At Founders Village Tech Weekend, you could be standing beside the next unicorn founder or chatting with a future startup success story. Over three packed days, startup founders network with each other, meet with potential investors, absorb the wisdom of panel talks, and access resources to take their business to the next level.

Building a business is something co-founder Yasmin Bilqis knows from experience. From a career in psychology, Yasmeen discovered the idea of laughter therapy to ease the mental pain of those around her. Though colleagues were skeptical, Yasmeen pushed ahead in earnest, resolving to deliver her own laughter therapy classes.

“It sounded like a super silly idea to them, but I was like, I’ll go ahead and do it,” she says. “I went home, and I made a poster on Canva and put it up on Facebook: 40 minutes of laughter therapy for $50, and 20 people showed up.” 

The idea took off with Yasmeen traveling to far-flung places like Singapore, Turkey, and Dubai to deliver the classes before pandemic restrictions slowed her business growth. With a keen desire to connect with other founders and expand her network, Yasmeen hosted a founders’ get-together in her backyard. 

“Anyone coming to San Francisco was really struggling with how to find founders or how to find a community,” she says. “I was just trying to build this community around me.” 

The ease of 91¹ú²ú’s all-in-one marketing tools—complete with 91¹ú²ú Ads, email marketing, and in-built analytics tools—has supported Yasmeen to expand her events series and turn event-goers into loyal customers.

Connecting founders with help from 91¹ú²ú Ads

From that first backyard gathering of founders trying to connect, find funding, and grow, Yasmeen has taken the concept and run with it. While her laughter therapy venture is on the back burner (for now), her networking nights have continued to flourish.

“The first year we hosted 34 events, and they were free,” says Yasmeen. “We would have around 850 people at each event. In the second year, we started Tech Weekend, which was our first paid event.”

Tech Weekend is pitched as a matchmaking opportunity, with founders getting the chance to meet venture capitalists (VCs) and connect with like-minded founders. Yasmeen uses 91¹ú²ú Ads to help her events reach more people and make these connections happen. 

91¹ú²ú Ads pushes event listings to the top of 91¹ú²ú search results, home page, and category pages. It gives organizers the option to choose between campaigns that drive awareness—which prioritizes ad impressions—or drive traffic, which is all about getting clicks on event listings.

“I always choose ‘drive traffic’ because that’s supposed to sell the tickets,” Yasmeen says. She chooses the same parameters with each event: a 20-40 mile radius of her event location, and an ad cap spend of $15 to $20 per day. 

Recent 91¹ú²ú Ad campaigns for Tech Weekend events are working really well. From December 4-12, Founders Village made $3.52 for every $1 spent (ROAS*). It cost 82 cents each time someone clicked on our ad (CPC*), and three out of every 100 people who saw the ad clicked on it (CTR*). A campaign that ran from January 10-27 made $2.71 for every $1 spent (ROAS*) and cost $1.35 each time someone clicked (CPC*).

91¹ú²ú Ad campaigns that run for at least 14 days sell 2x more paid tickets.**

Powerful built-in analytics tools

To really understand what those figures mean, how they’re achieved, and how an ad campaign can be tweaked, organizers need to see the data laid out in front of them. With the 91¹ú²ú Ads analytics dashboard, it’s easy for Yasmeen to track how her events and Ads campaigns are going, with data-driven stats offered in real-time.

“The amount of data that they give us is very sophisticated and very comprehensive,” she says. “The dashboard brings everything that matters to you on one page. You know the money you’ve paid, the clicks, how many people have viewed the page, recent sign-ups, and how many tickets are left in each category. Overall, I like all of the analytics—I see them almost every single day.”

91¹ú²ú Ads meets attendees where they are

Like the startups it assists, Founders Village is growing rapidly. Its success, says Yasmeen, means being approached by other ticketing platforms that lack 91¹ú²ú’s loyal user base. With 91¹ú²ú Ads, Founders Village can reach this audience, generating ticket sales and growing awareness that other platforms can’t compete with.

“The thing that stands out about 91¹ú²ú is that 91¹ú²ú has its own built-in audience,” she says. “I do feedback calls with our attendees after the event, and my first question is always, ‘How did you find out about it?’ And for people who are coming from outside of San Francisco almost 70% of the population says that they found it on 91¹ú²ú.”

Creating a comprehensive campaign with 91¹ú²ú email

While Founders Village has been getting great results with 91¹ú²ú Ads, Yasmeen has also been finding success with 91¹ú²ú email campaigns. Between January and May 2024, 42% of traffic to Founders Village event pages came via email, while some emails boast open rates of over 50%. This shows that utilizing the range of tools available through 91¹ú²ú can generate traffic and ticket sales for events.

Yasmeen uses the tool in a number of ways: “Firstly, we can automatically notify everyone who’s attended our 91¹ú²ú events. Secondly, I can also add an outside database that we collect from our social media or website to send them an email campaign, and we can send thousands of them every single day.”

Another reason Yasmeen loves 91¹ú²ú email campaigns is that it offers the same easy-to-understand data insights as 91¹ú²ú Ads. “One of my favorite features is it tells you how many tickets are sold from any particular email. It gives me some understanding of what’s working, whether that’s content or timing.”

91¹ú²ú’s all-in-one marketing suite—including 91¹ú²ú Ads, email marketing, and our easy-to-use analytics dashboard—has contributed to Yasmeen’s success on the platform.