My Big Idea: party planning website Poptop

‍Hi Eugene! What's your elevator pitch?‍

Poptop is the UK’s favourite place to plan a party. We provide a wide range of private party and event services, from street food vans and private chefs to DJs, photographers, musicians, transport and even murder mystery nights. We are the only company on the market which provides live pricing and availability for all our services. No need for party planners to waste time requesting dozens of quotes just to find a supplier is unavailable or too expensive - just enter your event details, get immediate, accurate prices and book there and then.

Why does the market need it?

Existing, traditional platforms focus on being a nice, convenient middle man. You create a quote request and get a feed of offers from their featured suppliers. We focus on being the ultimate solution - much faster, easier to use, and considerably more transparent. You just enter your date, guest numbers, event type, and postcode and immediately you can browse thousands of services displaying live pricing and availability. You can literally book your whole party - food, drinks, entertainment, and more - in a couple of hours. This relieves a huge pain point for party planners, who are traditionally hemmed in by a protracted, lengthy process of communication with multiple suppliers

But Poptop is about more than just speed and transparency. We curate the client offering in clearly defined, great-looking service listings. Clients love it because it’s easy to understand what you get and how much it costs. Equally, suppliers love it because we give them a powerful and visible shop window for their services - guiding them on how to make listings attractive and set competitive prices for their service category.

The whole approach also removes hours of admin load from busy, time-starved suppliers. Suppliers on Poptop don’t need to spend time manually submitting cold quotes over and over again. Instead, suppliers can engage with high quality, well-developed leads from the start. 

Where is the business today? 

We serve approximately 14,000 parties and events every year, sourced from over 6000 active, professional UK suppliers across a wide range of party categories. Clients can now use Poptop to plan a birthday party in a back garden as easily as booking a corporate summer party for 300+ people. Corporate parties have come to represent a core vertical for Poptop, with around 45% of our bookings generated from corporate events for clients like Netflix, Nvidia, Lloyds Bank, Mastercard, BBC, John Lewis, and more. Currently, we are exclusively present on the UK market, but our growth plan sees us expanding into international markets in the near future. 

What made you think there was money in this?

Prior to launching Poptop I was an events manager, so I was acutely aware of the industry challenges as well as the opportunities those challenges potentially created. The first iteration of Poptop was solely focused on connecting DJs with night clubs. Within the first few months, however, we realised that there wasn’t huge amounts of pain or money to be generated from that niche. During this time, occasional private bookings kept business ticking over, and it's here where we began to see the opportunity for good margins and extensive revenue growth.

When we started in the UK market in 2015, the competition was mostly represented by agencies and directories, so we quickly gained traction, as we could provide better service at a lower cost due to our automation. Over time, more platforms appeared on the market, but they all continued to work on a “request a quote” basis - one we’ve always viewed as an outdated approach. To change that, we raised investment in 2019 and transformed into a fully transactional instant quote marketplace platform sooon after.

What's your biggest strength?

We are a very lean, ambitious, and hard working team. Making the leap towards an instant quote marketplace was not easy - many large-scale companies tried before us, all of which failed. The transformation has always been seen as too difficult. We started among low frequency service marketplaces and we were the first to scale it - from a partial implementation in 2020 to a full rollout in 2021. This allowed us to gain a unique selling point and establish our brand on the market.

What is the secret to making the business work?‍

The key challenge for us has always been about taking the chaos of thousands of very different small service businesses and organising them into a workable, understandable solution which is significantly better for both parties. The paradox was that while the industry desperately needs to see this change, many people don’t like the idea of change and wish to continue doing things the way they’ve always done them. This change was much more warmly welcomed by event planners. Poptop gives them prices and availability for thousands of suppliers, making it a no-brainer from their perspective - it was easier and more accessible than any other platform on the market. The challenge was to scale the adoption from the supplier-side, and convince these small, independent businesses that it was worth their time and efforts coming with us on this journey.

To gain that adoption and achieve “critical mass”_, we realised we needed to start curating our supplier base, meaning we could no longer exist as a solution for “every supplier”. We made the decision to implement an exhaustive process of curation for new suppliers, and a rigorous and ongoing moderation of existing suppliers and their services. We developed our own service standards for most categories. We are committed to helping and guiding suppliers to ensure they meet those standards, but services will not be published on our platform until they do. In the first year, we inevitably saw a decline in active suppliers, which in turn affected commercial performance, but over time we built a strong, industry-leading baseline of suppliers and partners aligned with our expectations and vision for the industry - and this supplier portfolio is growing all the time. Typically a “Poptop supplier” tends to be upwardly mobile, aggressively entrepreneurial, and genuinely committed to growing their business with us. 

How do you market the company?

As any low frequency service marketplace, we rely on Google search and Google ads, but thanks to the USP of the instant quote model and the curation of our services, we are seeing a growing number of clients coming to us directly, especially among our corporate segment. Having a clear USP helps us to communicate our value much more effectively, resulting in better stickiness even among “low frequency” use cases. The growth of our corporate market has been a particularly powerful driver in this respect - this segment tends to repeat-book much more frequently than the private party market, and the accumulation of instantly recognisable brands in our client base makes for a highly effective brag list. 

What funding do you have? Is it enough?‍

In total, we’ve raised £1.2m from VC and angel investors, and whilst it helped us to launch Live Pricing & Availability, it didn’t prove to be enough of a resource to see further breakthroughs in tech and marketing. This undoubtedly caused a bit of drag on our growth for a while. Since then, however, we’ve turned profitable, meaning we are now in a position to achieve growth more sustainably and on our own terms. 

Tell us about the business model‍

We are a transactional marketplace and take commission from each confirmed booking from the supply side, which is quite typical for a model like ours. Commission typically varies between 15% and 20% depending on a number of booking-specific factors. In order for our business model to operate profitably, we needed the flow to be as straightforward as possible - the result of this is a platform that does not require much human intervention to operate efficiently. 

That being said, in 2023, we made the decision to introduce a dedicated team of Corporate Account Managers, as our corporate market segment started to rapidly expand. Larger, more complex events typically require a more bespoke approach and our Account Managers do this perfectly - offering a bit of a pressure release for busy event coordinators or HR teams tasked with assembling these events on behalf of their organisation.

Data tracking and analysis has always been a significant strength of ours, and this has allowed us to track the value brought by account managers very precisely, so we know that each activity is driving value and profit.

Again, offering up a distinctly different value proposition from our competition is a huge advantage here. Before discovering Poptop, our clients would typically visit 5-8 websites prior to making a purchase. There is a growing share of corporate clients who now choose to regularly return to Poptop for their future event planning, knowing that the booking process can be completed in a fraction of the time - accompanied by the service and convenience of their own, dedicated Account Manager. We may still have to fight for traffic in this space, but we don’t have to fight as hard as the competition.

What were you doing before?

I was a club event promoter in my hometown of Kyiv, a DJ, and owner of a record label (Really Really Big Records) for about 10 years. In truth I know very little about tech startups before launching Poptop. Except for deep industry knowledge, my biggest skill from the pre-Poptop era was related to promoting label releases - when I had to outreach to hundreds of radio stations and DJs to push out releases to ensure my acts got played and heard by their target audience. I was very lucky, though, to get admitted into business accelerator programmes - Eastlabs (Kyiv) and Ignite (Newcastle).

What is the future vision?

Like most online businesses, service marketplaces are going to see significant change within the next several years as a response to the evolving nature of search being driven by AI agents like ChatGPT. The universal sentiment from most of the low frequency marketplace leaders I’ve spoken with is that 90% of platforms will die and the rest will have to adapt. As a marketplace you have to start providing more value to both clients and suppliers, and become more “managed”. Poptop will lead this transformation among event service marketplaces. Not just in the UK, but globally, the same way we lead it with instant pricing and availability in 2020. The future is bright!

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