23 year-old graduate leaves FTSE 100 career to found business

A 23 year-old Sunderland University graduate has left the safety of a FTSE 100 company career and started his own business, and secured Eventbrite as a partner.

Elliott Perry, a business computing graduate from Washington, finished his degree last year and immediately went to work for software firm Sage plc.

After three months as a software developer working in the Small Business Research and Development division, working on the Sage 50 product, Elliott decided to go it along as a freelance iOS engineer.

After working on his own contracts, Elliott attracted the attention of entrepreneur Mark Stephenson, with whom he has co-founded EventSneaker - an online tool for events managers to use in delivering their projects.

Elliott explained: “Event professionals use Blogs, post content on their website, Facebook and Twitter, but they don’t have the time to spend on measuring the effectiveness of this, it’s just done in a fairly ad hoc basis.

“EventSneaker provides a tool that measures return on investment on all of this content, and where it’s marketed. The tracking code we use follows their content directly through to ticket sales.

“Up until now there’s been no one solution to the problem of how you market an event and how you track your investment in different markets such as Social Media, Blogs and websites.

“With EventSneaker, we think we have created a unique product.”

The firm has now partnered with international ticket sales service Eventbrite, and signed up new clients including Epic Times and Exposure Events.