Allie Magyar, founder and chief executive officer of Hubb may be under 40, but has already been in the events industry for more than 20 years. At 18 years old, she took her love of import cars to produce her first trade show and, although she admits she really didn’t know what she was doing, she moved from producing a single show to 10 around the country. Magyar learned from the ground up at an early age what it meant to work in the events space and step into the role of solopreneur.
After figuring out how to manage the logistics of every aspect of running a trade show, Maygar moved to corporate events in 2004 and worked with with corporate giants. She says that back then, “fax machines were our technology” and people still mailed or faxed in their event registration. It was a tedious and demanding process with too much room for error. Magyar saw how much time event planners were spending on tactical paper pushing instead of focusing on work that actually moved their events, meetings and conferences forward. And as an event planner, Magyar was also living that reality herself.
Event planners spend painstaking hours collecting bios, headshots, titles and abstracts through FTP or email. Changing a detail like a period would require hours of finding the right version, updating it, and making sure everyone involved in the event had the most up to date information. “It was a really long and drawn-out process,” Magyar recalls.
That’s when Magyar got the idea to develop Hubb to help streamline the organizational processes of her own agency. She realized there was nothing like it out there, and already deeply understood the smallest pain points of meeting planners because she had been there herself.
“I knew there was a need for Hubb in the industry,” Magyar says. “We went to market with Hubb in 2015 and it was a bootstrap company, really small team and ended up with 21 customers.”
The company went on to onboard some of the biggest tech names in the world like Microsoft.
The Hubb Experience
Hubb manages the sea of content for an entire conference, where teams can make updates in real time. This also reduces time spent on updating spreadsheets and sorting through version control issues and endless emails. When a team member logs into Hubb, all of the updated information is ready and waiting in real time. Hubb's system also empowers speakers to submit their own profiles and credentials, upload their content for their sessions and collaborate on the details in real time with the event team.
Users can also organize staffers so everyone is always at the right place at the right time to ensure multiple points and locations are covered. Magyar explains Hubb as, “the single source of truth that powers all of an event’s content where the software acts as an event’s central hub.”
But Hubb also expands beyond the event planner and looks to the end customer—the event attendee. The Attendee Mobile Experience gives attendees the ability to plan their own schedules at an event, find the speakers they want to connect with, book a breakout meeting and receive instant updates and evaluations on any device.
Magyar sounds confident when asked about other technology and software players in the events space.
“A lot of product companies out there don’t understand their user and are bringing people in and saying what the state of industry is,” she says.
Magyar’s experience in digging deep into her user base didn’t start at Hubb. She started running accessibility programs at Microsoft before it was a trend to figure out who are the actual people and not just the categories. Magyar took that experience with her to Hubb and says they’re constantly trying to figure out how to help its users get the most value.
“Our company has lived and breathed events for years,” she says. “We know what to answer what people haven’t asked for yet.”
What’s Next
One of those answers is AI. Magyar sees the future of events as similar to going into an Amazon store that employs the evolving landscape of machine learning. She sees Hubb as a way to make accurate predictions on what people want to see, do and experience at an event by studying data.
Hubb doesn’t just collect data, but helps event planners understand how to best use it and make smarter decisions around event content and improve their ROI. Magyar herself says she spends a lot of time in the analytics side of event planning and how to best serve and make the experience even better.
But there’s another reason Hubb stands out. Successful women in tech are rare. And so is Magyar’s career start in a male-dominated space like import cars, as well as the events industry as a whole. But she’s also among the 2.2 percent of women in the country who received venture funding and raised more than $10 million in series B funding for Hubb.
Magyar has no plans to slow down, and is focused on offering the most value to customers by listening to what they want and adding new features. As the “single source of truth” that all information flows through, Hubb aims to not just be an extra hand, but an intuitive part of the event-planning process from start to finish.
