Whitney Komor

Business name: The Best Day

Age: 24

State: NSW

Conventional wisdom suggests that you need a solid set of figures and serious runs on the board before investors will even look sideways at your start-up.

But Komor’s business tale is far from conventional. The 24-year-old has raised serious investor cash – the figure is large but publicly undisclosed – using nothing else but “passion, energy and vision.”

“I think my age helped really, because the investors probably thought ‘she’s a generation Y entrepreneur – she must see something we can’t’,” she explains.

The Best Day was conceived by Komor after a frustrating experience organizing a social get-together.

Rather than an endless stream of emails, the website and app offering allows groups of friends to easily vote on an agreed plan. An upcoming feature will even enable groups to pay online collectively for venues or experiences, rather than one person having to cover the cost and be paid back afterwards.

Komor is in discussion with a number of big-name brands to install a widget on their websites to allow people to plan events with them directly. A percentage of the resulting income will go to Komor, acting as the business’ revenue stream.

Komor initially worked on The Best Day on the side while working for Coca-Cola. It wasn’t until a surge in interest, after some handy media coverage, that she realised she was onto a winner, getting seed funding off friends and family and completely overhauling the site to improve the offering.

“I want The Best Day to be the global platform for making plans,” she says. “It provides businesses with a really interesting way to connect with customers. I started the fundraising process as an exercise, really, but realised that there was great interest in the vision I had.”