Goldcast — The New Standard For Event Marketing
The Problem
The inspiration to start Goldcast came from Palash Soni’s exposure to events throughout his career. Before Harvard Business School, he worked in adtech for a platform that sold to enterprises and collaborated with the revenue team, customer success, and marketing teams. As such, many of the companies he worked with invested in events for building brand recognition and pipeline. However, there seemed to be a consistent struggle to learn from these events, and marketers were left trying to justify continuing to pursue them as a medium for growth without proper validation. From this experience, Soni believed that events needed to be more analytics-driven. He also believed that a shift in how events are done was inevitable.
What The Company Does
Goldcast created a purpose-built platform for enterprises to conduct experiential online events and for marketers to measure the return on investment of the event and leave with strong lead qualification insights. Goldcast strongly believes in the value of event data and has made it easier for enterprises to integrate this information into their current tools for improved post-event analysis and decision making. Their goal is to help marketers decide who to invite and how to invite them; engage with attendees after events through personalized follow-ups; and convert engagement into interest and customers According to Soni, the typical Chief marketing officer’s core strategy includes many pillars from inbound and conversational marketing to advertising and intelligence for tools. Goldcast’s long term vision is to be an essential part of the go-to-market strategy for enterprises as the default for event marketing.
Market
Goldcast is focused on the B2B events and conferences space, an industry valued at $5B, with competitors such as Hopin, Bizzabo, ON24, Zoom, and Google Meet. Goldcast differentiates itself by focusing on one particular vertical within the B2B space: Field and event marketers. In addition, their platform is uniquely positioned to assist with the entire cycle of the event from initial invites to customer acquisition and conversion.
Business Model
Goldcast requires an annual contract to be used by enterprises with different quota tiers based on the number of attendees for events.
Traction
They currently have 40 customers, ranging from Drift and Toast to Microsoft GitHub.
Founding Team Background
Founder and CEO Palash Soni, COO Kishore Kothandaraman, and CTO Aashish Srinivas met while at HBS and eventually decided to drop out to pursue Goldcast. Before coming to HBS, Soni went to undergraduate college in India and saw the shift in marketing channels after working in TV and brand advertising for several years. Kothandaraman graduated from college in India, worked for Boston Consulting Group, and holds leadership experience in sales and marketing for go-to-market products. Srinivas graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in mathematics and computer science and has worked at Kyruus, Meetup, and Jet. His experience working at Meetup, in particular, involved setting up events and matchmaking
The Ask
Goldcast is currently fundraising, expanding, and hiring and encourages anyone who is interested to visit this their career page: goldcast.io/careers. They are also always looking to speak with event marketers and getting feedback with their customer base. Connect With The Goldcast Team.
Subscribe To Storied To Get More Startups In Your Inbox