Starting an Event Center Business in Nigeria (VenueHero.co)

I honestly think the niche is a nice one and could be potentially profitable with time and hard work. I see event niche as one of the few still available niches which has not yet been taken. So anyone who is serious could just grab this niche and build a dominant platform with it in Nigeria.

Your site is looking great too. I like the logo design and the color combination. The logo especially is making the site look professional at a glance. But that’s where it ends. Every other things seems to be wrong for now.

1. Your Domain (VenueHero.co) is a complete no. Reason: It is extremely hard, almost impossible to build brand recognition on a .co domain, not even in America. The internet is a .com world and anything short of .com is viewed as inferior. That’s the fact.

2. It seems you just grabbed the theme, installed it and off you go, without doing proper edit and customization? Most urls are still pointing to # and not clickable. The event images and titles on the home page suppose to be clickable but they were not as at the time I visited. A visitor to your site need to browse the event centers listed on the site without having to login or create an account.

3. I fear that the size of your niche might be extremely low – too low to be profitable for a long time. Your target audience are event organizers only. How many Nigerians are organizing events on daily, weekly, and monthly basis? Worse still, most of these event organizers seems to already know their venues. Example: AY Comedian already know he is going to use EKO Hotel for his events in Lagos, the couples getting married this month already know they are going to use one of the many event centers across the streets, etc. This has greatly reduced the number of event organizers searching for possible event halls online.

4. Monetization is going to present a challenge except you think outside the box. What means do you plan to monetize the site with?

These are just my little observations which may not hold any water. Maybe providing more insight will help us give more detailed and accurate reviews.

Thank you Darlington! We appreciate your response. You don’t need to login to browse the venues – we take this observation seriously and will review our UI/UX for this because if you couldn’t notice that we wanted you to search the database, then we didn’t get it. As for your other comments, thanks again. Please go to https://www.venuehero.co and try again. Regards

First of all Lagos is not Nigeria. there are other states in the country where there are event center as well. What if the event couple want to have their reception in the state of indigenous? and they are not sure of the quality of the hall available … you could provide incite in pictures and video for where to hold their event.

For me venuehero.com should be it and not .co

the monetization aspect is easy, u need to network with other people in other states and help them get clients and they will in return pay you in percentage or in any other means.

Nice one. keep it up!

But this needs a lot of work and legal backing as well.

Dear Venuehero,

This is a good idea really but demand is very low. You would still be able to pull good traffic if you will run PPC on google display network and facebook. Even though the demand is so low, the competition is also very low. So using PPC to stay on top for a while will bring reward.

Demand distribution is throughout the year. That means you will run campaigns every month. My advice is to work hard and invest in SEO to help you transition from paid traffic later in the future. Adverts may get pretty much expensive with time and with this our $100 per month spend limit, that might be a problem in the future except you want to be buying from black markets.

Work more to optimize your conversion as Darlington has advice. This is very important if you don’t want to be increasing your bounce rate while you are spending on adverts or SEO.

To scale your revenue, Robor has a very good point. You need to work on his advice from the onset.

You might also want to study this website in your industry.  eventsource.ca. See how they try to bring their website visitors into their halls with lots of pictures. You need a lot of hires, close-captioned pictures of your venues (Is not that theirs is also perfect though).

Who though Airbnb would thrive to become a multimillion dollar startup. Everyone believed it can’t make it past its second year. Everybody called it absurd. There was no single demand for a shareable room anywhere in the world but just like bitcoin, it became a game changer overnight.

So if you believe in it, keep on it but do it right.

I wish you all the best.

Best regards.