Sanjog

Where events and livelihoods meet

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About the project

Inspiration

Every wedding, concert, college fest and corporate summit in India depends on the same people: the tent house owner, the sound and light operator, the caterer, the decorator, the DJ. Yet most of them still get booked through phone calls and WhatsApp forwards, quote prices that change from person to person, and wait weeks to be paid, sometimes never in full.

We saw two problems at once. Organisers have no single place to find reliable vendors. Small vendors, who do the real work, have no way to prove their reliability or protect their income. On top of that, large events generate a lot of waste, from single-use decor to surplus food.

So we asked a simple question: what if the platform that organises events also made sure every event left something better behind? That became Sanjog ("coming together"), a one-stop event platform with a cause built into the transaction itself.

What it does

  • For organisers: search verified vendors by event type, city, date and budget, compare transparent pricing, and book in one flow.
  • For vendors: a free profile, a booking calendar, and escrow-protected payments, so money is held safely and released once the event is completed.
  • For the community: every booking automatically adds to the Sanjog Impact Fund, which supports vendor upskilling and community celebrations. A live impact dashboard shows vendors paid, rentals reused and fund balance.

How we built it

We scoped for a working demo of the core loop rather than a half-built platform:

  1. Vendor onboarding: category, pricing, availability and photos.
  2. Search and shortlist: filtering by event type, city, date and budget.
  3. Booking with an escrow tracker: Requested → Confirmed → Funds held → Completed → Paid. Payments are simulated in this prototype.
  4. Impact dashboard: counters that update automatically from bookings, so the impact numbers are tied to real usage.

For the business model, we designed multiple revenue streams: vendor commission, a client service fee, vendor subscriptions, organiser SaaS tools, escrow and payout fees, insurance and finance referrals, and impact sponsorships.

We modelled the economics of a single booking as:

$$ \text{Gross take} = B \times (c_v + c_c) $$

where \( B \) is the booking value, \( c_v \) is the vendor commission rate and \( c_c \) is the client fee rate. For an illustrative booking of \( B = 50{,}000 \) rupees with \( c_v = 0.10 \) and \( c_c = 0.04 \):

$$ \text{Gross take} = 50{,}000 \times (0.10 + 0.04) = 7{,}000 \text{ rupees} $$

After payment gateway and support costs, we estimate a contribution of roughly \( 5{,}000 \) rupees per booking. These figures are modelling assumptions, not measured results.

The impact fund is a fixed share \( s \) of platform fees, so it scales with usage:

$$ \text{Fund} = s \times \sum_{i=1}^{n} \text{Fees}_i $$

The more events happen on Sanjog, the more the community benefits, and the model doesn't depend on donations.

Challenges we faced

  • The cold-start problem. A marketplace needs vendors and organisers at once. We chose to launch with a single city and density in a few categories (tents, sound, catering, decor) rather than spreading thin.
  • Trust on both sides. Vendors fear platforms that squeeze margins, and organisers fear no-shows. Escrow and verified track records address both, but designing the booking states so neither side feels exposed took several iterations.
  • Making the cause real, not decorative. It would have been easy to add a "donate" button. The harder and better choice was to tie impact to the transaction, so the dashboard moves only when real bookings happen.
  • Scope under time pressure. We had to resist adding features (payments, chat, reviews, analytics) and instead polish the one flow that tells the whole story.

What we learned

  • Marketplaces win on density and trust, not feature count.
  • Small vendors value getting paid on time more than any other feature, so escrow is a product feature, not just a security measure.
  • A cause works best when it is built into the business model, not placed next to it.
  • Modelling unit economics early shows which revenue streams actually carry the business, and which are only nice extras.

What's next

  • Pilot in one city with 50 to 100 vendors across the core categories
  • Integrate real payment and escrow infrastructure
  • Launch vendor Pro subscriptions and organiser SaaS tools
  • Partner with NGOs for surplus food pickup and with companies for impact sponsorships
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