The Best Day might just have lived up to its name – for angel investors and a venture firm backing the Sydney startup, as much as for founder Whitney Komor.
Actually, make it The Best Days for Komor. She had not one but two best days on the trot when she wowed investors.
With two successive presentations, the 24-year-old won over so many wannabe investors she quietly decided to accept the $1.1 million from OneVentures and Sydney Angels, dropping prior plans to raise only modest amounts for a company that has yet to launch.
“I have been told that what made TBD stand out as an exciting investment was that we have a clear and realistic plan,” Komor told Anthill.
The Best Day epitomises the value that entrepreneurs and investors alike see. It identifies a real problem, and then offers a creative solution.
The Best Day zeroes in on an event-planning nightmare – how to schedule an event with varied preferences and availabilities of various people.
Komor says she became “incredibly frustrated while organising a weekend away with a group of friends.”
She sifted through “endless Facebook message threads” and even began compiling a table to figure out everyone’s different availabilities and preferences.
Then “it just hit me that it didn’t make sense to be wasting so much time, that there had to be an easier way for a group to plan an activity,” Komor said, describing the birth of her startup.
Komor has developed a planning widget that makes it easier to pick the best day for a variety of events, given multiple choices and preferences. It also has tied it in neatly with partner businesses – giving The Best Day a viable business model. She says individual users of the service will pay nothing but businesses will pay a transaction fee for the sales that it facilitates through the widget and later for highly targeted plan suggestions as well.
The Best Day might be the only one of its kind on the market — “the first social planning tool that makes it easy for a group to agree on time and place as well as any other detail such as where to meet.”
Some services offer a similar solution for collecting votes on meeting times but they are targeted at professionals scheduling business meetings, according to Komor.
“Facebook and calendar invitations are great for collecting RSVP’s to a set plan but as soon as a group needs to coordinate any aspects to an activity they have to descend into back-and-forth messaging madness.”
Over the past months, The Best Day has not only created a prototype but also tested it with real users and business partners.
“We initially validated the user demands for the service through a survey of 1,000 Australians. We found that 94% of us agree that planning is a frustrating experience and that we send between 5-10 messages over 3-5 days to lock in a plan,” said Komor.
But the early prototype was found wanting, she confessed, when people desperate for a solution made 5,000 plans.
“I have had many conversations with target partners about the concept of making it easier for their customers to organise group bookings and everyone agrees that the barriers to converting a group booking are significant,” said Komor. “If we can help a customer instantly put a plan into action, successfully coordinate the best time and place for it and then manage collecting payments off the group, more plans are going to be made. It’s a win-win.”
So, The Best Day team is back at work and the widget is expected to be launched late next month.
