Hi Justin! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?

My name is Justin Anyanwu, I am 34 years old. I am based in Raleigh North Carolina. My background is a bit of a mix. I got my masters in Computer Architecture and my bachelors in Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering. I did a bit of coding in college, but I didn’t pick up coding until I started working on personal projects.

A few years ago, I built Eventloot, a SaaS platform for wedding planning professionals. It was inspired by the idea that most wedding planners at the time were using Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets to manage weddings for their clients. So, my partner and I decided that we could offer planners a solution that reflected the convenience of cloud-based SaaS products.

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What were your job duties at Eventloot?

I was the co-founder and CEO of Eventloot. As a developer, I helped my partner who was the architect with development. But my other role involved customer acquisition, marketing and business development.

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What was your business model?

It was simple. A monthly fee to use Eventloot. Wedding planners will pay a monthly fee to use Eventloot to manage weddings for their clients.

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What motivated you to start Eventloot?

I’ve always wanted to start my own business. At the time, I was already running an Anime lifestyle brand. We sold graphic tees and posters. But I quickly realized that it wasn’t scalable. The profit margins were not enjoyable and the need for inventory made it hard to consistently realize a certain level of profit. I started gravitating towards software after I met people who were making a livable wage off their software assets. And considering that their profit margins were much higher and also the fact that their expenses were a little more manageable, it was too tempting to resist not considering. Another thing I loved about the idea of Eventloot is the fact, that if we got it running properly we’d basically have a system for recurring income that didn’t require us to trade our time for money. Eventloot just happened to be an idea I came up with after I ran into an event planner who told me she still used spreadsheets and email to manage her events. It could have been anything depending on the type of person I ran into that day.

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What part of your background defines you, and possibly led to starting Eventloot?

I am a software engineer by trade. I don’t consider myself to be a great software engineer. But the one thing I can say about myself is that I have become fairly resourceful due to my experience with starting entrepreneurial ventures. I know where to find the right freelancers to help us achieve a goal.

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Before Eventloot, what were you doing?

Before Eventloot, I was running an anime lifestyle brand (I still am) and I had a day job (I still do). My day job involved writing software that ran on Point of Sale systems.

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Did you have any failed or previous businesses?

Before Eventloot, I built a trading platform for college students while still in college. It was a massive failure mainly because we didn’t code it in a scalable way. It was written in PHP and HTML with an SQL DB. That’s not the problem, the problem was that we wrote almost everything in two-three files and we wrote all our queries by hand. It was awful whenever we found a bug that needed fixing.

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Did any big life events lead to starting Eventloot?

Not really, Eventloot is just a product of my desire to be my own boss. And that desire started after I sat in on a group of NCstate alumni talking about how they started their own company.

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How did the idea come to you?

Eventloot came to me after talking to an event planner who was trying to invite me to a valentine’s event she was organizing. It was after asking her how she managed her business that I realize that there might be an opportunity there.

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How did you build it?

This was our very first foray into creating software as a service. In the beginning, we tried to do everything ourselves. 1) We tried to rig together a UI, which was basically stitched together from various CSS designs on other sites. I highly recommend that no one should ever do that. It is the least useful thing you can do. 2) After our very first disastrous version, we realized that we needed to hire experts for certain parts of the project. For example, we outsourced the UI design to a freelancer we found on Fiverr. We hired a number of AngularJS freelancers to handle the frontend for us. 3) We met at Starbucks to code whatever feature we had agreed that the platform needed.

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How long did the process take?

Quite a lot - 3 years.

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Who was involved?

My partner and me. And 2 freelancers we hired.

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What resources/tools did you use?

Bizspark credit from Microsoft. This allowed us to use Visual Studios Enterprise. Free Azure hosting for the platform. Starbucks as our office.

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How did the initial product look?

The one thing that we did right was the design. A lot of our prospects commented on the design. Some wished it had a more feminine look. But most people felt it was much more contemporary than our competitors.

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Did you run into any obstacles in this process?

A lot of the obstacles were more mental. The feeling that we might be making a big mistake with how we’ve tackled the project. The feeling that we might be in a crowded market or that our customers might be too difficult to sell to. We simply pushed forward.

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Did you enjoy the process of building it?

Actually yes. A significant chunk of the journey was a lot of fun. The sense of purpose and ambition. Waking up every day knowing that you had something interesting to work on. That was a lot of fun. Also, the comradery that I built with my partner.

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How did you approach pricing your product?

We bounced between charging based on the amount of effort we put in which would have put us at $30/month. And pricing it strategically to undercut the competition at roughly ($9-$10)/month. We settled on $20/month.

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Did you launch/publicize your product in any way?

That too was a first for us. We spent roughly $600 on Facebook ads. That got us nowhere. It was very difficult to properly target for event planners or wedding planners. At least we knew our conversion rate was awful. So, I spent more time sending out emails to planners on WeddingWire. That was a lot more rewarding. If nothing else we learned why prospects wouldn’t join or what it would have taken for them to join.

