Happied

Happied is a team retreat planning and design company that organizes offsites and virtual experiences for distributed teams. Its offsite offering consists of pre-packaged retreat options with all-inclusive per-person pricing at selected destinations, paired with a dedicated planner (a "Happied Curator") who handles venue and hotel selection, welcome events, meeting space with a standard A/V setup and meals, team-building activities, team dinners and catering, and a suggested itinerary balancing work sessions and social time. Happied does not create the substantive content of clients' work sessions. Retreat formats it markets include sales kick-offs, engineering hackathons, client retreats, startup offsites, all-hands gatherings and executive getaways.

Alongside in-person retreats, Happied offers year-round virtual team activities such as games, celebrations and wellness events, presented as curated, ready-to-run experiences. The company describes itself as built for remote and hybrid teams and serving customers ranging from startups to enterprises. Per a 2022 interview with co-founder April Johnson, Happied evolved from a one-to-one managed service into a custom-built software platform that automates the team and client event planning process from ideation through feedback collection, while also returning to in-person experiences after pandemic restrictions eased.

Founding story

Co-founders April Johnson and Sharon Cao first built Happied as an app to help people gather for in-person happy hours around the greater Washington, D.C. area, then pivoted the business to virtual events for corporate clients at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Business model

Happied sells planned team offsites on all-inclusive per-person pricing, with a stated minimum of $1,500 per person for a four-day (three-night) retreat excluding airfare and a minimum of $200 more per person for longer retreats. It also offers virtual team activities on a curated, ready-to-book basis. The company states it uses a travel partner network with pre-negotiated rates to reduce retreat costs. A software platform developed after its service-based MVP phase automates much of the event planning workflow.

Revenue is generated from per-person retreat packages with stated minimum budgets per attendee, plus virtual team experiences.

Traction

By October 2022 Happied had worked with more than 150 customers, employed 10 full-time staff with plans to reach 13 by the end of the year, and had launched its software platform. Named clients cited in testimonials include Fairmarkit.

Latest developments

In the October 2022 interview, co-founder April Johnson reported that Happied had completed the Techstars Minnesota Twins Accelerator in February 2022, closed a $1.6M pre-seed round in July 2022, launched its custom-built software platform, grown to 10 full-time employees with hiring underway toward 13 by year end, and resumed in-person experiences.