Beyond Product-Market Fit: How Vendelux Identified Category-Market Fit in Event Intelligence
Finding product-market fit is challenging enough. But creating an entirely new market category? That’s a different game altogether. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Alex Reynolds revealed how Vendelux is transforming event marketing from a tactical function into a strategic driver of business relationships.
From Point Solution to Category Vision
The genesis of Vendelux came from a specific pain point. As Alex explains, “We ended up building a brand new business unit within Shutterstock over about a four year period, from zero to 30 million in ARR… and that growth mostly came from going to events and conferences and trade shows.”
This experience revealed a broader industry problem: “When it worked well, it was the best thing that we could do. When it didn’t work well, it was a huge waste of time and money.” But rather than just building a better event selection tool, Vendelux saw an opportunity to reimagine the entire function of event marketing.
Identifying the Category Opportunity
The key insight came from recognizing how fragmented event participation had become within organizations. “Sales will go to events on their own, SDRs will go, customer success will go, even like recruiting or legal and finance will go to seminars for learning and development,” Alex shares.
This fragmentation, combined with the significant budget allocation – “24% to 40% of the B2B marketing budget is in events” – signaled an opportunity to create a new strategic function.
The Gainsight Playbook
Vendelux’s category creation strategy draws inspiration from how Gainsight transformed customer success. “In the same way that Gainsight took the account management function and essentially turned that into customer success… we see event marketing needing to go through a very similar transition,” Alex explains.
Just as Gainsight elevated account management from a tactical role into a strategic function, Vendelux aims to transform event marketing from a cost center into a strategic driver of business relationships.
Building the Category Foundation
Rather than immediately pushing for widespread category adoption, Vendelux is building credibility through:
- Meeting customers at their pain point: “We call these marketers the unsung heroes, because if everything goes right at an event, then you’re nothing. But if the coffee is cold or the booth isn’t set up on time, then they get all of the blame.”
- Demonstrating immediate value: “When we come in and say, hey, we’re going to help you show the value of everything that you’re doing, their eyes light up.”
- Expanding through proven results: “We start there, we show the results, and then they’re able to build on top of that.”
The Platform Vision
What started as event intelligence is evolving into something broader. “Today, we focus very much on the pre-event, everything with planning, but there’s roughly a 40 month end-to-end journey that our customers are going through,” Alex reveals.
This journey spans “planning for next year’s events, a year of events, pre-event, during event, post-event, and then the ROI measurement, which can take anywhere from six to 18 months per event.”
Beyond Events
The ultimate vision extends beyond just events. As Alex articulates, “Our vision is to empower humanity to build meaningful professional relationships.” This broader mission allows Vendelux to expand from large events to smaller gatherings and even one-on-one business meetings.
“100,000 person event like CES looks somewhat similar to a 10,000 person event… And so if you keep going down to 1000 people, 100 people, ten people, there’s a lot of similarities that exist.”
The lessons here for founders extend beyond event intelligence. Creating a new category requires:
- Identifying fragmented functions that could be strategic
- Building credibility through immediate value
- Having a vision that extends beyond the initial solution
- Drawing parallels to successful category creation stories
Sometimes, the biggest opportunity isn’t in building a better solution to an existing problem, but in reimagining how entire business functions could work.