POSH, the easiest way to manage and monetize live experiences, today announces its public launch. The company provides the infrastructure for independent event organizers to host events, whether it’s a small dinner party or a 10,000-person music festival, and for attendees to make money as paid affiliates. To make this vision a reality, POSH has raised a $5M seed co-led by Companyon Ventures and EPIC Ventures, with participation from Cameron Dallas, Day One Ventures, Pareto Holdings, Joshua Browder (DoNotPay founder) and others.
Despite launching in 2020 during the pandemic, POSH has already grown to more than half a million users and processed $30 million in tickets. The platform has been used across six continents In Q1 2023, they grew their number of live events created by 50%.
POSH was founded by Black founders, Avante Price and Eli Taylor-Lemire, who’d been immersed in the events and nightlife space for years and knew intimately the struggles of scaling their own events. Avante learned how to DJ from his father at five years old and has played hundreds of shows in the past 15 years. Through his own freelance photo-agency, Eli’s produced content for major fashion magazines and music acts, including Sony and ROC Nation-signed artists. In 2020, Avante and Eli dropped out of NYU to build POSH to disrupt the worldwide events industry that’s projected to grow to $2.1T by 2028.
POSH provides the financial, community management and marketing infrastructure for live experiences. As the Shopify for events, POSH helps independent event organizers manage the entire lifecycle of a live experience, offering white-labeled event pages, powerful marketing tools (email, SMS, affiliate), community management features and complex financial infrastructure that provides organizers with daily payouts, automated dispute fighting, the ability to add custom fees, and more. Their suite of tools is completely free for event organizers to use, whether they’re hosting a free or paid event. POSH makes a fee off of each ticket purchased.
“The existing events industry is extremely monopolistic,” said Avante Price, co-founder and CEO of POSH. “Incumbent brands use a pay-to-play model to keep corporate event organizers exclusive to their products. They put their brand before their organizers’ and make it extremely difficult to manage and scale the communities that event organizers work so hard to build. Other existing platforms have limited functionality, weak financial infrastructure and offer little to no marketing tools. We built POSH to make it the best platform to find what to do as an attendee, make money as an affiliate and manage an event as a host.”
POSH features include:
- Before an event: POSH offers a robust ticketing & RSVP tool that allows organizers of any event to easily create a custom page tailored to the specifics of their event. The platform’s white-labeled event pages allow organizers to tailor the look and feel of their pages to match their brand identity.
- Once an event is kicked off: Organizers can onboard their team, segment, SMS and email their past attendees, and create Kickback offers to incentivize attendees to become paid affiliates. This empowers fans and those with monetizable social influence to earn cash in the events space without the heavy lift of hosting their own experience. For more established brands, organizers have access to limitless capabilities, such as; attendee payment plans, custom checkout fields, website code embeds, custom aerial seat/table maps, and much more.
- After the event: Organizers and affiliates get immediate access to working capital through POSH’s instant payouts feature. They also receive robust analytics, including attendee demographics, attendee purchase location and history, attendee social media handles, attendee contact information, fraud alerts, page visits and tracking link data, and more.
“POSH immediately caught my eye as the most user friendly, sexiest and innovative ticketing platform,” said Charles Hochfelder, co-founder of We Belong Here Festival. “What has truly exceeded my expectations has been the personalized support and dedication from not only the POSH team, but from Avante and Eli themselves. Text blasts, personalized table charts, and custom payment plans are just a few of the many features I absolutely love about the platform. We threw our first-ever event in NYC on POSH, and two years later, we sold out a 10,000-person music festival with their support.
