Jay Herron, VenBoo CEO
“We launched our app on Thursday with about 10 events currently on the app,” VenBoo CEO Juaquan “Jay” Herron told the 4thEst8. “We had about 300 users within 24 hours and that is steadily growing every day.”
Herron bills VenBoo as ‘the Ticketmaster of vendor events’ and it addresses the problem he learned when he was a comic book vendor and had trouble finding good events where he could sell his goods.
“Almost 85% of all vendors are doing this part time, so they have full time jobs. It’s my goal to make this a marketplace for all vendors, where they can find opportunities and book them, as well as track their expenses and revenue,” Herron said. “To strategically sell at these events a vendor has to track debits and credits… if, you know, your boot was $200 and you have materials that are another $200…. that’s $400. Going into the event you know you need to make $400.01 in order to make a profit.”
The VenBoo app is newly available on both The Google Play Store for Android and the Apple App store for iOS.
Herron says he has partnered with 10 venues so far, including the Latino Arts Festival in Kansas City, and VenBoo becomes their official vendor host for the events, handling all vendor bookings . VenBoo makes its money by charging vendors 5% of the booking cost for the event. The company was founded in March, 2020 and has one full time founder (Herron) and a part time founder, as well as several vendors. One recently hired vendor is seeking out events to partner with in neighboring states of Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois.
VenBoo is bootstrapped, but funded most of the Beta development with the $20,000 it received when awarded a grant from Digital Sandbox KC. Other ESO’s that Herron says were instrumental in his company’s growth and development include SBDC at UMKC, KC Sourcelink, The Porter House KC and Egghead at UMKC. Herron was a finalist for two recent awards by the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce: the Equity Award and the Emerging Business Award.
Links:
VenBoo
