Today we’d like to introduce you to Jemal Swoboda.
Dabble (www.dabble.co) is an online community marketplace and skill sharing collective where curious learners can sign up for one-of-a-kind classes, everyday experts can teach their unique talents and local venues can host classes and drive sales. Dabble is designed to give new social learning options to those with busy lifestyles.
Over 100,000 “Dabblers” navigate a user-friendly website to explore affordable experiences while a community of nearly 5,000 teachers and hosts are given simple steps to promote and market their events and venues.
Dabble was started by Erin Hopmann and Jess Lybeck in May 2011 who got things bootstrapped and started from their Chicago base. In 2014, Jemal Swoboda stepped up to take the reins of the business with the support of a startup grant from St. Louis, Missouri-based Arch Grants. Three years and tens of thousands of classes and experiences later, Dabble has grown from Chicago to Denver, St. Louis, Seattle, San Francisco and recently Austin.
Dabble seeks to support entrepreneurs to build their own businesses through in-person events while fostering a community of lifelong learning around creative and social local experiences.
Has it been a smooth road?
It’s been a ride with lots of highs and lows. The energy and passionate teachers behind the company have carried the startup through several periods without funding but Dabble should have probably disappeared in 2013. The founders had to make the tough call after raising some early funding to wind down operations and layoff the team which they documented in their 30 Days of Honesty blog (www.30daysofhonesty.com) and they kept the company going until I took over as CEO & Chief Dabbler.
After securing some small grants, I was able to slowly hire an amazing team and restructure the company and debt with the help of early investors. As a team, we ultimately secured a VC round of funding that led to significant growth in 2016. In early 2016, there were 10 team members and we were pushing hard for growth. Things were going well but we weren’t hitting our goals and we ran out of funding again in early 2017. Lots of lessons learned but mostly just the fact that startups are hard to scale.
During 2017, I have driven Lyft and Uber and taught knife throwing classes to keep the company alive before securing our latest round of funding. Things are going great with lots of updates and site improvements for our partners and learning community and the current team of just two full-time staff and a contract developer are supporting more business and making more revenue than we have in any prior year!
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Dabble story. Tell us more about the business.
Dabble is truly building a community. While just about anyone can ticket your events, Dabble is supporting creatives to monetize their skills through local events. Dabble specializes in marketing curated experiences to curious locals who then can choose to take more classes, buy products or just support the artist as a patron.
Our technology has been built completely in-house and it runs really well. However, I’m probably most proud of the way our partners feel supported by the Dabble team when they need any help as well as other listing partners who often answer questions online before our own team can respond. The community of teachers and partners on the platform is amazing with everyone always will to support or lend a hand.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
With the huge ticketing/marketing companies supporting events and experiences like Eventbrite and Airbnb. Smaller platforms have our work cut out for us to compete with the size, scale, and resources of large corporate ticketing partners.
More and more, we are seeing the small makers and artists seeking to avoid the large ticketing partners to support local, community-based businesses. If you are a local artist, why would you want to work with a huge corporate partner?
This business isn’t for everyone but I think we’ll see event marketing and ticketing becoming more divided between the huge corporate partners and the hyper-local platforms. The trend toward experiences over things is here to stay. As such, I anticipate more event specific platforms specializing in nuanced experiences versus ambiguous aggregator sites where you can book a massage, register for a creative class or a business conference. We’ll see!
Pricing:
- Average price of an experience on Dabble is $30 – $40
- Fee to list an event on the platform ranges from 5% to 40% (more fee = more marketing support)
- Free to list on the platform anytime!
- 5% fee to nonprofits and free to list free events or meetups
- Free to use the platform for discovery, only pay when you Dabble!
Contact Info:
- Address:2703 W Thomas Street #2
Chicago, IL 60622 - Website: dabble.co
- Phone: 312-945-8011
- Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/dabble.co
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/dabblehq
- Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dabblehq
- Other: http://www.pinterest.com/dabblehq
Getting in touch: VoyageChicago is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
