Attending – Free events, done better | Hacker News Reader

Attending – Free events, done better

attending.io

24 pointsbikeshack6 comments

Not to rain on their parade, but the world doesn't need yet another event registration site. There are literally hundreds of competitors globally. Almost all of them start with this same premise... "I couldn't find one I liked a lot, so I built The Worlds First Perfect Event Registration Platform and now you should use it."

You can guess how that's working out for the 99% who aren't eventbrite, ticketmaster or one of the top 5 or 6 competitors.

There are tons of problems in the event space. If you're contemplating starting something in this space, don't go with what you probably think is the easiest problem to solve. For one thing, you're probably wrong about that. Secondly, there's a lot more money in other problems in events.

Hey. You're right. There's loads of events registration page apps. And with our first iteration we did build one because we couldn't find one we liked.

But, after we did that, and we spent time speaking with other small events organisers, and looking at what we needed for the events we put on ourselves, we concluded that there is room for an events app focused on helping people who put on small events primarily for a secondary marketing benefit. Hence this second iteration.

Our hypothesis is that these guys need a different feature set to ticketed event organisers - they really want to capture attendee contact data, and build relationships. And almost all other event apps concentrated on trying to up-sell you to a paid organiser.

So that's where we're going to focus - helping you exploit the marketing value of your small free event. If you know of anyone else doing this I'd love to check them out.

I wish i'd seen this a week ago, because I'd love to talk you out of the idea that your intended market is in fact any different than any of the other markets out there.

Many if not most of the other event services out there started out doing something different, some twist on the basic premise. Without fail one of two things happens: they go out of business, or they shift their business strategy to the market standard of taking a small slice of the ticket price at what has become the industry standard $1 + 2%, give or take a bit. Meetup is the only successful site that is doing something different pricing-wise, and I just don't think there's room in the market for another one.

I hope you're successful, and if you are, contact me (address is in my profile), but the total addressable market is a lot smaller than you probably think it is, and its incredibly competitive. Don't shy away from the pivot.

I'm assuming this is your site? It's very nice looking.

How do you plan to monetize if not up-selling to paid organizer accounts?

I really like MeetUp and the niche doesn't sound much different. Can you share the differences?

I would love to be able to easily invite friends to events via SMS. I have a group of friends who come out to a regularly-scheduled hang-out, but we change up the location each week. It would be awesome if I could see who plans to attend.

I haven't been able to find anything like that yet (at least for iOS). I feel like it could probably be done with Twilio's API, but I'm a front-end developer and haven't really looked into it that much.

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