Thank you Prof. Koester for connecting me with Mack. He was a great resource! The only downside is that he is super busy and could not schedule an in-person meeting; we had to speak over the phone.
7) Mack, DC - Male, White, 30s(?)
Mack is an industry expert on events websites and applications. Years ago, he and some friends beta tested an app called "Spontaneous." He sent me a few pics of it, and it looks almost exactly like our idea. He said that this events finding app has been tried hundreds of times and no one has been successful, for a variety of reasons. Primarily: it is really hard to get enough, viable info to satisfy a user. No one is going to upload the content to your app, so you have a few choices: 1. Do it yourself 2. Pay someone to do it 3. Build a server structure that crawls the web for events and uploads them to your app, which is virtually impossible due to the variety of postings. His app tried to do the 3rd option by looking for tag associations and commonalities. They had 2000 events per month, but needed 4x that. No one was using it. Not enough events per day, and not enough nearby. They thought they could do a round of funding and get $1 million, but that it would just be wasted in the end. He mentioned another key thing: events apps are too broad. You almost need a different app for every single niche community: mom app, hipster app, city app, etc. People in Pittsburgh only go to events their friends are going to, while people in NYC will go to events alone. Most people have blogs or websites they follow for event postings specific to their tastes.
Key Takeaway: Find a niche and exploit it. Also, many have tried at this and none have succeeded.
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