Event tech can seem like a solved space. You’ve got ticketing platforms and networking apps… what more do you need?

Today’s startup is coming out of Brighton with a ton of experience in the events space and fresh ideas to help events organisers large and small do more and grow their businesses.

…oh, and one of the co-founders has beaten a brain tumour before they have even got to a pre-seed raise. Buckle up: this one has a few twists and turns…

Fun fact: this is the second startup we’ve covered from the team previously behind Mind The Product.

– Martin

Rodeo wants to lasso the events market with a new way to manage and monetise meet-ups and conferences

We love events, don’t we? Well, most of us do. The opportunity to hear new ideas, meet new people, and spend a day out of the office doing something that counts as work can be massively appealing.

In an increasingly digital world, events keep us grounded in our humanity.

And yet the tech that supports events can feel underdeveloped. That’s a sentiment also felt by James Mayes, who previously co-founded and sold the events-focused product manager community Mind The Product.

“It became very clear to me just exactly how poor the tooling was in that space. To give you an example, when was the last time you saw Meetup or Eventbrite meaningfully change?”, Mayes asks.

“Ticketing platforms, for example, are typically built by an engineer who got a ticket for something, didn't like it, so bought a better transaction platform. That is very different from somebody who runs and builds events and communities and understands what it what it takes to be an operator in that space…. I'm coming from a background of really understanding the problem space and building something a little different.”

That “something a little different“ is Rodeo, which Mayes has co-founded with fellow experienced UK tech world folks Josh Russell and Andy Dennis.

Although it’s still at an early stage, Mayes says Rodeo is being geared up to do a number of things to help event organisers.

Firstly, it will harness the latest generative AI to navigate the heavy burden of ‘stuff’ that needs to be done around events.

“There is so much wasted time with preparing copy for events, preparing emails, little speaker blurbs, gathering assets. We can save organisers an awful lot of time. They put their time into these things tirelessly, but you see meet-ups particularly peter out because they just take a load of effort'. The tooling isn't there for them,” Mayes says.

Beyond that, Mayes sees a role for Rodeo in helping event organisers understand more about how their events are being used, and by whom, and provide a new channel for monetisation of events.

“[Event organisers] are using platforms like Meetup that they're playing for, or LinkedIn or Facebook or any of the big social platforms who harvest all of that data and then sell it to the highest bidder and run away,” Mayes says.

He says Rodeo is exploring ways to allow communities to opt into data monetisation, with some of that revenue shared back to the community organisers to reinvest in their communities and make them more sustainable.

“We want to give organisers the opportunity to see some of the value of the data that they're creating,” Mayes says.

“If I talk to any marketing leader today, one of their biggest concerns is that most of their budget is going to bots. We're re-platforming on Cloudflare at the moment so that we can make sure these are humans that we're dealing with. But then going beyond that, once you attend an event, you're verified by another human, so we can be really sure that we're actually doing human-to-human business.

“If we're capturing media from events, we're able to start saying things like ‘this was captured by Martin. He was digitally checked into the event and geophysically present at the right location. You can trust this. This is genuine media while the internet is sinking under generational [AI] slop.’”

The story so far

Mayes says Mind The Product grew into a 300,000-person community spanning 200 cities, with conferences in five cities, and a media business, before it was acquired by Pendo in 2022.

“By the time I sold that business, we had 440 data silos. That is no way to run a business, so I started building something inside mind, the product, to unify that data and start to do interesting things.

“But at the same time, we had just survived Covid, the team was pretty burned, so we chose to exit that business.”

Mayes cannily held on to the IP for his data software experiments, and they formed the basis of the beginnings of Rodeo. He says he’s conducted around 200 discovery interviews with event organ

“One of my favourite questions is ‘tell me about your tech stack’. And the standard answer that I get from them is ‘oh, we don't have a tech stack, we have a tech mess. And if Zapier or Google Sheets goes down, we're screwed’. That is a technology discontinuity that needs addressing.”

Mayes teamed up with Russell and Dennis to get started on Rodeo in late 2023. He says the trio are all full-time on the project. However, the development of the company hit a considerable challenge when Mayes was diagnosed with a brain tumour in early 2024.

“I hear a lot of investors say that they like to back founders who have proven they can thrive in adversity. I'm going to remind them I got an event business through Covid and smashed the exit on that, then I got a brain tumour, and they told me I'd be in hospital after surgery for three weeks on a high dependency ward. I was home in three days.

“They then hit me with radiotherapy and chemotherapy at the same time because they decided I was tough enough to take it, but they also told me I wouldn't leave the couch for six weeks. That would be the six weeks where I ran 5k every week and published my first book. I'm tough to kill.”

Tumour swiftly beaten, Rodeo was back to full steam, conducting discovery interviews and publishing a book for events organisers, partly as lead gen.

Mayes says Rodeo intends to target community events organisers first before moving up the chain to big events companies.

“If you talk to any major conference organiser, they'll typically come at you with three problems, the time they waste on tooling, they always like to sell more tickets, and they would always like to sell more sponsorships.

“So our starting point is to make the meet-up organisers an awful lot happier. If we can do that, we start to build traction in numbers, where we know where people are, what they're interested in, and we can start to help conference organisers address the problems that they have… and these companies are typically spending some fairly serious money on event tech.”

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