Nice :) Several people have asked if we were going to expand to event discovery.
I just submitted the information for our Product Hunt happy hour this Thursday (so far 2k+ RSVP'd).
@sotak there are a ton of sites (many skeletons now) that have tackled this space. What's your goal with Event Hunt and why will this work where others haven't?
@rrhoover great! wish I was in SF :)
Event Hunt's goal is in simplicity, automation and minimal maintenance. We need a centralised curated place, where the events will be streaming itself through feeds from other services. Curators can then just go through the imported events and publish them if they like and find appropriate. They don't need (in most cases) to add events one by one which is a time consuming task.
For end-users, they will see all the events in one place, they can easily access the list from mobile, they can add to bookmarks and feed bookmarks into calendar.
Later adding machine learning, that will for example learn from curators behaviour which events are popular and have good history of being published, so they will be published automatically without curators.
Also, I have been asked by friends to which events I am going to, if I could just share my public page with events I am attending, so they can join, even better. :)
Less work, more events to attend, easy to read list ^_^
And we can go a lot further with social features later
Ah, went too far with this I guess. :)
@sotak haha, nice. I like the simplicity.
One quick (unsolicited) piece of feedback: beware of trying to enhance largely community-driven experiences with machines. When you say "machine learning algorithms," a flag raises for me. Often times it's the "human" context around the curation that's most interesting to people.
@rrhoover totally agree! it would be more for adding tags based on the content for curators to approve, publishing might be dangerous - I am aware the curators are the driving force behind this. People liked the solution before because of me posting relevant events that I liked, machine can't replace that, more over, machine won't know if the event is no longer interesting if they can't attend :)
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@rrhoover What do you mean by the human context, like the reasoning behind the curator including it?
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How is this different than Meetup? From the consumer's perspective I just want one place to go to find people with similar interests to meet with. I feel like Meetup already fills that need.
@blainehatab "From the consumer's perspective I just want one place to go to find people with similar interests to meet with" - Just now we focus on events only. Meetup is not the only place where organizers are adding there events. You might be missing on some great events if you are relying only on Meetup. Maybe one day, Event Hunt might become your central place, even for recommendations, if we will add it, but lets keep it simple now. :)
We want to create centralised list with events from various sources for given location, curated by local people and easy to maintain.
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@sotak "We want to create centralised list with events from various sources for given location, curated by local people and easy to maintain." Sounds like Meetup.
I mean sure you might have some differentiating qualities but there are a lot more similarities than differences. Not trying to be a dick, but I'm just bored with already been done ideas.
@blainehatab I understand, really appreciate your feedback. I wasn't able to get the functionality I needed from Meetup, hence I have built Event Hunt. You can't add other events from other sources to meetup and make your own list which will automatically update.
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@sotak Apart from using the PH interface, how is this different to Startup Digest? (disclaimer; I'm a volunteer curator for Startup Digest).
@clogish I am not sure how startup digest works in terms of entering content, but I think you rely on adding it manually one by one?
With Event Hunt we want to automate the process for curators, as if you are entering data, you know it can be a long and time consuming process. So what if almost all the events were there already and only needed one click - publish? The data and APIs are there, so why not to use them.
For end-users, they can pick events they like and add feed to theirs calendar by just going through the list and clicking on star next to the event. There is more we can add of course for end-users instead of just calendar.
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@sotak The curator can add events, but event organisers can also submit their events for inclusion to the calendar/digest.
Therefore the job of the curator is to check that the events are all suitable for the calendar, highlight a few and write a locally relevant introduction for the digest.
All events are added to the local calendar, and the curated stuff goes direct to the inbox of the subscribers - who can also download events to their own calendar etc.
There's a number of challenges that you're going to face. In the automation, you're going to come up against the fact that city to city and country to country, there are dozens, if not hundreds of event sites, aggregators and ticketing services, all of which structure their data in weird and wonderful ways.
Then, you'll need to be able to figure out which events are actually relevant. Too much junk or missing the key events will leave you without users.
and that's before you think about a business model that works for your users, customers, curators and you.
I wish you good luck - and hope you can beat the odds where almost everyone else has failed.
@anujadhiya great idea! also once we will have tags, then you will be ble to filter by lets say pitching opportunity, accelerators deadlines, workshops, free office hours (legal, marketing,...) so you can get most out of the city where you are at :)
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@anujadhiya@sotak Tags are a great idea. Could be useful for @producthunt too. I'd love to see a search bar and the ability to look at February events (perhaps there aren't any posted yet?).
@pedrogastal there are events in the queue for February, but not yet published, might be worth adding better pagination in a calendar style view too :) // @producthunt@anujadhiya
Some feedback: this needs some indicator as to popularity/who's going/why to go. The London page, while full, doesn't give the user any indication of why to care about any particular event. This made me miss Plancast, though. :)
@dshan as long as we can fetch all this data (and we can), then we can work with that. Event Hunt is a list, we don't want to let people sign up on it for event and give another source of registrations to organizers, they won't use it anyway.
We definitely can we do more in that space, but lets not complicate things now :)
Love it. Thanks for adding me as a curator for MSP.
Anyway to get urls for specific cities? Or am I missing something? I want to share with the world specific to Minneapolis.
Thanks man. Good job!
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Well done for the launch, @sotak! Really helpful feature you have to download my calendar. Would love to be able to also sync it to Google calendar. Keep up the good work!
@pedrogastal thank you! It should work thought, the link is public once shared, so you can give it a try to copy the link where the calendar is pointing at and add it as a calendar from URL. :)
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