum award provided amiando with a lot of visibility outside the internet sector in traditional business and in the media. It was a huge booster. Equally important was the impact on the team. It really brought everyone together again: Hey, we are amiando, and we build something cool.

Santos: What is the average annual growth for amiando?

Haas: In the last three years we always approximately doubled our revenue.

Santos: That's quite amazing for a five-year company to keep that growth. So, in December 2010 XING buys amiando and you become a public company. How did that come about? And why did they decide to buy, what did they think to bring, and how did it change amiando?

Haas: Back in 2010 we originally planned to do a Series B funding round to support more aggressive growth, also international growth. My CFO, Sebastian, and I spent months traveling: seeing venture capitalists, doing presentations, and so on. At the end, we had two term sheets for funding. Just the moment before we decided to take one of those, the CEO of XING called and asked, “Shouldn't we talk about joining forces to develop the European event market?”. We already had a working relationship with XING because we already had a corporation agreement to integrate the amiando technology into the XING platform. The idea of joining forces to combine a social network like XING and amiando was very appealing to us.

So, it was a great fit. Thus we decided to go into talks with them and XING provided the four active founders, Armin, Dennis, Sebastian and myself, an attractive package. Also for the employees and customers it was a well-rounded package and right decision.

As I mentioned, the vision of the deal is to marry social networking with ticketing and merge those things to build things like viral tickets even more effectively.

Santos: Does it change the fact that you're now a publicly-traded company?

Haas: Yes, it changed things a little bit. Before that we were able to communicate externally independently and I could freely speak externally. to represent the company. We can't do that anymore. Having a parent company which is public means that you can't give any guidance of the future because the only communication is done through shareholder meetings and through investor relations calls, so everything is more formal.

You have quarterly numbers, so there's more reporting. So, things are, a bit more overhead, but it's manageable and a great learning experience.

I now have a phone call with the XING CEO every week, which is very good and very effective. Before that, I had a call with the supervisory board every three months or so, and basically it was them asking, “Hey guys, are you guys still alive?”

“Yes.”

“You guys have a nice day.”

So we have a lot of freedom running amiando within XING. That's very important for us.

Santos: [laughs] Yeah, that's right. So it's good for both parties?

Haas: Yes and we have a great working relationship. XING and amiando are a natural fit.