It's probably no secret that the Covid period wasn't a favorite for the event industry. In France, between March and October, the sector's accumulated losses reached over €15 billion.

So what do you do when you're an event-tech start-up and, overnight, events start cancelling one after another and visibility runs short.

Startup culture as the best ally for weathering the storm

Turning a challenge into business opportunities is a hallmark of startup culture.

Just like in the early days when the Digitevent project had to get off the ground, we had to find and adapt our business model to a transformed market, design new offerings, ship features in record time, and find new partners.

The youth and mindset of the teams, both within the company and more broadly across the startup ecosystem, is also a key factor in success. Employees' adaptability in the face of the unexpected and their digital fluency are real assets when the setup suddenly changes (remote work, new organizational processes, etc.).

Reacting fast while still taking time to think

Lucien Derhy, co-founder of Digitevent, looks back on the past few months...

"From late February, we anticipated the cancellations and organized ourselves to limit the impact of a crisis whose duration we weren't fully able to gauge at the time. So we froze hiring (except for developers), set up remote work, reassured our teams, adjusted work rhythms, and decided to accelerate our technology investments by looking ahead to the future.

We then took the time to run a two-week strategic sprint to gather the opinions and needs of all stakeholders: employees, clients, partners... This let us identify, with no preconceptions, the new challenges that Covid brought to the surface. In a way, it forced us to step back in a way that day-to-day pressure didn't normally allow".

New strategic priorities

The goal was to address the new challenges facing a market in search of new benchmarks, and to help organizers put innovative solutions into practice: "We had to offer end-to-end alternatives for every type of event: seminars, virtual conferences, professional meetups with video-based B2B meetings, etc."

It was around these challenges that the ecosystem took shape starting in spring 2020.

In order to avoid cancellations and limit postponements, we reorganized our roadmap in record time, rolled out brand new technology solutions, trained our teams, and handled communication around the new offerings to build our profile in a market that was still being mapped out.

On top of this internal training, a lot of work went into guiding, explaining, and supporting clients who were sometimes overwhelmed by the stakes of these new challenges.

We also reviewed all our resources (website, sales presentations, client case studies, articles, our white paper on virtual events, etc.) to reassure people about our expertise in managing virtual and hybrid events end to end.

New, unlikely alliances also emerged across the industry, driven by the challenge of getting these solutions known. For example, startups offering streaming technology started working with stage managers and video production specialists. What used to be the exception became the rule, creating new synergies that look genuinely promising for the years ahead.

A glimpse of the event industry's future...

As you'll have gathered, the event industry in 2020 was a bit like the Wild West!

In a word, Covid ended up being a catalyst for startups. Those already struggling, or lacking a clear vision, were caught out hard by market reality... Meanwhile, for others, Covid acted as an innovation accelerator. This market consolidation (or "skimming," to insiders) gave no player any rest.

The upside in all this? We can hope that the competitive landscape of the coming years will end up more complete, credible, and robust.

In most cases, the virtual event will remain a valuable but imperfect substitute. As proof, 93% of French people say they're "missing" in-person events since lockdown ended. The concept of zoom fatigue emerged in the meantime, too.

Most organizers also say that in-person remains their preferred format for the post-Covid world. Most are hoping for a rebound as early as the start of 2021, with the return of good weather and the start of vaccination.