How AmazingCo crafts leisure experiences worth talking about
What are you doing this weekend? It’s the quintessential question for a Friday afternoon, and Australian startup AmazingCo is intent on giving its customers a good answer. AmazingCo is a leisure experience company that crafts fun and interesting experiences for everyone from couples to colleagues. Already operating in over fifty cities around the world and offering more than a hundred different experiences, AmazingCo is determined to level-up your leisure time.
Small Beginnings
AmazingCo was founded in 2012 by Co-CEOs Jeremy Cox and Silvia Hope, alongside CMO Nick Brozovic. Initially, AmazingCo specialised in children’s parties, but what began as a self-funded hobby business soon picked up steam, and within five years, the company was a major children’s entertainment business. When we spoke to Cox, he explained that early on, AmazingCo built a strong focus on customer feedback. “We had feedback from 70-80% of customers every single week – that feedback would just pour in,” Cox told us. “And we would use that to identify gaps in the supply side – whether quality was dropping – and then we would develop all these interventions.”
That focus on quality management has stayed with AmazingCo as it has grown into an international business, offering not only children’s entertainment, but also experiences for friends, families, couples and companies. According to Cox, even as the business has scaled to operate in more than fifty cities around the world, they still obtain feedback from 70% of customers, using net promoter scores to track and address quality issues.
Connecting People & Places
Today, AmazingCo crafts and curates specific experiences to help people discover their city and connect with each other. ‘Experience-launchers’ are on the ground in each city, working with local service providers to develop activities and experiences for local customers. “And from there, it's about this mindset of global scaling,” Cox explains. “Could you believe this thing designed in Atlanta, or LA or London or Melbourne could actually be relevant to people in all of our 60 cities?” Cox describes idea flow as the lifeblood of the business, with feedback and input coming from customers, local providers and experience-launchers alike.
But as Cox is keen to point out, AmazingCo is not a marketplace, taking a small cut of each booking. Because the business designs its own experiences and generates original content, AmazingCo is able to retain a far greater percentage of the proceeds. With digital-only experiences, that retention is as high as 100%, and with some in-person experiences, a greater cost of delivery may mean the business only retains 30%. On average, according to Cox, AmazingCo retains 50% of the revenue from each booking.
New Problems & Opportunities
The Covid-19 pandemic proved a major test to AmazingCo, a company geared around providing experiences for people to gather and connect. “95% of revenue was shot within one week in March 2020,” said Cox. But between April 2020 and the end of 2021, the business became cash flow positive, their headcount grew and their booking volumes increased. How did AmazingCo achieve this? First by reducing costs and then by identifying immediate opportunities and creating new digital experiences to help people connect. But the team went further, speculating on how the world would re-open, and creating day-trip experiences for family and friends, as cities eased out of lockdown.
Running as an asset-light business with strong margins, Cox sees tremendous growth potential ahead for AmazingCo. In the next couple of years, however, the company is keen to focus on the cities in their current roster. There are still millions of potential customers looking for new and interesting leisure experiences and as Cox puts it, “We're really just scratching the surface.”
If you want to hear more about AmazingCo and the unique experiences they offer, listen to our full chat with Co-founder and Co-CEO Jeremy Cox on the Artesian Podcast: ArteHouse Innovation Series https://www.artesianinvest.com/podcast/episode/75c0c18b/amazingco-levelling-up-your-leisure
and check out https://www.amazingco.me/.
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