Founding 100 — Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Founding 100?

Founding 100 is a capped early-access program. Up to 100 qualifying European MICE agencies get full access to Easy RFP free of charge during the promotional period, in exchange for structured product feedback and the right to use their company name as an early reference. Founding 100 participants who stay active also lock in a lifetime loyalty discount on the paid plan when paid pricing begins.

The cap exists for a reason. We are a small team — one founder and two contractors — and we want to give every participant real attention, including direct email access to the founder. A hundred agencies is the upper bound at which we can still do that honestly. When the cap is reached, applications go on a short waitlist and are reviewed as seats open up.

2. Who can apply?

Any registered MICE, corporate-events, travel-management or hotel-sourcing business in the EU, EEA or United Kingdom that ran at least one hotel RFP in the past twelve months. We ask for evidence — a brief, a vendor email, or a referral from someone in the industry. We also need you to be willing to give us three short feedback sessions across the program. Direct competitors are not eligible.

"Agency" is read broadly. A two-person event-planning shop in Lisbon qualifies. An in-house procurement team at a multinational that runs ten MICE events a year qualifies. A solo executive assistant who sources hotels as part of a wider role qualifies if the EA has the authority to commit on those events. What we are filtering for is real operational use, not company size.

3. What is the application process?

Apply at /pricing/founding-100/. The form is short: company name, country, work email, one example of a recent brief or hotel-side email, and one sentence describing the sourcing problem you most want solved. We do not run a sales process, ask you to book a call, or push for an immediate commitment.

The one sentence about your sourcing problem matters more than anything else on the form. It tells us whether what we are building is going to be useful to you, and it gives us the starting point for the first feedback session. Anything from "BAFO rounds take forever and I want to stop running them by email" to "I cannot get a clean comparison view when half the hotels reply with all-in rates and half reply with itemised" is exactly the kind of input that gets you approved.

4. How long does review take?

Three to five working days. We read every application personally. If we need a clarification we ask once, by email. If we approve, you receive credentials in the same email so you can start the same day.

If you have not heard from us inside five working days, please write to [email protected] directly. The most common cause of a delay is a spam-filter problem on the reply, not silence from our side. We acknowledge every application within two working days, even if the substantive decision takes the full five.

5. What happens if I am not approved?

We will tell you the reason in plain language — for example, "we need to see one example of a brief you have run," or "we are currently capped on agencies based in city X." You are welcome to reapply when the situation changes. Nothing in a rejected application is shared outside the founder and is deleted within 90 days.

A non-approval is not a rejection of you or your business. It usually reflects the program cap, the city-level distribution we are trying to maintain, or the maturity of the workflow you are bringing in. None of those are permanent. If we have to say no today, we want you to be able to say yes to a future invitation without a grudge on either side.

6. When does paid pricing start?

The promotional period is currently planned to end in the fourth quarter of 2027. We will publish the exact paid pricing at least 60 days before the transition so you can plan and decide. No card on file is charged without your explicit consent at the point of transition. Existing accounts get the loyalty discount described below; new accounts joining after the transition pay the published price.

7. What is the loyalty discount?

Two tiers. If you complete at least three structured feedback sessions during the program and are still active at the transition to paid pricing, you keep a 30% lifetime discount on the paid plan. If you stay active but do not meet the feedback threshold, the discount is 15% lifetime. "Lifetime" means the discount stays attached to the original account for as long as it is continuously active on a paid plan. We confirm your feedback count in writing before the transition so there are no surprises.

8. Can I cancel?

Yes — anytime, for any reason, with no penalty. Use the in-product cancellation flow or email us. After cancellation you have a 60-day window to export your hotel data, RFP responses and contract drafts in CSV and PDF. If you want immediate deletion instead, request it in writing and we action it inside 30 days.

9. What about existing Founding Hotels?

Founding Hotel agreements (hotel-side) are a separate program with separate contracts. Nothing in Founding 100 — which is the agency-side program — changes those hotel-side contracts. The two programs run in parallel. If you are an agency that also has a hotel-side relationship, the two are managed independently.

10. What data do you collect?

The account fields you give us, the briefs and RFPs you create inside the Platform, the responses hotels send back, and standard usage logs. We do not sell data, we do not identify individual hotels inside benchmarks, and we do not train third-party AI models on your workflow data. The full picture is on the Data Usage page. For procurement, the pre-signed DPA is at /legal/dpa/.

11. Why are you doing this for free?

Because charging before the product is ready would set the wrong expectation. We are one founder and two contractors. Giving the tool to a capped cohort lets us refine the workflow with real European MICE agencies, build a public reference base, and reach feature parity for general availability without pretending we are bigger than we are. We pay for it out of the founder's savings. The full reasoning is in the Founder Letter.

The other honest reason: when something is free, people use it differently. They try the workflows they would otherwise skip. They tell us what is annoying, not just what is broken. They stay long enough to find the second-order problems — the ones that only show up in week six. That is the feedback that turns a working prototype into a tool an industry adopts. Charging too early would lose that signal, and there is no shortcut to it.

12. How do I contact the founder?

Direct email to [email protected], or on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/gustavoborges. Gustavo replies personally to every email from a Founding 100 applicant or member. Acknowledgement target is two working days; substantive replies depend on what you are asking, but most are resolved inside a working week.

For anything urgent — for example, an active RFP that is blocked by a bug in the Platform — put "URGENT" in the subject line and we will treat it as a P0 issue. For longer-form thinking, conversation by email is usually faster than a call, but a video call is available whenever it would actually help.