Last week we had the pleasure to interview Skye Bulter of Smylee for the Bondi Innovation Forum 2022.
Camille is the CEO of Smylee, an event management app that encourages positive connections. Smylee is a free event organising app with a distinct difference, it’s not just about planning the event, it’s about encouraging people to attend too, by pledging to donate to charity if they don’t show up as planned.
The community of Smylee users want to show up for others, not be cancelled on and value the time and effort that people put into arranging events for themselves and others. it’s all about creating a movement of positive connections and in-person experiences.
In this interview she Smylee along with how she sees Bondi’s future growth.
Reach out to Skye on the BIA platform or on Slack to discuss what it takes to create a start up or for help to bring an idea you have to life.
Transcript
Okay, so Smylee is an app that’s free to download from Apple and Android, that’s basically set to bring people together and hold them accountable for showing up. So how we do this is have them pledge to show up. So you might say, $10, to show up, and we’re going to show up to this particular place, whoever doesn’t show up that $10 goes to charity. So it’s really just a kind way of saying, I want to show up for you please show up for me. And let’s do something great for the world in the process. If we can’t do those commitments. It actually happened in Bondi, there were a few of our friends that were feeling really down, especially during COVID, where people wouldn’t show up to it for them, or they’ll feeling a little bit lonely people and going on dates would get ready for dates, and then all of a sudden, they’d be cancelled on the last minute. So we wanted to really come up with something that helped with the anxiety around meeting up with people for the first time, and also just wanting to create an app that helped him organise events that bring people together. When I spoke last year, at the Bondi Innovation Forum, we had just launched Smiley in Australia, obviously, because of COVID hits, and Australia went into lockdown, smiley had to pivot very quickly. And we ended up over here in California, where I am at the moment. So I am now travelling between California and Australia. Now that Australia has opened up again, we have launched in the US successfully, we’ve done a few promotions, in Santa Monica, and Long Beach. And we’ve partnered with the University of Berkeley, their Cal football team, to do event promotions with them as well. I have met some wonderful investors over in California, but also back in Australia, who are helping grow the company and mentor the business. Definitely going global, so we really wanted to test the idea over in America and make sure that it was a something that Americans were facing as well, the whole not showing up and your unreliability side, and it was very important to understand if it was just Australians that didn’t like it, or was it a worldwide problem. And every single country representative that I speak to, they have a funny story about unreliability. So in Hollywood, they’re like, oh, everyone’s flaky. People in South Africa are like, oh, yeah, when we say we’re on the way, it means we’re doing our makeup. So the whole, you know, people cancelling and not showing up for each other or, you know, wasting each other’s time or, you know, not being flexible, or whatever the case may be. It’s a problem worldwide, that we want to kind of help with. So for us, now that we’ve learned that it’s a definitely a viable product, and people are absolutely loving our brand, and what we stand for, we want to increase that community. And we’ll be launching in the UK, MDR, and Canada shortly.
There’s so much potential in Bondi, not only is it a beautiful place, but there are so many amazing entrepreneurs that come out from Bondi that people can leverage from so from coaching and mentors to successful businesses. Bondi is a really fantastic place not only to live but to really sit down with people and access people that have gone on a journey to start their own companies and either succeeded or even learnt from trying a startup and what they can do better next time. So I think there’s a lot of potential in Bondi for getting people together and getting people to grow their companies, as well and yeah, be successful together. Probably keep on doing what we’re doing in Bondi and getting people together and telling what their journeys have been so far, sharing their knowledge, and really just supporting each other and not supporting each other. You know, it’s always important for a win win. But make sure that you’re genuinely wanting to see other people succeed. And you’ve got that in front of mind. It’s not that you’re participating because you want them to help you or whatever the case may be just be a good person and pass on your knowledge and want to see other people succeed either in your industry or outside of it, because that harnessing those relationships is really going to support both innovation and growth of companies coming out of Bondi.
