Markit Social

Founder: Jonathan Chang
Founding: 2021
Mission: Redesign the event experience
Employees: 7+ & 100% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & <$5M Raised
Investors: Phillips Academy Andover Angel Group & Techstars
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$10M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Markit Social is “software for creators and event marketing”. Founded in 2021 out of the Tufts Venture Accelerator and a recent graduate of the Techstars Boston accelerator program, Jonathan Chang and his team are on a mission to reinvent events for creators and Gen Z attendees. 

Markit started out as a side project when Jonathan was a software engineer at Realtime Robotics. He figured, if I can convince someone else to do this with me, I’ll take the plunge and do this thing full time. He had conversations with 30 interested Tufts students after posting on the university job board and got 15 to commit to joining him for the summer. In the fall of 2021, 75% of the Tufts student body was using Markit every week. The power of the platform (app based at the time) was that anyone who had attended a previous event was sent a notification when a new one was planned. For example, a fraternity would post a party invite and within 3 minutes they would have 300 people requesting a ticket. That’s a powerful market pull! 

After giving the university scene 2 semesters and joining Techstars Boston in the summer of 2022, the real work began to bring this product to businesses, event organizers, comedy clubs, music venues, sporting events, and beyond. Through their experience working with students, Jonathan & team realized that real world event software just wasn’t that great. Ticketmaster is huge, we all know. Then there’s Eventbrite. But the overall event process hasn’t changed in decades. You buy a ticket to an event and receive it on your phone, usually through e-mail. You pull it up on your phone and then you use it to get into an event. Pretty simple stuff.

The problem is the platforms facilitating ticket sales are separate from the promotional work done on e-mail platforms or social media. You might get 100 people to show up at a show but then how do you reach them after the show? Getting in touch and staying in touch with people is a core problem for event organizers. Markit is solving this disconnect through text messaging and integrating it into the event experience, transforming relationships between event organizers and attendees with no app needed. 

E-mail lists average somewhere between 5-20% open rates and only something like 20% of social media posts are seen by your followers. On top of that, roughly 5% of attendees will even follow an event organizer on a social platform after an event.  Text messaging has an average 98% open rate, almost 5x better than those aforementioned platforms. One comedy club the Markit team worked with even had a 1% e-mail open rate. Ouch. It’s hard to get people’s attention and cut through the noise. The way content is being consumed has changed dramatically.

Markit is a B2B software platform that happens to sell tickets as its main mechanism of capturing past event attendees. 40% of their customer base is Boston with LA, New York, Salt Lake City & Dallas rounding out some of their other significant markets. Traditional entertainment providers are the best customers but “anyone that organizes recurring events with a strong brand” are potential fits. What makes Markit effective is that their customers have a community of people that want to hear about their events. If you want to know what’s going on with startups locally in Boston, for example, you should sign up for this event list Jonathan created to see Markit in action. 

Their business offering launched this past fall with a free tier and three priced packages. It is a B2B(2C) platform that is subscription based with additional per transaction upside from ticket sales. In just 8 months they’ve already onboarded over 30k users and processed over $200k in ticket sales. From 300 events created a month, they’re seeing >$40k/month in volume on the platform, up from just ~$10k in January.

Their team views product development in two tracks – building event management tooling and building communication engagement tools through text messaging, providing their customers with ways to engage their community better and facilitate better events. If you want to follow Jonathan’s entrepreneurial journey, he has a LinkedIn newsletter you can check out here too.

Operators to Know:

• Ned Carlson, Head of Product, Creative Director
• Jonathan Chang, Founder & CEO
• Peter Chang, Head of Engineering
• Caroline Rose Harrison, Content Director
• Joseph Lillard, Head of Customers

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Markit Social team if I missed any up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

• More roles coming in the months ahead!
• Marketing expert
• Senior Backend Software Engineer

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

• What are the biggest advantages of Markit’s approach to building events software relative to incumbents? 
• What are the key milestones your team is looking to achieve in the second half of 2023?
• What is the long term vision for the company?
• What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 to help reach your goals?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Markit Social you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more engaged event experiences into the digital age. All attendees applaud your efforts. See you at the show!