Hi everyone! I'm Alex Reynolds, Co-Founder and CEO of Vendelux. I'm a third-generation entrepreneur. My grandfather came to Ellis Island and started a meat market in Boston, and my dad started a market research company, so I feel like entrepreneurship is in my DNA.
I've always been creating products and businesses from an early age. After I graduated from college, I was a strategy consultant for three years and then spent about ten years in strategic partnerships, mostly at startups. And then, most recently, I was at Shutterstock, a tech company based here in New York, where I met my now co-founder. The 2 of us ended up building a $30 million ARR business unit, like a startup within the broader company, and that's where the idea for Vendelux came from.
Over the last few years, I've been working on Vendelux, which is an event intelligence platform. We've built a database of over 100,000 events, conferences, and trade shows, including all of the people and the companies who will be there. We help companies and marketers figure out what events they should be going to and who they should send based on who will be there and maximize the value from the event marketing channel.
What inspired you to start Vendelux?
In building that $30 million ARR business unit at Shutterstock, we found that when we went to really good events, they were incredible for the business, like the single best thing we could do to drive new business and get new customers. The problem was that when the events were not good, it was a big waste of time and money.
We saw this play out at the corporate level, and I’ll use an example of one event, Cannes Lions, a huge advertising event in Cannes, France. Of course, everyone at the company wanted an all-expense paid trip to the South of France. Every year for maybe three years in a row, we saw the same movie play out where we would get back from the event, and everyone would want to go back again, but nobody really knew how we did. So, as a result, there would be months of internal meetings back and forth with all of these stakeholders, and at the 11th hour, we would decide to go again. But by that time, everything was 10X as expensive, and we would go, and then once again, no one would know how we did. We looked at that and said there’s a huge upside when it works well, a huge waste of time and money when it doesn’t, and yet there’s no platform to help improve this process. There’s no way to make these decisions effectively, so we decided that we had to go out and build it ourselves.