Founder of eEvent Shares His Story as an Entrepreneur

Edy Sulistyo is the co-founder of eEvent, currently leading the overall technology direction of the company. eEvent is a robust online event management service powered by game mechanics which helps users create viral events. We have previously written a detailed introduction about it here.

Edy is also a serial entrepreneur, and prior to eEvent he co-founded a consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio and began several web start-ups.

eEvent has gone through several iterations before hitting its stride. So we thought it would be interesting to hear to Edy’s entrepreneurial experiences, and share them with you here.

1. What inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

I have to admit that being an entrepreneur is not the easiest job in the world and certainly not the best way to make money. That’s why to become a great entrepreneur, passion alone is not enough. You need to have a strong vision, mission and work ethics. The lesson and the experience I got from becoming an entrepreneur are extremely valuable. It helps me become a better individual and leader in both my company and family.

2. We know eEvent is doing pretty well now. What are some of the greatest obstacles you have faced so far? How did you solve them?

Since two out of the three co-founders of the company have very strong technical backgrounds, we have no problem developing and releasing new features.

The problem was, however, that most of the features we released are frivolous features and did not add much value to the product. The features even backfired because at one point, we had too many of these frivolous features which caused us to lose our company direction.

To overcome this, we went back to the company vision and mission, reviewed everything, and decided to eliminate all of the frivolous features. We then tune in to our existing users and build a single value proposition that actually solves our customers’ real problems.

3. You’re based in U.S and also have a team in Indonesia. How does that work? What’s the strategy behind this?

Although we are based in the U.S all of the founders are Indonesian and we are very proud to be part of the #StartupLokal community. In addition to that, due to time differences, by having operations in both the U.S and Indonesia, it allows us to have a 24-hour operation. It works very well because Indonesia and the US are currently the top two countries that we are serving.

4. What’s the big plan for eEvent?

We are currently working on a huge, exciting feature that I’m certain will disrupt the event management industry. It is scheduled to be revealed in Q4 2011.