Introduction

The chicken-and-egg paradox is a common problem for startups. A marketplace needs buyers to attract sellers and sellers to attract buyers. Much like how a young professional needs experience to get a job, but a job to gain experience. Successful tech startups, including Airbnb, Reddit, Facebook, and Amazon, have discovered a simple solution: curating information that buyers want.

Startups often distill relevant yet hard-to-navigate information into a filterable or ranked list to attract buyers and position themselves in the sales pipeline of smart sellers. Other times, startups create user-centric platforms where individuals look for information or audiences. These types of platforms form the basis of what is referred to as the “attention economy”.

Reddit

Reddit is an excellent example of a successful startup that used crowdsourced curation for its platform. Founder, Alexis Ohanian, took inspiration from Hacker News and created subreddits. The founders collected links from around the web then manually and automatically curated them into relevant subreddits. The platform became so popular that many people now use Reddit within Google search for higher quality results by adding the text “site:www.reddit.com” before their query.

Facebook

In the case of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg used an easily navigable web interface that pulled the names and images of fellow Harvard students to attract his initial users. He then allowed them to curate their own profiles. By curating a relevant set of information and expanding user control, Facebook overcame the chicken-and-egg problem.

Airbnb

Similarly, Airbnb’s founders – Brian, Nathan, and Joe – scraped accommodation listings from Craigslist to attract its initial audience. Once they hooked customers, they curated and improved listings to offer better value to their hosts. Airbnb’s user-centric approach was key to its success, which has grown to become a global hospitality powerhouse. They famously hired local photographers to improve the attractiveness of listings and provide more value to their hosts, resulting in a better experience for all of their users.

Amazon

Amazon’s Founder Jeff Bezos created a platform that allowed people to purchase books even if they were not in inventory. Bezos found a list of all the books in print and marketed them through his website. When someone made a purchase, he would buy the book from another online seller and provide the buyer’s postal address. If he couldn’t find the book, he would visit local second-hand bookstores in Portland, Oregon, to source the book and post it himself, often at a loss. This user-centric approach paid off as customers found the website reliable and returned for repeat purchases. Over time, Amazon expanded its inventory, diversified its offerings, and employed more sophisticated supply chain management strategies. These strategies built upon the initial foundation of curation and customer service. By overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem in its early days, Amazon has grown to become the world’s largest online retailer, pioneering the industry and transforming the way people shop.

Our Own Journey

At Plug.events, we work with the mantra “you win or you learn.” And we have learned a lot! One of the things that we have learned is that while the strategy for solving the chicken-and-egg problem is always the same, the particular tactics depend on the context, and tactics are complicated. It is not simply a matter of manually curating content until your fingers bleed and fall off but of working smartly, and efficiently over time to curate large quantities of reliable data in a sustainable workflow.

We had been attempting to prove our model with two small dance communities that we were very familiar with, forró and balfolk, but at a certain point, we realized that to survive, we needed to grow the user base very fast, across a wide array of communities, ideally related to each other with a large amount of intersection.

To achieve this, the tactics we explored and settled on can be put into three buckets:

• Doing it for Them
• Making it Easier
• Making it Worthwhile

Doing it for Them

This means collecting events from around the web and publishing them on behalf of organizers. We are partnering with another startup that provides a system that scrapes the web for content, structure, and labels then delivers it in a neat package. This system can also be augmented to check for updates on the sources of that data, such as changes in venue, descriptions, or dates, and send an alert to the event administrator on Plug.events.

Making It Easier

By making the website more user-friendly, organizers and our supporters will be able to add events more quickly and easily. In practice, this means comprehensively reviewing the user experience (UX) of the site through multiple lenses

• Analytics: Our product analytics tool shows us what people are doing on the site and where they might be having trouble.
• User Stories: Based upon a set of three personas, we create a list of user stories of the format: A person (who?) wants to do something (what?) because (why?).
• UX Heuristics: 10 usability heuristics for user interface design by Jakob Nielsen.
• Graphic Prototyping and User Feedback: We generate clickable prototypes of proposed redesigns or specific steps in the event creation process and test them with real users to capture their feedback.

By using these methods, we created a large list of issues that people were facing when creating an event, this allowed us to design solutions. We tested those solutions with people who were both close to the project and others who had a fresh or more objective perspective.

Many of those solutions are small fixes and updates to text, labels, and descriptions on the site, so that people can understand exactly what is happening and the relevance of each element on the screen. Other changes are entirely new features that streamline the flow using ‘smart’ predictive methods, meaning users don’t have to enter all of the event information manually.

Making It Worthwhile

Lastly, we are also working on a string of new features and benefits that make it more attractive to add events directly to Plug, including:

• Features that will increase the number of users finding events through Plug.
  • A simplified version of the website presenting the information in a short, digestible calendar format.
  • More ways to access our event information from the applications people already use.
  • Easier sharing tools that present event content in image formats that are more suited for social media.
  • Better event suggestions and notifications.
• Event embedding so that organizers can post once on Plug and publish to multiple places.
• Subscription management so that our partners have another income stream and allowing their core community to actively support and engage with them.

Conclusion

The chicken-and-egg dilemma is a pervasive issue for startups, but we have learned that it can be overcome by curating information that ‘buyers’ are looking for. The strategy remains the same, but the tactics depend on the context, and here are ours:

• Curating large numbers of events ourselves using modern web scraping techniques and machine learning,
• Improving the site usability to make it easier and quicker to post events directly on Plug,
• Adding features that make publishing on Plug worth the effort for organizers.

This, we believe, will increase user engagement and eventually allow organic growth to take over.

Greetings!

In this month’s newsletter, you’ll get a glimpse at the new recurring events feature, which makes it easier and quicker to add your entire calendar of events to the site. We will also be sharing our story with you by sitting down with our founders and contributors to learn about why they joined the Plug family. 

But first, here’s a quick update about what we’ve been doing in our day-to-day to bring this vision to life!

What’s New

After quite a lull over the summer, things have begun to move at a more desirable pace in terms of development, team building, and marketing. As we all have lives and commitments outside of Plug, our goal has always been to make our work process smooth and manageable for everyone involved, all while simultaneously creating opportunities for new people to meaningfully contribute.

We need to flow, in confluence, and grow as a river heading towards the same sea. This is difficult. Even profitable companies with paid employees hardly achieve this, and dreams alone don’t pay your electricity bills.

Our most important priority right now, and where more people can contribute to the project, is by improving the site’s usability and making it easier to understand. This is especially true on mobile, where most people first find out about us.

For this reason, we have been preparing a comprehensive review of the site, using surveys, establishing focus groups, and conducting analyses of the user experience. Our aim is for more people to learn about the site so that they can give us honest feedback and suggest features we should prioritize. We want more people to feel a sense of ownership over Plug. That it is truly their social network because it was built to serve them and the communities they care about.

We will formally begin this process next month, starting with a review of the search function. If you would like to be involved please reach out on Plug, send us an email, or on Facebook:

• https://www.about.plug.events/contact-us/
• hello@plug.events
• https://www.facebook.com/joinplugevents

Exciting Developments: Recurring Events

Perhaps you have events that you repeat periodically such as a 3-week tango beginner’s course on Saturdays that you run every second month. You could duplicate that event and then adjust the dates, but it’s much easier and more convenient to use the new recurring events feature!

To use this feature when creating an event, select the Course with multiple sessions as the Scheduling Type:

From there, you’ll be able to set the recurring event details such as frequency and when the event ends:

User Support Channel

We have also implemented a user support button for users who are signed in, which you will find in the personal menu in the left column.

Stay tuned for more details to come!

More Recent Updates…

• Showing related orgs/events in conversations. When you receive a message from another user, you’ll be able to see if it’s related to/about a specific event or org.
• Update your email address under My Account. Want our communications to go to a different email address? You can now update your email address when navigating to My Account.
• No more blurry profile photos.
• We have removed the interest-in-common rule when creating events, organisations, or conversations
• Now when creating an event we do not allow ‘as an Org’ if users have not created one
• We have improved the UI copy in a few places, for example when linking events
• We modified the location fields that are visible if an event is online-only

And a few bug fixes

• Interest added to profile doesn’t show immediately – page not refreshed – FIXED
• No more blurry photos!
• Search Suggestions now only display on entering the field
• If users are not confirmed we don’t allow them to hold Roles at organisations or events

Founder Spotlight

Without Ciarán’s vision, Plug wouldn’t exist today!

Learn more about his background and what inspired his journey to create the platform.

Read Ciarán’s Story

___

We have more exciting updates and features in the pipeline. So, be sure to keep an eye out for more news from us here at Plug.Events.

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at hello@about.plug.events.

Cheers,

The Plug.Events Team

Hi there, 

We know it’s been a while but we’re reaching out with some exciting updates about all the work we’ve been doing at Plug.Events! We promise it’s worth the read.

The New Plug.Events Experience

We are thrilled to share our new website with you! Behind the scenes, we’ve been creating an innovative way for communities to find, share, and curate events.

By serving communities first and providing simple features that are lost in the complexity and noise of traditional social media, we’re helping people reduce their social media usage without feeling socially isolated. The truth is, 2-hour in-person meetings do more for your mental health than days of scrolling through attention-fracking feeds.

If you want to know what a social network looks like when it is designed to bring people together as groups and individuals then stay tuned because we’re just getting started.

Communities We’re Working With

Our website is currently in development and being tested with a growing community.

You Too Can Be Part of the Revolution

Curious about who we are? We are a team of musicians, dancers, designers, community members, and more, but it doesn’t stop there. We would love for you to be part of us, whether you are a community ambassador, front-end engineer, back-end engineer, graphic designer, or digital marketer. We are only a few steps into our journey of a thousand miles, and there is still much to be done and ways to get involved. Our doors are open, so feel free to reach out to us!

What Comes Next?

In the upcoming months, we intend to notify you about updates to our website and the progress we have made. Behind the scenes, we have been working to bring you a host of updates, bug fixes and new features. Improvements include:

• enhanced search results
• we have added ‘search nearby’
• you can now add online events
• improved mobile navigation

Keep reading to learn how we are improving our platform to make your user experience smoother and streamlined.

Updates and Upcoming Improvements

Making Search Results Better

Our priority this month has been to improve the way events display in search results. We made the event image more prominent to create more impact, as this is often where organisers convey key information, and organisers invest a lot of time and thought designing their images and posters.

We have also improved the information included for each itemed listed so that you can see more without having to load the detail page. For example, in the list of people, we now show their availability, so that you can find hosts and others that are willing to meet up.

Search Nearby

Sometimes, when you search in villages or small towns there won’t be any results in the place you chose. To make it easier for you to find events in surrounding areas we have added the ability to search nearby, based on distance from the place you specified.

Online Events

You can now add online events, this can include a link to online streaming.

(In future, we intend to make this more clearly marked and allow people to filter for online or in-person events.)

Improving Navigation, Especially on Mobile

We have redesigned the navigation to make it consistent on all devices. This means moving all of the menus to the left column, with notifications and ‘Add content’ buttons up into the header, so everything is consistent across mobile, tablets, and desktop.

Improve Interests

Central to the way events and other content are curated on Plug is through the way interests are organized, in categorisation. Amongst other things, these categories make it possible for us to translate the website while also making user-generated interests freer flowing and organic. Previously, our design decisions made adding interests a little confusing. This has been dramatically improved in the latest release.

Important Updates Across Other Areas of the Platform

• Changes to the pin on the map to something more universal
• Improvement in the data displayed in-person search results
• Implementation of caching for Geo event search results
• Addition of resend code to email confirmation dialogue
• Improvement in the data displayed in organisation search results
• Changes to the link on recover password
• Changes to the GeoEventSearch URL to “events-near/interest/locale”
• Modifications to the bottom of search results
• Improvement in the data displayed in Event search results
• All instances of ‘Cancelled Event’ show ‘Strikethrough’
• Clearer local date & time
• Adjustments to location fields visible if online-only Event
• Search to show a persona description if a search is for ‘Anything’
• Improved Location fields

We Got These Bugs Fixed!

Intermittent Country Code Error on Sign Up

We had a strange problem recently which caused sign up not to work and reported an error with the country. This was intermittent and hard to track down. Thanks to some hard detective work this should be fixed now, but we will continue to keep an eye on it.

Bug Fixes Across Other Areas of the Platform:

• Fixed: Search results ‘jump’ to August and could not clear
• Fixed: Share dialogue errors
• Fixed: organisation logos to display in Conversations
• Fixed: search results page, after sign in, positioned on the organisation tab
• Fixed: changing the location of an event didn’t clear address Line 2
• Fixed: changes address dialogue remained open after change
• Fixed: event location sometimes showed country only
• Fixed: intermittent authentication error caused by sign-in credentials getting ‘lost’

What You Can Look Forward to From Plug.Events

Recurring Events

This would certainly be a game-changer for us.

We are adding festivals and parties from the forró and balfolk communities, but there are a lot of smaller regular events we also want to cover. Recurring events will allow us, and you, to add the classes and weekly parties that are such an important part of most dance organiser’s activities. When we release recurring events, later this year, we will publish a guide explaining everything you need to know about how to get the best out of them. If you are an organiser who has tried to post your regular events online this is going to make your life a whole lot easier.

More Coming on Next Month…

• User Support Channel. We want to make it easier for you to reach out to us, so in the near future, we will have a support feature.
• Social media previews on Plug links. When you post a link from Plug.Events you will see the images and text previews.
• Improved notifications and event suggestions. We want to give you a reliable and relevant event digest based upon your interests

We have more exciting updates and features in the pipeline. So, be sure to keep an eye out for more news from us here at Plug.Events.

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at hello@about.plug.events.