How this app dominated Hong Kong universities in just 1 month

Around 400 university organizations in Hong Kong are now powered by Qnect, a membership and event ticketing marketplace where users can sell tickets and merchandise and facilitate memberships. The company originated in Australia and got a transaction volume of US$6 million in 16 months.

First step into Hong Kong

Qnect recently entered the Hong Kong market. Their customers include 30 large faculty organizations and nearly 80,000 students in Hong Kong’s top five universities. More than US$435,000 (or HKD 3.4 million) in annual payments from tickets, memberships, and merchandise is expected.

In Hong Kong, each campus has approximately 200 university organizations that manage 1,000 to 8,000 student members. The summer season is an intensive period for these societies in terms of collecting payments for camps. They are unable to simultaneously sell and collect payments in person and online for balls, dinners, parties, and conference tickets.

Currently, they are relying on Google Forms, bank transfers, manual confirmations for online and offline payments, and tin cans where members can put in their cash. There is no member management system to streamline the ordering and selling of merchandise.

A ‘social ticketing’ tool

Qnect was founded in 2015 by Daniel Liang and Ryan Chen who quit their universities to pursue the “social ticketing” tool. It allows event-goers to know the events their friends are attending and purchase tickets accordingly.

Qnect currently has 150,000 users for its mobile app and website.

In 2016, the company released “membership ticketing,” allowing organizations with 500 to 10,000 members to use the tool as a networked CRM or member system to make announcements and collect payments across multiple channels.

“Member by default” is a key concept where first-time payers automatically become members of the organization.

“Currently, the university market is untapped and the technology adoption is low. It doesn’t have a satisfactory tool to manage organization member bases and sell their tickets, merchandise, and memberships to their members,” Liang said.

Last year, Qnect raised a seed fund from Click Ventures (early investors of Spotify, Meetup, DocuSign, and Palantir) and reached breakeven point.

Acquiring 80k users in one month

Unlike other startups, Liang and Chen went offline and used a top-down approach for its user acquisition strategy. They worked closely with influential organizations and community leaders to satisfy specific needs in service and had them spread the word about Qnect.

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