Meet Dojour | Episode 8
But our goal is to help you experience things in life that make you happiest in the physical world.
This is the Lunar Startups Podcast and I'm your host, Twila Dang.
Lunar Startups launched its first cohort in the fall of 2018—a startup accelerator determined to create better opportunities for women entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color. But at the heart of this work were six companies a group of entrepreneurs representing a variety of fields, coming together with the support of Lunar Startups to take their businesses to the next level. We'd like you to meet them. We asked the cohort founders to share the origin stories of their businesses.
O’Phelan: My name is Connor O'Phelan and I'm a co-founder of Dojour with my brother Tim O’Phelan. So the Dojour origin story...I think like any interesting business, it comes from both a problem and then having a vision for it and then stepping all the way back multiple times to kind of figuring out how to actually make that come to life. So, the Dojour idea came back probably eight or nine years ago. I was living in Chicago at the time and there were events happening every weekend that it seemed like I was either just finding out about last second or found about too late. They were all over the city—especially when you're young, 23-24 years old wanting to go out and do things.
It was frustrating to be able to find what was happening in those cities based on what I was interested in. So, that was always a pain point for me. Then I saw—it was actually a website for finding web designers that you were interested in. The visual format of it was like ‘Yes, that's exactly how I want to find out about events—find out about things that are going on in my city’.
So my brother who's always been my business partner and “idea throwing around person”—I showed it to him. I said, “what about this for events?” He's like, “Yes, I've had the same problem” and then we started a different business between then and we started another business between then. My brother and I have very complementary skills in terms of our social impact and then our technical impact to what we can bring to the table. It was just a natural fit. We always like to solve problems and we both could bring something to the table that complement each other. So we're naturally good partners together. It started off by just making videos when we were younger and then we were doing our website ideas and it just kind of started to snowball into “let's start a business and let's actually try to do this together”. For one, my brother's wildly talented. I have another brother who's also wildly talented. So I just want to be associated with that level of talent.
The second part is, we have a dynamic where we didn't take anything personally.
It was more just feedback and “how do we work through this?” and we were able to work out some of those founder problems probably years—decades—in advance about how to just dynamically work together as a team. So there was one point in time or it was like “you know what you're going to be my future business partner”, it was just “I've always gotten along with you and we've only gotten a stronger relationship.
Let's do this together”. To not take something personally is definitely an acquired skill. There's nothing innate about that. So, a lot of trial and error. I credit my mother for a lot of this aspect of things. Assume the best in people. Assume the best intentions—that they're not trying to hurt you. They're not trying to ruin you. They're not trying to wrong you in any way. And if you could hear that out, the truth will come out in terms of what they're actually trying to say.
When we were first starting Dojour, we were just starting to close down a business making course software and it didn't take off for a variety of reasons. We had this passion in us to still build more businesses and we're trying to find out what's the next one we're going to solve?
So, we were to chit-chatting back and forth and came up with “What if we do that events idea I was talking about?” Yeah...that's a problem that I’d be interested in. We were starting to go back and think about the problems that we had experienced in our failed businesses and what the things that were successful and what was interesting
about everything coming together is the ones that were most successful were very focused. When you're starting a business, it's really easy to get into all the ideas about what it could be and who it could reach and it's like “it's for everybody” and that's a death trap in terms of starting a business.
We knew we wanted to solve this very specific problem about discovering events. That’s what we kind of came into after going through all the problems about what we have with calendars and how it would work and it really came on to just the discovery side of things. So that's the core idea behind Dojour and it still is the core idea. What actually made it work, we were pulling on the other side of the businesses is having to get it in front of people sooner. So before we would build out our tool completely and then show it to somebody. Well we've about the smallest version, we got it in front of some users and they're like “Cool, it sounds like another place to post my event. I already posted on XYZ websites”. And we knew that we didn't want to be another place to post your event.
We wanted to be THE place you your event. So then it got us thinking about this problem in a different way. How can we be that tool that becomes the first place you post? Well, what if we were the calendar on your website? What if we could take away these steps that made it really painful to create events?
And that's how the core of the business got created in terms of what you see today and why it's actually helpful to people. Right out of the gate, even if they don't have any followers for their events, it's a tool that helps them on the utility side of things and then there's a network to stay on top of it.
We'll be right back after the break.
Welcome back to the Lunar Startups Podcast.
O’Phelan cont’d: So what we're trying to do with Dojour is all in all, we're trying to get people to go out more. To go out and experience the world, to go to shows, to see their friends, and to just live more cultural lives. That's our greater mission as an organization. When we were figuring out what the main pane point was, we figured out the problem is our relationship with calendars in particular.
So when you want to go out and find something to do, you probably have your 10,15,30 favorite places, whether it's an art museum, concert venues, comedy clubs, breweries, restaurants, and all the things like that. It is nearly impossible for you to figure out what is happening at each one of those locations. You have to go to every single one of their websites if you want to just find out about the events.
There are plenty of social media tools out there that people are like “Well, you can just use Facebook”. The main problem is that my relationship with Facebook is to not like those businesses. My relationship with Facebook is to talk to my grandma or my aunt and things like that. They've just thrown businesses on top of it and that's how they just basically overrun the software to be unusable for a lot of people. So what we're trying to do is to focus on the relationship between businesses and the people that care about them. That comes down to directly what is happening at your location. What are you doing? What shows are going on? What are the exhibits that are happening? What are the new beers are putting out? In order to make that a very simple experience, it needs to be a direct relationship about just what those events are. We're trying to change the relationship that people have with businesses and we're focused on calendars because that has the widest spread—has the widest reach in terms of who is interested in what's going on.
There's always going to be a need for a Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for the super fans who really want to know every new little detail that’s happening. But the greater reach is around “I just want to know what is happening and make it really simple for me to do that”. So how we do that is by making a calendar that's really easy to use for both businesses and the people that care about them. So for businesses, we have a piece of software that lives on their website. They can just plug in one line of code and the Dojour calendar fills up their website. So when they add an event on Dojour, it automatically syncs with their website...eliminating some of the steps in the process.
We've slowly started to add other tools to create Facebook events, to create Google calendar events, and start one-by-one eliminating some of the steps in pain points to create an event and manage and market an event for a business. On the flip side, as a customer who cares about that business, all I need to do is follow them once on Dojour and then I always know about the new events that are added and I always have a full updated calendar in my pocket. So it's not just for one event, its for every single one.
Our ideal customers are anybody who put on events. That might seem like a lot of businesses—that's breweries, that's restaurants, that’s comedy clubs. But it's also nonprofits that put on learning seminars. It's also networking groups. The interesting part about the event world is it addresses people's interests and the interests are variant. Our goal is to make Dojour as turnkey as possible for you. So it looks like that in creating your account. It's easy to sign up. You can even use Facebook to sign up for it. It involves integrating with the calendar of your website one time. So you copy and paste a line of code into your website or have your developer do it. It shouldn't take more than a minute and then it's just signing in at integrating with the other accounts that you care about.
So once you do that one time, the rest of it just happens. It instantly shaves hours off of your workload. So if you are running an event business, you have many places you want your event information to be. It needs to be on your website because people need to discover it at the core trusted spot. It needs to be on your Facebook page, so your fans can follow it. It needs to be on your Google calendar, so your team knows what's happening and what to plan for. It should be in your Google search results, because if someone Googles what's happening at your business, it should pop up right away.
It should be on the calendars you associate with so maybe you have five, six, twenty—whatever the number is that you have an audience that crosses over each other. You need to share that information. Each one of those is a lot of steps for one event. Imagine trying to update that for five, ten, twenty events a month.
Dojour integrates that. Just set up that one time and we'll handle the rest for you. We’ll make sure it gets to all those things automatically. If there's any updates you make to your event, we’ll automatically sync and update those ones too for the most part.
If you are interested in following a calendar of somebody in particular, it's as easy as following somebody on Instagram. You pull out your Dojour event, you search for them, and you click follow. Then you have a feed of all the events that are coming up in their particular spot. If you're interested in one in particular, you can save it or you can sign up for it.
When I'm most casually talking about Dojour to people, I get most excited about learning about their favorite experiences—whether it's going to comedy shows or going to concerts and the time that they met their wife, their best friend or whatever. The common thread around those is that you're physically at the place, you're looking at an event or physically meeting with people. Dojour is a tool to help you facilitate those experiences. We want you to find what you're going to do, go do it, put your phone away, and enjoy life. The more you do that, the happier you’re going to be, the happier those around you are going to be and that's our goal. Yes there's business along the way that's helping make that happen but our goal is to help you experience things in life that make you happiest.
Thank you for listening to this podcast.
If you'd like to learn more about Lunar Startups or apply for an upcoming cohort, check out the website at lunarstartups.org.
We'd like to extend a special thank you to the Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media, Knight Foundation, and Osborn370 for their continued support of Lunar Startups.
This podcast is a Matriarch Digital Media production.
Executive Producers: Twila Dang, Brittany Arneson, and Josette Elieff.