Linkaband makes it easy for hotels, brands, event professionals and individuals to find and book musicians and DJs for their events.
The company’s co-founders, Filip Langiewicz and Martin Zdrzalik, are changing the face of the music industry by creating gathering opportunities for artists on an intelligent marketplace.
When we launched Linkaband [in January 2017] we didn’t have a very clear idea of our business model,” says Linkaband’s president Martin Zdrzalik. The initial idea of the Paris-based startup was to serve help local bars finding musicians playing around town and booking them. This explains the Linkaband logo: A pint of beer resembling a hand raised in the universal rock ’n’ roll salute. Six months later, the founders understand that their market is huge, they are receiving enquiries from hotels, corporate, event agencies and individuals, they start recruiting without having raised any money from investors.
"We are answering one of the biggest challenge of brands and corporate : how to create experiences How to be more than a living brand AccorHotels has completely understood that major shift" says Martin.
As a major partner of Viva Technology, AccorHotels had launched an “Open Innovation” challenge in the run-up to VivaTech’s 2017 edition. AccorHotels was looking for ways to attract more locals into its hotels. Linkaband came up with the winning answer: Live music.
Being showcased on the AccorHotels Hospitality Lab at VivaTech gave Linkaband some much-needed visibility at a critical point in the company’s evolution. Linkaband featured prominently on AccorHotels social media, especially after the startup won the AccorHotels pitch contest. The “likes” also flowed through some unexpected channels: a founder of Social Media Week tweeted to his million-plus followers that Linkaband had the best logo at VivaTech. The visibility was one thing, but the real life-changer for Linkaband was the contact with potential customers and partners.
Since those preliminary conversations at VivaTech, two people from AccorHotels have joined Linkaband’s advisory board. Martin and his colleagues also met top-level people from Airbnb and OneFineStay and made promising contacts in the retail sector (Carrefour, Klepierre, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield) and with startup accelerators (TechStars, Partech Shaker).
Icing on the cake, Linkaband is discussing a major partnership with one of the key AccorHotels brands for 2020.
Aside from the business and the networking, Martin says another major VivaTech takeaway for him was euphoria: “That’s the word for what we felt during three intense days at VivaTech: Euphoria. It’s all very relaxed, friendly, but it’s also huge and so many people are there. We had the feeling we were in a giant cocoon together.”