Find and book
diverse and inclusive
event vendors

Because we are a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. We understand the importance of being included in the narrative and how hard it is to find and connect with event professionals who are aware of the things that matter to us.

Many things in the event industry (ok, who am I kidding, it's everywhere) are saturated with hetero-normative conventions. As an example, when one of our queer non-binary team members at Venopi got married, 100% of the email (seriously) we got from event professionals consisted of: "future husband", "bride and groom", "bride to be". They always assume that our queer non-binary colleague is a woman marrying a man. This is not the only example, many kids' themed parties are also loaded with hetero-normative traditions that are often cringeworthy.

This matter is not just about being seen and heard but also about feeling safe. We are committed to being a part of the solution and to making a change for a better inclusive future.

Of course! If you are a straight and/or cisgender person who supports and/or accepts gender equality, equal civil rights, LGBTQIA+ social movements, and challenges homophobia, biphobia and transphobia - you are our ally!

So if anything, we are grateful that you want to support us! We need more people like you in this world.

Venopi mission is to improve the event ecosystem in the LGBTQIA+ community and allies through collaboration, digitalisation, and smart work.

Venopi is not just about features though. We are built by humans who are passionate about technology, simplicity, and effectiveness! It is one of our goals to help our event vendors to succeed by diversifying their income channels using various monetization methods and the latest technology, such as Web3, NFT, and Blockchain. We mean it when we say that your success is our success.

Venopi originally started as a venue marketplace. However, as our founding team learn and iterate from the users, the project has evolved into a platform for event vendors to do smart work. The fruitful side-effect of it, Venopi also helps customers to find the best various event vendors for their occasions.

Venopi was born end of 2017 as a personal problem solver tool and fun-side-project. It was shipped within one weekend to solve one burning IRL question: "I desperately need an affordable space next week to shoot an indie film. How do I do this?" Turned out it was a lot of manual work 😭 It was really a painful and time consuming experience. Being a software engineer who loves simplicity and automation, they started to think of a better way to do all of this.

After learning and iterating from our users and experiences, in the beginning of 2020, Venopi evolves into a platform for various event vendors to do smart work. The pandemic also one the reasons we double-down on the expansion. We want to help other event vendors to collaborate and digitalise their services so they can get customers using various monetization methods such as offering their service for virtual event, teaching masterclass, collaborate with various vendors to host an event with ticketing system, and others.

We aim to be the only framework any event vendors & organisers ever want. Whenever people think of event, we want them to think of Venopi.

In the last year 26,316+ Users has been using Venopi. Since its launch in 2017, Venopi has received 178,548+ visits. This number keeps growing,

Venopi makes money from membership and commission fee. Check out Venopi pricing page.

Venopi has a big hairy audacious goal to delight our customers around the globe and to delight our customers in the long-term, we have to survive in the short term. Bankrupt companies don't delight their customers.

Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again.

Whether or not this is done in good faith, in practice this kind of 'exit event' is a pump-and-dump scheme. The very popularity that attracts a buyer also makes the project financially unsustainable. The owners cash out, the acquirer gets some good engineers, and the users get screwed.

To avoid this problem, avoid mom-and-pop projects that don't take your money! You might call this the anti-free-software movement.

If every additional user is putting money in the developers' pockets, then you're less likely to see the site disappear overnight. If every new user is costing the developers money, and the site is really taking off, then get ready to read about those synergies.

To illustrate, I have prepared this handy chart:

	Free	Paid
Stagnant	losing money	making money
Growing	losing more money	making more money
Exploding	losing lots of money	making lots of money

What if a little site you love doesn't have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn't take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it's hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it's culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.

Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won't do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you'll be the only game in town!

So if you want Venopi to survive, please support it and become a paid member.

Venopi is NOT a venture capital funded startup. We are bootstrapped. That means we don't have any external funding on purpose so that we can focus on really giving value to our community. We believe that when we create a product that is loved by our community, it will all be OK.

We really meant it when we say, your success is our success. The only way for us to succeed is to make you successful.

We are not saying that all venture-capital funded startups are bad and that VCs are nasty. It is one of our wishes to work with great VCs that care about sustainability, future of work, people, and do-good. For now, we choose to focus our limited time and energy to creating a great product and happy, healthy, and sustainable company.

Venopi is a team of two (Ivana and Gaurav), and we are not good at showing off and bragging. Two important skills to "wow" investors. So we decided to just do as best as we can with whatever at our disposal, and challenge ourselves to be so good that people will notice us.

The problem with so many venture-capital funded startups is that their investors force them to grow fast in user base without making any money in the first few years, to then sell out to BigCo (e.g. Google, Facebook) for tens of millions or billions of dollars, then write a blog post about their incredible journey, then either shut the site down, or fuck over their users by selling their user data.

We are two lead software engineers and one sales manager. A normal VC funded startup probably has 5 engineers (A good full stack developer is paid $150,000+). Add some marketing and/or sales people and you're close to $1,000,000/y in labor costs.

We are using cloud computing services from DigitalOcean. A dedicated CPU with Memory-Optimized Droplet costs $640/mo up tp $2000/mo (exclusive backup storage and backup server). With backups, this brings us to $15.840/y.

For payment system, we use Mollie and they take percentage of the transactions.

We track our progress and todos using Trello.

Lucky for us, we're nerds so we build most of our system and tools internally so we don't have any other external costs.

We hope that in the future we can have budget for Jira (Issue & Project tracking), Design tools (at this moment, Ivana code and design on the fly), and Customer supports.

Now you understand why Venopi is not free. So if you want Venopi to survive, please support it and become a paid member.

Frontend: HTML5, CSS, vanilla JS (some legacy with jQuery), and Vue3.
Backend: Python, Django with MySQL as DB.
Hosting: DigitalOcean
Web3: Solidity, Python, Brownie, JS, Chainlist, Metamask