Local Ruckus has been a mainstay of the Kansas City Startup Village since day one in October 2012. But since Adam Arredondo founded the company back in February 2011, the events-discovery startup has gone through several stages. At one point he “decided to start from scratch,” as Arredondo told Silicon Prairie News last August. All of which is noteworthy because the Local Ruckus team in June shifted its time and resources to Hoopla.io, which “powers local event discovery” by distributing businesses’ events to Local Ruckus, media outlets, websites, mobile apps and publishers. Today Hoopla.io goes live.
“As we started talking to investors and customers, forcing customers to go to one website was not the best option,” Arredondo (right) told SPN this week. “Finding things to do is difficult, but we also realized local businesses don’t have time to effectively market events. There was a big opportunity.”
Instead of directing everyone to Local Ruckus, the idea is to put events—entered into Hoopla.io by businesses—where people are already looking and syndicating events content to publishers of all forms with an API and widget that works for everyone. That aggregated content has a lot of value for outlets and apps that need content, including apps like Groupon, Foursquare and Sprint, and major newspapers—they’re in talks with one newspaper that has more than 300 local publications—as well as smaller-market publications like Kansas City’s The Pitch. Local Ruckus’ main competitors have become Hoopla.io’s clients.
Businesses and publishers both provide revenue to the service—a monthly fee for those businesses using the site’s social media management tools and for all publishers a fee based on traffic—but Hoopla.io wants to keep the barrier to entry low, according to co-founder Matthew Marcus. They will offer a revenue-sharing program for publishers on business that comes to Hoopla.io through their site, which Marcus and Arredondo believe creates a cycle of incentivization. Whereas publishers currently have to pay to get content on their site as a loss leader, they can offset much of the cost through the program and not have to hire someone to curate events. It also helps Hoopla.io.
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“It cuts off the headache of managing a sales team,” Marcus (left) said. “The publishers already have relationships on the ground in their cities.”
To make the switch to Hoopla.io—Local Ruckus will still run as one place to find events—the team had to change from a consumer-facing brand to one that’s appropriate to sell to businesses. But while it may not promote its company through its famous koozies, they intend to keep it fun. And the switch has changed the timeline for expansion from years to months. The goal had been to expand to seven cities outside Kansas City after this year and to the coasts within five years. Now they want to hold themselves to national content by the end of this year.
But the team of nine, which has acquired $100,000 in non-equity grants, partnered with Sprint and earned more than $100,000 in revenue, has the opportunity to get in front of millions through established sources. After two and a half years of shifting, restarting and positioning, the moves may have paid off in a big way.
Credits: Adam Arredondo and Matthew Marcus photos from Twitter.
