Event sponsorships are antiquated, and an ache-infusing process. Especially if you are a college student, and don’t know the ins and outs of media buying. The same applies to big banner events and the preparation processes are frigid. The cheesed off organizers often hunt for perfect opportunities and brands holler at them asking questions like how their formal apparel brand is going to gain customers in colleges.
Hitesh Gossain concluded that these unmanaged relationships between brands and organizers hold a great opportunity within. Onspon was the solution to all these problems, which is a marketplace for advertisers and organizers to connect.
The Eureka Moment
“The idea of Onspon started when as the sponsorship manager of our college fests, we had to hunt down brands based on relationships rather than event metrics (and we were students – so had limited time and team size),” says Hitesh, the Founder at Onspon.
A couple of years later, sitting on the brand side, in his air conditioned office, he was in a brainstorming session with his colleagues to plan a brand outreach. It was almost impossible to find and close conversations with million of events.
“Leave apart small events – it was difficult to even evaluate high decibel events like premier leagues on a single comparative chart. The problem of sponsorship raising and discovering is everywhere – and we understood it soon” he adds.
The series of incidents led to the birth of Onspon to bridge the very same information and access gap. An experienced team of brand marketers, strategists, senior event operations folks and creative – across Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Dubai have made this happen.
The Founders Life
Hitesh studied in Agra and completed his high schooling there. After which he moved to Uttarakhand, where he completed his engineering from Pantnagar university. Procuring MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, he joined as the youngest manager at Marsand and the member of the board at M&A in Singapore.
Hitesh Gossain comes with 14+ years of rich experience in P&L leadership, general management, strategic business expansion and M&A. An alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, Hitesh was the recipient of the prestigious “IIM Ahmedabad Award of Academic Merit”.
Having worked across the globe; he has extensive experience in spearheading strategy in blue chip corporations in segments like IT, FMCG, Metals, consulting services, supply chain and consumer goods. He has worked across SE Asia, Middle East, and India with significant experience in strategic growth and development.
Prior to start Onspon , Hitesh was the Business Head with Percept Ltd. Prior to that, he worked at organizations like UTC (Singapore), Mars Inc. (EMEA / Asia), InfosysTechnologies Limited (India / US).
At Onspon, Hitesh is responsible for ownership of overall organization’s growth and development. Hitesh is also an invited speaker at various industry events, in areas of strategy, M&A, Media and organizational development. His passion lies in traveling and interacting with people from varying cultures, beliefs and nationalities.
Current Scenario of Onspon
Today 400+ brands use Onspon to evaluate some fantastic opportunities like EDM concerts, B2B / B2C exhibitions, conferences, college festivals, sports events, corporate engagement platforms, children event, all major sporting leagues etc.
Onspon has rated as an exhaustive high-quality platform for assessing the best partnership opportunities across 8000+ avenues. The best part is that it’s a marketplace model – hence no ‘sales pitches’ – we are event agnostic hence brands get what they want.
“The idea is to help them understand how to do it – and do it in a scalable manner. Hence, the plan was to have maximum events listed and the maximum brands to view them. Thus, we created two teams – one to seek events and the other to seek brands,” explains Hitesh.
A few months ago, Onspon secured a funding of ₹1 crore from Swain Angel Investors. The startup facilitated transactions worth ₹37 crores in the last fiscal year. With a database of 13500 event managers and more than 45o brands, the company has managed to generate ₹1.2 crores of revenue in the last fiscal years.
Glance At The Industry
Being a $56 billion market globally, event sponsorships create a vast space for entrepreneurs to try their luck. Combined with other forces in the market, like event management being a $600 billion worth in industry value, the startup is sure to gain heavy traction in the upcoming years.
There are a few global peers like sponsormyevent.com , sponsorist.com, sponsorhub.com, etc. On a product enhancement level, there is IEG, which is the biggest consulting company for sponsorships globally. However, India is a very different market where the average value per event is lower and the sheer numbers are massive.
“The brands also are keen on engagement matrices which can be established only at a certain scale and hence, we think we are poised to create significant traction in this space,” states Hitesh.
As sponsorships are the single biggest problem area, the earliest need is sponsorship. However, on a long tail approach – all value drivers in event development space will form a part of the value offerings.
