Topic around which we dance from the first CzechDreamin. We tested a few different apps, heard feedback on another few and still didn’t solve it. It was also one point on my list of things to check while attending French Touch Dreamin (FTD) last week.
On top of all those hassles there are emails from the providers of such applications with „thank you for you interest, we will raise our prices because we put a lot of new features in it.“
And I realised how important it is to understand your needs to get the solution you really want. And probably how old I am or why I would not be a good product owner. Or maybe I’ll be perfect one?
What was my experience
FTD probably got the full package – agenda, sponsors, networking, community, polls, leader board, q&a, maps, ….
Well, having agenda was super cool, be able to schedule it in advance and have it ready on my mobile phone.
Sponsors – I do understand their needs and I really liked that the app was connected with the physical badge and I didn’t have to open the app to be scanned.
Networking – a few people reached out to me in advanced, which was pleasant, and we were able to schedule a meeting in advanced or just agree that we will catch each other.
Community & leader board – oh man. This is the place I realised I don’t really need. It felt like a great idea how to draw people to communicate, but I rather dropped back to my normal channels on Twitter/LinkedIn, because I want to share my posts with wider community, not necessary with other attendees. I would also say that due to the leader board the communication went sideways with tons of obsolete topics just to get the points and there was no real value to me only noise.
What we probably need
The real life experience allowed me to think about what I feel we need for CzechDreamin:
- lead scanning, ideally based on generated QR on badges;
- agenda;
- polls might be nice would – mainly speakers – use it;
- Q&A – as above;
- networking – not bad, just need to make sure no spam is going on and probably on the border of GDPR;
- sync with Eventbrite needed.
Everything else we will switch off probably anyway, so looks like we don’t need full blown solution with tons of features, but something simple will be enough, maybe even two (one for attendees and one for sponsors) solutions will be ok.
Any recommendation? Yes, we are price sensitive 🙂