The conception of Conference Bay

Conference Bay was founded out of a personal ‘experience’, as so many businesses are. While working in London in the late 90’s, I used to visit conferences regularly. These events would easily cost US$ 2,000 for 2 days, an amount that my employer at that time did not really have sleepless nights over, so neither did I. However, one day the phone rang and the following conversation took place:

Caller: “Good morning, you will be visiting [insert US$ 2,000 conference name here] tomorrow and we may offer you one free ticket for a colleague!”

Me: “That is very nice, thank you very much. But why is this, I have paid US$2,000 and my colleague can visit for free?”

Caller: “That is correct! We have some spare seats left over and want to fill the room up a bit.”

Me: “And it doesn’t really matter who fills the seat? Does the colleague have to work in a certain field?”

Caller: “Nah, not really, just bring anyone along.”

A day later I spoke with the organiser of this event (who shall remain anonymous as they are now a well regarded client of ours) who explained that the main reason to fill the seats was to keep the sponsors happy. He did admit that it also helped to have a full conference room so that no full price paying delegate would start wondering why he had paid up in the first place.

This is when one of the main ideas behind Conference Bay was born. Why, did I discuss with the colleague who had come for free, was there not a system where potential delegates could indicate how much they were willing to pay for a seat at a conference (just as there are websites where you can do that for airline seats or hotel rooms)?

While discussing this question, we tried to find a few conference listings. This proved to be surprisingly difficult. So we decided that a listing of conferences would also be a good idea. In order to do so, we thought it would help to speak to a few conference organisers. Now this was the time before Google (remember Altavista, anyone?) but we searched online and offline and found there were literally hundreds of organisations out there organising conferences, events, seminars, you name it. And there was no central portal covering this industry…

Conference Bay was conceived at that time but suffered from the bursting of the Internet bubble. We developed a busines plan and even had a small team together but decided to shelve the plan when we found there was no appetite anymore from investors in anything that even smelled remotely of .com.

So how did the plan get revived? Read all about it in the next post…

Conference Bay’s second conception

I met William at the Coffee Club on Raffles Place in Singapore. It was early 2006 and I was working (quite happily) in a boutique advertising firm as a regional business director for one of the largest global banks. I wanted to meet with William because the idea for Conference Bay had never really left my mind. Especially during my MBA at Insead it had popped up ever so often (especially when I had to start thinking again about finding a job afterwards). William had been a classmate of mine and had successfully built and sold an Internet start up before attending Insead.

After we had ordered lunch, I sketched out the idea for Conference Bay – not on a napkin, they are hard to come by in Singapore – and waited for his reaction. While he suggested I’d keep the day job for a while, he was clearly enthusiastic and saw the potential of the idea. Since he had at that time been active as an angel and private equity investor for quite some time, I valued his advice a lot. He told me to do some more work on the business case and find some potential partners in the industry.

Ever since that lunch the idea of starting Conference Bay has never left me – all the way until the day it all came together. But let’s not jump the gun on that one…

I started doing research again, just like we had done in London. I collected hundreds of websites from conference organisers, magazines, newspaper clippings, conference flyers, the works. I also started speaking with people in the industry: a friend worked at a large convention centre in town, others had friends who worked at conference organisers. And last but not least, I convinced very good friends from an Internet company in Australia to give me a hand with the development of the first concept of the website.

The plunge came in March 2006: I left the agency where I worked and for the first time since I had started working, no salary would be deposited into my bank account at the end of the month. The mobile phone bill would not be picked up. Doctor’s appointments (admittedly very few) would have to be paid in cash.

The first days were bliss: I took the laptop out to the pool and would pretend to be working, only to accept after a few hours the fact that this was in fact not working. Fortunately, there was enough to be done well away from the (attractive) poolside. I met with conference organisers and people working in venues and recruited a couple of students to help me with the data collection. This proved to be much more work than expected, which I saw as a good sign; if it was this difficult to get a good listing of conference organisers, surely there must be a demand out there for a portal bringing it all together. I also flew to Australia, where I worked for a week with my friends in the Adweb agency to develop screenshots of the ideas that so far had just resided in my head. This support would later on prove to be instrumental in getting Conference Bay off the ground.

All this while I was also on the lookout for a business partner, as it had never been my intention to work on this on my own. I know my limitations well enough to realise that without a partner I would most likely never get the business off the ground, or if I did it would probably be a short-lived affair. One of my best friends in Holland, Marcel, had always been interested in the plan and came to Singapore in May to discuss it further. Over (quite a few) beers that week we decided to give it a shot. Our skill sets were completely different (good) and we knew each other quite well (also good). However, Marcel was living in The Netherlands and had to consider a move to Singapore with his wife, who had a good job as well.

Marcel and I recruited a group of 4 MBA students from Insead to help us develop a compelling investor presentation.  They were so enthusiastic about the plan that they asked us if they could participate with it in the annual Business Plan competition at Insead. We didn’t see much harm in it and worked with them to further sharpen the proposition. We could not know at that time that we would meet our angel investor at that competition in Fontainebleau.

From conception to birth

At the Insead Business Plan competition in June 2006 our team of students performed admirably but did not end up winning the first prize. One of the judges later told us over drinks not to be too discouraged by that: he had found that there was an inverse relationship between winning competitions and plans becoming economically viable business. Marcel and I drew courage from that and then moved on to chat with one of the other judges who we knew also lived in Singapore and also was of Dutch origin. He told us he liked the plan and that he would be interested in helping us with some angel funding, provided we could find other investors. This was of course great news and once back in Singapore we met up with him several times to get to know each other better. Our “angel investor” had successfully built several businesses already and was a very well connected resource for us. In the months leading up to Christmas we worked closely together with him and his network to get the business plan further sharpened and the financial assumptions tested.

Singapore has several government departments focusing on stimulating entrepreneurship and angel investment. So called “matching schemes” encourage entrepreneurs to find an angel investor and strike a deal after which the government simply matches this deal on the same conditions. The angel investor basically does the due diligence and keeps an eye on the progress of the company, safeguarding not only his own but also the government’s investment. After we struck a deal with our angel investor we applied and received funding from SPRING in June 2007, which gave us the chance to get the business off the ground.

By this time, Marcel had decided not to relocate to Singapore and I had found a new business partner in Frank Bomers. Frank and I met during a company visit to the Philips steam iron factory in Singapore with the local Dutch business association, in October 2006. Although this of course was a riveting occasion where we learned all there is to learn about steam irons (and there is a lot to learn!), we did find some time to get to know each other (over a cup of mineral water, as Philips did not provide the usual alcoholic beverages that attract most people to these visits). Frank had just arrived in Singapore with his girlfriend who had been posted to Singapore by her law firm.

In May, we had found a great office space in Mohamed Sultan Road, just above the Martini Firm a cool bar full of day-beds (a pure coincidence). We hired a team of 5 summer interns to help the business get off the ground in the initial phase so that we could figure out which resources we would most need. It soon appeared that getting in touch with conference organisers would be a time consuming task: not only are there hundreds of them in Asia Pacific (where our initial focus lies) but they also were not easy to get hold of! Scott and Piotr spent many hours chasing them and in the end we decided to visit those who were avoiding us most effectively with boxes of chocolates. This proved to be a very successful method as no one refuses a free gift in Singapore, especially when it is food related.

Aside from tracking down conference organisers, we worked hard on getting the website up and running. For this we worked with Adweb, a Melbourne based agency which I had worked with during my time at Shell. In May, we flew to Melbourne with Jazlyn and Shili, our 2 IT interns. This proved to be the trip of a lifetime for them (one had never before been on a plane…) and over the week that followed they took an estimated 1500 pictures (many of them of the food they had!). Apart from having the best hamburgers in the world at Grill’d and “Spuds” at Spud Bar we worked hard and fleshed out the framework of what would ultimately become the Conference Bay website.

Finally, on September 6, we had the official launch of the website. Mr Edward Liu from SACEOS and Melissa Ow from the Singapore Tourism Board were present as our guests of honor as were around 100 conference organisers and other partners. Conference Bay was born!