#13: Damien Courbon

Radical Departures

Episode 13 - Damien Courbon - Swapcard: Bringing efficiency & engagement to events

Key Points:

• The event market was ripe for disruption & innovation

• If you wait until you arrive at an event to organize, it’s already too late

• Attendees seek more efficiency, so planning ahead makes more sense

• Events are very expensive and there’s a lot of competition, so organizers need to show better metrics to win business

• Swapcard sends team members to events to listen and learn, so they can improve

• Seeking to build an international team, so hiring more foreigners

• Focused on team happiness and engagement

• Moving forward, exploring predictive analysis & more international expansion

f you have ever attended a trade show, you’re familiar with the challenges: You want to go to important sessions but it’s also a great time to meet in person with others in your business.

If you’re a vendor, you spend countless weeks trying to figure out who will be there for networking, since your company has invested a significant amount of money to be there. If you’re an attendee, your company has sent you there at great cost as well. And if you’re an event organizer, you need to show metrics of success to keep and grow your user base.

Swapcard saw the inefficiencies of the market and built an app that brings more value for vendors, attendees, and organizers alike. You can plan your event in advance, including important networking meetings, without scrambling during the event to find people who you need to meet. Swapcard lets you plan and prepare for the event, including scheduling your meetings. The end result is a much more productive event and metrics that show the benefits of attending.

Damien and Swapcard are focused on satisfaction and improving the overall experience. To do this, they make sure their app is easy and quick to use so that their users actually use it! As obvious as that sounds, it’s astonishing how many businesses seem to forget about this.

In this episode, Damien explains how the company is growing, including hiring more people from abroad and expanding their market reach. The tricky balance moving forward is maintaining the company culture during this growth, so they’ve been focused on finding new team members who will be able to come in, work hard and keep the same team spirit.

Because Swapcard has plans to grow internationally, the culturally diverse team will be its strength for building into new markets as well as new ideas. This diversity is a positive trend we’re seeing increasingly these days in French startups, and we expect to see a lot more of it moving forward.