[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.