I agree. I have a customer who is an event management firm and the complexity and size of their events (long running events that last over several days) makes the operational side of running the event the biggest challenge.
In a lot of ways it's tricky, but easy at the same time. We end up trying to build strong concepts that can be mapped onto a few different problems within the event. A lot like an online store product, but with a better grounding in events.
We then try and provide the right management/reporting/organising tools so that they can work with it better.
I have a customer I have built lots of 'back-office' functionality for into a custom event management system. T-Shirts are a simple example, each participant in their event gets a shirt (lots of races do this as well) and they have to coordinate the ordering and production of thousands of shirts, allocate the orders for pickup and ensure that it alls happens in a short amount of time. They need a structure for that process and they expect a simple integration with their registration system. To them this means that when a person or group registers they define the sizes for their people. They have rules about shirt types (kids get t-shirts and adults get collared golf shirts) and upcharges based on sizes larger than XL. This seems like a simple problem but do that 25 times for various operational aspects of their event and now you understand what is meant by 'back-office'
1) Existing/new organizers loved the idea of going mobile for their events, but they didn't want to manage another platform.
2) Users were asking us if we could handle ticketing/reg. as well.
3) We now have an opportunity to make mobile engagement seamless for attendees the moment they check into an event.
There are other things as well, but these were the top three.
Do you think the focus positions you better for new smaller scale events or getting access to larger events? I ask because it seems like the real value in this space would be taking down active.com and high volume high frequency events like 5K races etc.
I'd say both. We're seeing smaller events than we used to get signup. On the flip side, we're seeing large events signup as well. What is interesting is the variety of events we're now seeing (5Ks included). We're talking to users in these new verticals to see how we can better serve their needs.
Good luck. I do some custom dev work for a event management firm because they could not find something that fit their needs (this was 4 years ago) so I took an interest in the space. It shocked me how broad the reach of Active.com was and how they were pretty much universally despised by everyone who had to use them. Really a sales organization pretending to be an event management system.
I'm impressed by your insight into the industry - A lot of your observations really resonate with my own experiences. I'd love to talk shop some more sometime if possible! My email is pshin45@gmail.com. I tried reaching out to you on Twitter just now as well.
How do you plan to prevent event organizer churn? Since each event's data like scheduling, speaker list, sessions change from year to year, there is no real incentive for organizers to keep coming back to your platform.
With the registration component, we now have a lot more data and value that we can provide to the organizer. Over time we'll give them the right tools to leverage that.
