[mlevental]

you're very close and

>People don't use that kind of thing.

is exactly one of the key hypotheses that needed validation/falsification. what we are facing now is whether we really falsified it given poor marketing/education on the part of the organizer.

[djur]

I worked in this market for a long time, and the biggest single problem with making software for conferences is that your users aren't your customers. Furthermore, your customers only have a rough understanding of what the users might want. Event attendees don't tend to provide detailed feedback to organizers.

This is why event apps tend to suck -- they're designed to appeal to people who aren't going to use them. To be successful, you have to actually figure out what users want _and_ convince your customers that you know better than them. This is incredibly difficult.

Also, organizers generally aren't invested in promoting your product. They buy your product in the hope that it will magically make their event more successful. It takes a lot of one-on-one training and coaxing to get most of them to participate. This is an extremely support-heavy market, and thus labor-intensive. Even as a startup, you rapidly end up needing dedicated customer support staff.

Also also, as it seems you discovered, there are a ton of pitfalls with building a product that is intended to be used by large groups of people, all at once, in a time-sensitive context, in a single enclosed environment, on their variously capable mobile phones. That makes failures nearly always catastrophic, and it erodes the average experience as well -- there's always people with some sort of bizarre cheapo phone that breaks in obscure ways, and those people also complain loudly and frequently.

[unclebucknasty]

1.) Selling to a customer is hard.

2.) Selling to a customer that must then sell your product to its customer is at least an order of magnitude harder, and may be one of the hardest tricks for a new business to pull-off successfully.

Simply put, you don't have the branding to convert the end customer nor the control over that second sales process. Compounding this is that your product is not a priority for your direct customer and is not mission-critical to them in addressing their actual priorities. Thus, they will not engage nearly the focus required to address item 1 above in selling your product to its customers (i.e. end-users).

This last point can't be stressed enough. As entrepreneurs, our products are our focus and we tend to project that priority onto others.

The only way this model will work is if:

a.) The product is extraordinarily compelling/valuable to the end user in the same sense as would form the basis for building any viable business

AND

b.) The product is easy for your customer to sell to the end user in a frictionless manner (easy to communicate, requires no onboarding or support from your customer, etc.)

AND EITHER:

c.) Your product were mission-critical to your direct customer (preferred)

OR

d.) There was an immediate value to be had for your customer from introducing the product to the end user (monetization, good will, etc)

It seems that you have achieved only b (perhaps) and d in this equation, and then only to varying degrees. If you cannot pivot to solving the other variables then you should shut it down now.

[nickfromseattle]

I used to go to a lot of conferences, and some of the big conference organizers would try and push us to download an app - they were always really painful and didn't provide much value.

What does your app look like and what pain point is it trying to solve?

[Maro]

I'm a comp sci guy, my fiancee runs big (2,000 attendee) tech conferences [1]. Being her partner I have a reasonable amount of visibility into this world. Happy to chat with you.

[1] https://craft-conf.com/

[foota]

Not sure if this fits your context, but could you get the conference to use your app for check in or something? Then they start out with it.

Edit: or find something else that benefits the visitors?