This week I wanted to cover Mystery, a corporate events company that just raised a series A at a $100M dollar valuation. While I was interning at Madrona Venture Labs I met Brennan Keough, Mystery’s Co Founder and COO at a brainstorming session so I have been following this company for a while and was excited to hear about the round.
But first, a personal note: I’m leaving Microsoft and joining a startup called Nex Health as the first Product hire on the Nex Health API. Nex Health is building a universal API layer for health care systems and I am incredibly excited about the mission, and the role I’ll get to play in it. This article from Not Boring covers Nex Health in detail and is what originally got me excited about it so I encourage you to give it a read.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Pandemic pivot
When I first heard of Mystery they had just raised their seed and were running a B2C service called Night Out that put together planned date nights. You would fill out a form detailing your preferences, then get into an Uber and be whisked off to secret bars, magic shows, glass blowing classes, and more. The catch was you had no idea what the next experience was until you got there.
Unfortunately the pandemic made their whole business illegal, so they pivoted several times. First they released Night In, a service where they put together experience boxes that could be enjoyed at home. Then, after noticing corporate teams using Night In for team bonding, they released a more targeted B2B offering using the same network of experience providers to put together unique virtual events.
Make corporate happy hours great again
Mystery offers six categories of events, artistic events, classes, games, relaxing events, tastings, and performances. For the month of February they have 60+ offerings, including wine tasting, Dungeons and Dragons, and a freestyle rap concert. We’ve all taken part in virtual happy hours that fell flat, or fallen back on the same old online games so I can see real appeal in unique high quality events that are trivial to book.
To put together these events, Mystery maintains a roster of hosts including artists, comedians and chefs. These creatives can earn steady income from a roster of corporate clients managed managed by Mystery.
Morale as a Service
Mystery is building this company at the perfect time. As I talked about in my article covering SeekOut, the market for talent is incredibly hot, which means companies are putting more resources into providing great employee experiences to retain talent.
At the same time despite more and more companies going remote first, virtual events are still by and large ad hoc and kind of lame.
Mystery provides high quality experiences that are easy to book and calls this offering Morale as a Service. They claim their experiences allow people leaders to drive improvements in key metrics like feeling of belonging, and team cohesion.
If Mystery can show their events drive measurable improvements in team performance, establishing a significant number of enterprise customers (and ARR) will be trivial. Increasing team productivity is worth paying for any number of hot sauce making classes.
Right now Mystery is just offering virtual and in person events where permitted, but it seems like they plan to bring back their consumer products sometime in the future.
Unique experiences at scale
Overall most of my questions about Mystery are related to how operationally intensive running events seems to be. While every driver Uber onboards is providing a similar service, onboarding a magician and a cooking class where participants need ingredients seem fairly dissimilar.
It seems like operational costs will largely depend on companies returning to office as supporting in person events seems significantly more difficult than virtual ones. To offer in person events Mystery will have to scale gradually solving the Cold Start Problem in each city. In addition, scaling Mystery seems harder than many other marketplaces as each experience is somewhat unique, and will need to be vetted.
At the same time, Mystery has a lot of flexibility in what they can offer. Every time you use Uber, a driver has to pull up, but Mystery can offer ceramics class, elixir crafting, or guided meditation depending on need and availability.
A growing mystery
I hope Mystery brings back their consumer product, partly because I never got to try it, but also because it seems like a great growth vector for their enterprise offering.
In (my newsletter role model) Packy McCormick’s most recent article he covers Snappr, a photography marketplace that built a marketplace of photographers for consumers and is now selling their services to enterprise customers. Reading about Mystery I was struck by how similar their strategy is. Mystery built up a network of event providers with a consumer offering, and is now packaging up that network and selling it to enterprise customers.
Packy describes Snappr’s consumer business as feeding their enterprise product, as when people who use Snappr at home need a photographer for work, they naturally think of Snappr. The same strategy clearly apply’s to Mystery, as there is no better marketing than a great product experience.
Overall reading about Mystery, I was struck by how wholesome their business is. Mystery’s goal is to increase employee belonging at work, while supporting independent artists and entertainers and I wholeheartedly hope they succeed at it.
See you next week - Espen