EventVue was as a social private network whose aim was to assist online communities to have a better conference networking experience. This platform helped attendees connect from different parts even before they met at the conference. The platform sought to make social connections easier for people who frequently traveled to attend conferences around the world but end up not knowing or not interacting with their fellow attendees before and after they got to the event. The startup later pivoted to become an event discovery platform.
EventVue shutdown in February 2010, due to the fact that it lacked product-market fit and failed to test early on their assumptions about the usefulness of the product from their target customers view.
EventVue co-founder Josh Fraser wrote in a postmortem that EventVue was a Vitamin instead of a painkiller, the platform was ‘nice to have’ but not necessarily needed by conference organizers. Despite the fact that organizers thought it was a good platform for connectivity and interaction, they weren’t particularly interested in paying for it since it didn’t bring them any additional revenue, cut any of their expenses or make their business any better. Being able to sell more tickets was the primary focus of conference organizers and their product wasn’t addressing that need.
Discovering this, EventVue decided to take a different approach by introducing the EventVue Discover widget which automatically notified people about who else would be attending the conference in hope that this would increase ticket sales for the event. However, this feature backfired at them and sales actually dropped. It seemed that most attendees used the widget to check if friends and acquaintances would attend and when they learned that no one they knew didn’t sign up they refrained from purchasing conference tickets.
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