A young Sunderland graduate has gone from working in one of the top companies in the UK to setting up his own business in less than a year.
Elliott Perry, 23, from Washington, has co-founded EventSneaker – and after only six months the fledgling business to business company has landed several major clients.
Elliott graduated from the University of Sunderland last year with a degree in Business Computing, and immediately landed a post with Sage (UK) Limited, the only FTSE 100 software company in the UK.
But, as much as Elliott enjoyed his role in the Small Business Research and Development division, working on their flagship product Sage 50 as a software developer, he quickly decided he wanted to go it alone.
“I always fancied working for myself,” says Elliott. “So after three months working for Sage I thought I’d take the risk while I had the opportunity.”
Elliott became a freelance iOS Engineer, developing iPhone Apps.
“My time at Sunderland gave me a foundation of knowledge, particularly in computer programming,” he says. “So I had the skills to teach myself the ropes, and I managed to land a couple of contracts.”
Elliott’s skills caught the eye of entrepreneur Mark Stephenson, who had come up with the idea for EventSneaker, an online tool for professional events managers which tracks content through to sales, measures the efficiency of different markets, and ensures that events budget spend leads directly to sales.
“Event professionals use Blogs, post content on their website, Facebook and Twitter, but they don’t have the time to spend on measuring the effectiveness of this, it’s just done in a fairly ad hoc basis,” explained Elliott.
“EventSneaker provides a tool that measures return on investment on all of this content, and where it’s marketed. The tracking code we use follows their content directly through to ticket sales.”
The young company has had a significant boost recently, when it partnered with international ticket sales service Eventbrite, and signed up new clients including Epic Times and Exposure Events.
“Up until now there’s been no one solution to the problem of how you market an event and how you track your investment in different markets such as Social Media, Blogs and websites,” says Elliott
“With EventSneaker, we think we have created a unique product.”
