Crowdfunding startup, Picatic, can eliminate the financial risk for event organizers

Event planning must be one of the most stressful jobs around. On the day, everything can go awry, and there’s always the risk that the event will be a huge waste of time and money.

Online ticketing startup, Picatic, brings the crowdfunding model to events thereby removing some of the financial risk for promoters, artists and venue-owners. The Canadian company, founded in 2008, is the brainchild of a former events organizer, Jayesh Parmar.

Using EventTilt, a technology that is not dissimilar to Eventbrite, promoters create custom event pages with information about the artist and the location. If enough fans decide to pre-fund the event, then it actually gets organized. “Crowds will dictate what the market can bare, which takes the guessing game out of event planning,” Jayesh Parmar, the company’s CEO, told me.

Similarly to crowdfunding website, Kickstarter, there are perks for users who fund the successful events, typically in the form of discounted tickets or SWAG. Those who fund events that don’t actually take place because they fail to reach the threshold set by the organizer will be reimbursed.

“EventTilt allows people putting on events to have cash in hand before they have to pay for venues or talent,” Parmar explained. It’s a cool idea, especially if it means that local and grassroots organizers can get their hands on some funding to host an event that brings together their local community.

Crowdfunding is all the rage; Picatic is up against startups like Gigfunder and Queremos that also offer crowdfunded events. To succeed, the startup will also need to convince enough people that it’s worth putting their hard-earned dollars behind events, rather than conventional projects and ideas on Kickstarter. Another barrier to entry: there are already plenty of great events and tours, so why bother funding ones that may or may not happen?

For Picatic, the biggest threat comes from the big-name crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. Already, people are using sites like these to raise cash for their books, and events would be a natural progression.

The startup has raised $200,000 in seed funding, and will begin fundraising for its next round in the coming months.