Maksym Podsolonko tells us how Eazyplan helps clients manage their services, get bookings, collaborate on event details, and stay in touch with clients, other vendors, and team.
Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded Eazyplan.
Maksym Podsolonko: For over ten years, our wedding planning business, Magic Day Luxury Experiences, has been one of the most dynamically growing event brands in Europe. Our hands-on approach allowed us to build up volumes of insights into how all the different businesses operate within the industry. We realized that the Do-It-Yourself trend was gaining momentum among the lower-budget weddings and events. These two factors meant that the market was ripe for a technology alter-ego of wedding and event planners. Eazyplan was born to make planning all kinds of private and corporate events easier for customers while helping book more business and automate the processes for the professionals.
Do you have small habits that made a meaningful impact on your life and business?
Maksym Podsolonko: I believe in life-long learning and do my best to nurture my small habits around it. The spectrum of these habits covers everything from reading several dozen full non-fiction books on more profound subjects to scanning through hundreds of GetAbstract versions of books covering narrow-field questions every year.
How does Eazyplan market its product/services online?
Maksym Podsolonko: We focus on SEO, content marketing, and cold email outreach to our target audiences. SEO has proven to be the most efficient channel that generates hundreds of leads every week.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to manage your online marketing?
Maksym Podsolonko: Our online marketing is based on data gathered via Ahrefs and Google Analytics. These two tools have been instrumental in building our understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Pipedrive and Klenty helped us build an efficient outreach system that brings in new business on autopilot alongside the SEO. Among all the management skills, project management seems to be the most important in the startup environment when there’s always way more to do than can physically be done.
What is your hiring policy/process, and how do you retain your employees?
Maksym Podsolonko: A startup like eazyplan needs to stay lean to survive the turbulent first years. We focused on building the core team of founders that drive the strategic development of the business. The rest of the team are contractors with narrow-field expertise.
How are you funding your growth?
Maksym Podsolonko: Eazyplan is still at the beginning of its journey and requires external funding. We fund it with benefits from our wedding planning business. However, we believe that very soon it will become profitable.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Maksym Podsolonko: There are no direct competitors in the market as other products focus on different facets of the industry. Aisle Planner and Honeybook are some of the notable players offering features important for our target audiences. Eazyplan offers its professional and private users the most cohesive planning process that keeps them coming back.
Tell us a customer success story of yours.
Maksym Podsolonko: One of our first users is a boutique hotel in Italy offering its hospitality for celebrations and meetings. The inquiries and management of these events are an extra job for the sales manager. Before they adopted Eazyplan, the pre-sales communication used to take up to 40% of her time every week. Another 30% used to be dedicated to communication about planning the booked events. Eazyplan helped this customer automate their pre-sales cycle and cut the planning communication half. Having time to do what matters allowed the sales manager to assure a 25% increase in revenue for the hotel.
Your final thoughts?
Maksym Podsolonko: The events industry has displayed growth for the first post-COVID year and shown positive momentum for at least a couple of coming years. Eazyplan is well-placed to help event professionals and customers plan better meetings and celebrations faster. We are excited to see what the future holds for us.
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