Venuetastic (YC W11) Makes Booking Event Spaces a Breeze | Hacker News Reader

Venuetastic (YC W11) Makes Booking Event Spaces a Breeze

techcrunch.com

118 pointscyen33 comments

This one is a sleeper. Might not get as hyped as the other YC companies in its batch, but I think this could definitely be an interesting business.

Y Combinator's first all-female start-up. Lets hear a round of applause for that!

would be nice to see the number of upvotes for a comment like this. :)

Other big players in this space not mentioned in the TC article are: Reverbnation Gigfinder: http://blog.reverbnation.com/2010/06/15/gig-finder-the-large...

Foursquare Venues project (with some layer on top - hint, hint): http://blog.foursquare.com/2011/03/14/1up-the-importance-of-...

Indie On the Move: http://www.indieonthemove.com/

Venuetastic - YC's "Ebay for venues," and taking a cue from AirBnB.

These guys are positioning to be the Ebay of transportation: http://www.uship.com/

Y Combinator has several companies each doing something unique in the event space:

Lanyrd YC W11( http://lanyrd.com/ ) - Lanyrd is a directory of conferences, events and speakers.

GrubWith.Us YC W11( http://grubwith.us/ ) - Grubwithus builds friendships over food by sharing reservations.

Venuetastic - YC W11( http://venuetastic.com ) - An easy-to-use event venue marketplace.

Swagapalooza YC W10 ( http://swagapalooza.com/ ) - Free stuff for event attendees.

AnyVite YC S08 ( http://anyvite.com/ ) - The easiest way to create event invitations.

Just checked http://www.venutastic.com/ and you guys already had it with a redirect. Strong work.

Wait, that Helen? So that's what you've been up to since college. Nice job. (And you too Christine.) :)

A lot of great features in this thing, even from day one. The right number of different ways to do things. Very strong UI work already. Still a few kinks in the flows - how do I add a venue to my Event without also contacting the venue? - but something I'd feel comfortable recommending to my mother.

It's also clear you guys took cues from airbnb, not letting users get too distracted by worrying about what they can't chose until they've already been sucked in by the sheer imagery and selection of what they can. Heck, I don't even live in San Francisco, and even I found myself on here way longer than expected just looking at the various venues and how it all worked. (A "corking fee"? Fascinating.)

I see your "for ____ people" field only fits four digits. Do you see yourselves eventually letting people search for and select even larger venues (conference centers, stadiums, what have you)? Or is that sort of business a bit too high touch? EDIT: Ah, you can still type in five digits; it's just not wide enough. Eh, my question still stands. :)

Yes - that Helen :) Thanks for the kind comments!

Re: how do I add a venue to my Event without also contacting the venue? You can work around it right now by adding to Favorites first but yes, that is something we're working on changing!

Re: Yes. We are currently focusing on the 20-500 size events but will be be letting people select larger venues in the future (we are continuing to add larger venues even now). We will also be incorporating other new features for the more high touch events - so stay tuned!

Awesome idea!

As unsolicited feedback, I think the UI is a bit complex on search result and booking pages. Could benefit from doing a lot less there I think. But overall it looks great.

Thanks! We went back and forth finding a balance between the relatively complex constraints some people have in looking for a venue, versus a cleaner interface + fewer features. This is noted :) and we'll noodle on it a bit more going forward.

I agree. The search result pages is very busy with complicated options and heavy UI. I would consider splitting up the big grid into smaller, differentiated groups (perhaps by size or price) to avoid the overwhelming "Google Image Search" effect. I would also recommend moving all the complicated search options to the bottom of the page or to a different page.

I disagree :). I think the complexity is about spot on. Pretty standard...users are accustomed to having a myriad of filter options for sites like these. (Plus, the filter options are necessary to allow the user to filter down to the perfect venue IMO.) Maybe how they are presented could be improved, but I reckon looks pretty good as is.

It's like AirBnB, for venues. Neat idea! Congrats.

Ugh, can we please stop with the "X for Y" convention?

I feel you, but in many cases a comparison can save a lot of work for both the explainer and understand-er :D

"It's a peer to peer marketplace where both commercial entities and individual consumers can rent-"

"oh, like airbnb?"

In this case it's actually true. Try it out - it looks and feels a lot like airbnb, and it does so for good reason.

I like this concept. I know a few people were already looking into this ever since AirBnB came along, but this looks cool. well done.

Like this one alot. As someone who has booked venues before and had to run around searching, this would have saved me tons of time. Combine this with SpeakerGram (for booking speakers) and EventBrite for ticketing and I can plan a conference in a snap :-)

Nice pivot guys. But shame on the mentor that provided you all your features. Guess NDA's are worthless and integrity isn't coded into the tech world.

Eventify.me came out with this idea a little while ago. Plus points to Venuetastic.com for good interface design.

The about page is borking for me. http://venuetastic.com/about

Heroku / EC2 are seeing intermittent connectivity issues - try again in a bit?

I don't know why, but the Venuetastic site has crashed my Firefox about 5 times in 10 minutes. :\

Seems like a great idea and I definitely see a need for something like this... but Venuetastic... really?

Done much domain shopping lately? ;)

They can always find a better domain after they've proven the business works.

Almost as bad as calling a search engine google.com.

I too have pointed out google and yahoo when people talk about bad domain names, but for all I know those names may actually have made it take longer for people to take those companies seriously.

That said, I think venuetastic is a great name.

Grin - but you'll remember it the next time someone mentions needing a venue, won't you?