This might have been useful when I was at Coachella last month (so much fun 💃) but to be honest, I'm skeptical this will get much traction in its current form for two reasons:
1. Is it that much better? I'm not sure it provides significant value above existing tools that everyone already (habitually) uses (e.g. text messaging, Facebook photos). Centralizing all of this isn't enough, imho.
2. The use case is infrequent. With exception to the minority of hardcore festival fans, most people don't attend many. This decreases the frequency of usage, making adoption and continual usage even more difficult to capture for those that go once a year.
That said, I do like the location-tracking aspect of this. Although there are many apps that do something similar, being able to see where your friends are at within a few meters at a big, crowded festival is very helpful (assuming you have an internet connection or an alternative way of tracking). I could imagine that use case being split out and marketed as its own app.
That said, I've only spent a few minutes thinking about this with very little data outside my own perspective so I could be totally off. Thoughts, @freakinphong?
@rrhoover
Thanks for the input and feedback! My input below:
1. Is it that much better?
Agreed there will be a core group of people who it will be hard to convince them away from their current habits, but as avid festivagoers, typically what we have seen is multiple groups creating a GroupMe for every single festival to help organize the group of 5-15 people, and then eventually use some kind of friend tracker app to make sure they knew when someone made it home ok or if they left the festival to go home early. After the actual festival now everyone's on a shared photo drive or some kind of photo-sharing app. This whole process is very tedious and often in time a lot is taken away from the experience and you end up losing a lot of good content because people don't participate in the sharing. The idea of Hango is suppose to be natural and easy to use. That way, people can focus on what is really important, having fun at the event versus opening 3-5 different apps inside each festival.
2. The use case is infrequent
The interesting thing here is there are a lot of studies that point out that 1 in 5 millennial have attended a music festival and of those 1 in 5 a vast majority of them go on to attend 2-3 more festivals within the year. The US is the fastest growing market for festivals and will continue to grow because of things like Twitch.tv bringing you Ultra live stream, Snapchat bring you the Ultra, EDC, Coachella MyStories, and even Vine introducing their own Ultra channel. These create serious cases of "FOMO" and only lead to new festival attendees. For the hardcore festival fans you will often find a mini folder on their phone where they store their Outsidelands, Ultra, EDC apps. These apps are purely informational and don't offer any benefit to the festival attendee besides pump information their way. Our vision for Hango is 1) offer a mobile platform that enhances the festival experience for the attendee and 2) create a ecosystem of festival attendees where Festivals and Festival Partners can constantly be in touch with their fans.
Agreed, there are a lot of great apps that offer similar location tracking features. The team's personal favorite is Life360. The idea of Hango was the natural complement of all 3 screens. Chat, map, and photo-sharing done real-time features which all can be useful within any social outing. Because we are focused on music festivals our goal is to eventually incorporate festival map overlays so that you will be able to tell where exactly your buddies are at a festival.
@freakinphong thanks for the thorough response and good points. I'm curious to see how it plays out and maybe you can share a mini retrospective in ~3 months after launch. 😀
@rrhoover Thanks for the great questions. Curious myself to how it will lay out :P, let you know in 3 months!
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@freakinphong@rrhoover One of my previous startups (defunct) was going after festival & concert issues. We made plastic beads w/ tracking numbers on them. Everyone that makes and trades those kandi bead bracelets could log them in and reconnect with that person after the show. You could also see anyone & everyone that had that bracelet before you and them. A timeline of sorts.
It had a pretty awesome launch here in Vegas but I couldn't wrap my head around a good business model to make it worthwhile.
Dug up the old video: . If I did it again, I would change the concept to specifically and only focus on people's relations with each other.
@disruptvegas This is pretty interesting, what was the feedback from the people who got their hands on one? Did it get enough traction to see some interesting stats on "kandi exchange"?
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Very cool, we'll try this out at EDC. Curious - what happens when your phone has poor reception? Cell phone tower availability is always one of the biggest problems I have at festivals.
@disruptvegas Our favorite question! EDC Vegas is probably the most extreme case of no reception, since you literally have 0 reception 99% of the time. For this case we are working on caching the entire Hango that way the app will still be able to open up and show you everything that was loaded the last time you did have service. That is our short term solution, for now. Other then that specific case we have found that most festivals tend to have some kind of service, although it may be spotty as long as you can make connection to the network here and there it should be fine. We tested it at Coachella weekend 2 and it was awesome!
@disruptvegas Another interesting note, Eventbrite recently released a music festival study that shows that only 17% of total social festival engagement happens during the festival. 54% happens before and 29% happens post festival. Our focus of the Hango platform is to capture the entire spectrum!
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@freakinphong Very interesting, thanks for sharing that. I think caching the data is fine for 99% of case studies. I may suggest having a timestamp on messages if it's not there. We usually write the time of the text we send just in case it was sent an hour ago.
"Meet at the spot ~midnight. (sent 9PM)" That sort of thing.
@disruptvegas Completely agree on the note of time stamping. I too utilize meetup spots with meetup times during festivals. We are actually working on a feature that will enable everyone in the Hango to still be able to chat with 0 service!
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@freakinphong Awesome. I'll make sure we all try your app at EDC this year!
Hi Product Hunters! The festival attendee engagement process is a 6-8 month process starting with ticket sales and ending with reliving the actual event. The current "Festival" apps only take advantage of engagement during the actual event. We built Hango so that attendees could have a platform to carry them from before, during, and post each music festival.
Hango is simple, start by using Hango news feed for relevant music festival content. Once you decide to attend start a Hango by inviting your friends. Once live you will have 3 screens:
1) Group chat to share text, photos, and 10 second videos
2) Map to keep track of the group before, during, and after each festival
3) Details screen that automatically collects and stores (on our side) all media being shared in the Hango chat so that you don't can go back and relive the experience with the groups photos/videos all in one awesome collage view.
Once the music festival is over the Hango ends and the groups details album automatically pushes into every Hango attendees profile. The profile then becomes a collection of all music festivals as you attend them. Finally a group chat that actually ends, a map that doesn't keep track of you 24/7, and photo-sharing done real-time versus post event.
Let me know if you have any questions. The Co-Founders will be doing a live Q/A Periscope at 1130am pacific! Title of it will be "Hango Music Festival App Launch: Q/A"
Phong Le
Hango Co-Founder
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