New Platform for Live Events Discovery "Shomee" Began as Musician's Passion Project

Irvine, CA, July 30, 2021 --(PR.com)-- Vinay Kumar is a performing musician on a mission to revitalize local arts and culture everywhere. During the 2020 lockdown, Kumar along with millions of others working in the live events industry experienced a panic from watching concerts get canceled in broad sweeps. Venues were shutting their doors. Some would never return. And ticket websites were drowning in a backlog of cancellation requests, struggling to make payouts to event creators even several months later.

Today, live events have returned to small and mid-sized venues and regional acts are touring again. But Kumar, who has played a primary role in two prior entertainment and media startups, remembers how Napster gutted the music industry’s revenues from CD sales. He sees another problem on the horizon, and an opportunity to do something about it with his newly launched events discovery website Shomee (www.shomee.life) before the tsunami hits the shore.

Just as many artists have resorted to making instructional or product review videos to supplement their incomes, Kumar asserts that it simply won’t be enough for event creators to rely on revenue from ticket sales going forward, even after COVID-19 is long behind us. “We saw a huge change in behavior and acceptance for different forms of entertainment during 2020,” says Kumar. “Although we know that nothing can ever replace a live experience, we’ve become ok with staying at home, working longer hours in our pajamas, and consuming entertainment digitally and in smaller doses.” What he predicts for venues and regional festivals as an end result of this lifestyle adaptation is a higher dependence on their community to keep themselves afloat.

“The venues that survived in 2020 were those who got creative with what they offered, and how they connected with their patrons.” Kumar himself launched a podcast in the last year as a forum for event organizers to share experiences about what tactics were working while restricted by lockdown. What he learned was surprisingly hopeful. There were numerous stories from theater companies, dance schools, event venues and artists like Les Warner of The Cult fame who found ways to reconnect with audiences by offering private events, classes, pay-what-you-want tickets and livestream experiences over Zoom.

All of this knowledge spurred the idea for a new kind of events discovery website which Kumar began coding himself. His passion project ultimately got the attention of California State University Fullerton’s Center For Entrepreneurship where he would spend six months under its mentorship. Assigned to a team of students from CSUF’s College of Business and Economics as a research project, the vision for Shomee evolved into a sophisticated platform aimed at competing with the biggest players. By early 2021, the project was backed by a private investor, and launched in June by invitation only. Today, registration is open to both event creators and the public.

Shomee (www.shomee.life) differentiates itself by facilitating more interactivity between the ticket seller and buyer with features like real-time communications, a shopping experience akin to Amazon, and an Ambassador program which anyone can join regardless of number of social followers. Additionally, it offers event creators the ability to sell tickets, classes, t-shirts, parking passes, exclusive content... basically anything that can bump up revenue for a single event.

For artists and venues, Shomee can eliminate the need for DIY websites like Shopify and Wix, and offers a suite of marketing tools to help event creators with the thing they often need help with most - promoting their events. Most event creators don’t follow best practices in every promotional campaign because of staffing constraints and limited marketing expertise. Shomee claims they’ve accessed the learnings from 65,000+ event ad campaigns that generated over $100 million in gross ticket sales, and designed a process that works for every part of the event promotions life-cycle.

Shomee is free to join, has no trial period or monthly fees for event creator access.