More than a year on from their official launch in Oxford University, it is time to consider the success of the alumni-founded startup app ‘Youni’, and whether there really is a gap that needs filling within the student community.
We’ve all seen Youni in Oxford. You may have been interviewed by the team at the Freshers’ Fair. You might have claimed the free Najar’s wrap they offered to users of the app last year. Perhaps you simply stumbled across a ‘POW’ (Pick of the Week) Instagram reel made by its co-founder, Georgia Gibson. The point is, their marketing is good. They are familiar faces. The real question is: what do they do?
Speaking to Cherwell, Georgia emphasised that Youni does not want to be another ticketing app. What they want to be is a community network; an events platform tailored to the university experience, with the genuine aim of making the world less lonely. For students, Georgia says the app is a place “where you can see everything that’s happening and who is going to what.” Youni’s feed is purely composed of events, and includes the recently introduced feature that allows you to see which of your friends are going to each of these events.
I noted that Facebook pioneered the use of this feature, to which Georgia responded: “but students don’t have Facebook.” This was certainly true for me; I only downloaded Facebook upon arrival at Oxford when I realised that it was the predominant means of communication for my college’s JCR. Georgia joked about the clutter of content on Facebook as a platform, quipping that you might see a mixture of ads, Oxfesses, and updates from your granny on her plants’ progress.
In her view, Youni has taken the best bits of Facebook and FIXR and combined this to build an events app that “creates FOMO in foresight” as opposed to hindsight. Unlike other social platforms, their focus is on boosting attendance at upcoming events rather than scrolling through highlights of past events. Youni also has the specificity that FIXR lacks; only events that are happening at your university appear on your feed, simplifying your search for something to do.
Youni has launched across five campuses so far, but has prioritised Oxford, where its co-founders have strong links. Georgia Gibson and Omar Lingemann both graduated from Oxford in 2022, and have since been working on Youni full-time alongside a growing team. Their society partnerships are mostly derived through personal relationships formed via coffee chats between Georgia and society presidents, as well as sponsorship offers, and their knowledge of how the Oxford student community works gives them an unmatched advantage in forming these connections here.
A brief scroll through the app does indeed reveal a host of events in Oxford, ranging from Wadham College’s Commemoration Ball to joint-college megabops at the Varsity Club to Oxford Media Society’s next speaker event with Gabriel Gatehouse. Across the UK, Youni has 17,000 users, 350 organisers registered, and has sold over £160,000 worth of tickets in the app itself. These figures have increased significantly since interviewing Georgia in early December. This all points towards a real need for the app amongst UK student communities.
But what is this need?
The post-COVID world is one dominated by screens, in the wake of a period where an unprecedented amount of the university experience shifted online. It is yet to shift back entirely: lectures are now often recorded, digital platforms such as Canvas are used to set assignments, and SOLO’s abundant store of online resources means that even a trip to the library is no longer a necessity. This inevitably means more time on our screens. Georgia sees the “big problem” being that “students are spending more time in their rooms, disconnected from each other.” She and Omar firmly believe that the most important part of being at university is the experiences with your friends, and Youni aims to prioritise this in the events space.
Youni is still very much in development, and there are areas for improvement. I raised one such area that I had discovered myself as President of a society on Youni: that any student group whose audience extends beyond university students cannot ticket exclusively through the platform. Music concerts or plays where parents or members of the public want to attend have to make use of other ticketing platforms. Georgia emphasised that Youni’s strategy is to listen to their users and adapt on the basis of their recommendations, and she was true to her word; as of this week, you can now ticket to students outside of university on the app.
Some other recent updates include introducing FaceID for login to speed this up, new group page designs, the ability to manually search up guests on attendee lists and check them in, and more. Beyond this, some enhanced filtering of the events feed in-app, whether that is chronological or profile-based, would also ease navigating through the plethora of events on offer.
Can Youni really achieve its altruistic goals?
The main concern regarding the long-term success of Youni stems from its sustainability as a business model. Youni makes a point of being different from the other social media apps. They profit from our addictions to our screens; Youni wants to get us off them. So how will they make money?
Georgia described how Youni had to “marry our monetisation and our mission.” Instead of generating income via in-app advertisements, or addictive short-form content like Instagram Reels, Youni had to find alternative avenues of funding. One such avenue is taking commissions from ticket sales made in-app. However, Youni offers the lowest booking fee on the market at £0.49 + 3% per paid ticket. In contrast, FIXR’s is £0.49 + 4.99%, and Eventbrite’s is £0.59 + 6.95%. Youni’s fee would be too small of a margin to sustain a business on its own.
Therefore, the main way that Youni envisions generating profit in the long-term is through operating as a unique sponsorship service. Youni aims to monetise offline communities by sharing societies’ events on the app, and then offering a dataset breakdown to societies to provide greater insight into their active membership, which can then be used to secure sponsorship. As the middle-man, Youni takes a ‘connection fee’ for putting societies in touch with appropriate sponsors. For example, in Trinity last year, Youni matchmade Oxford sports societies with the company Runna, and it has facilitated a similar relationship this year between Bank of America and Oxford Women in Business society. The option to add in-app sponsorship banners for societies’ profile pages is currently being developed, helping to enhance this aspect of Youni and establish its importance in sponsorship processes.
All in all, Youni is responding to a real longing for in-person connections, a reaction against the digitalisation of the university experience that we have witnessed over the past few decades. Their mission is noble; we would all love to see the success of an app that brings communities closer together through a more streamlined events platform.
Whether this mission is compatible with a competitive business model remains to be seen. If Youni honours their commitment not to introduce subscription plans, advertisements, or increased booking fees, the big question will be whether their proposed sponsorship service can create enough revenue to sustain it. Perhaps a follow-up article this time next year will have the answer…
