[nameiscarl]

I'm interested in that, too.

I go out a lot (in my home town, and even more so in holidays), and I'd love to have an app to give me suggestions of events (special nights, museums, openings, and such).

Why was it a bad idea ? Have brandond and al. research the market ?

[tonyarkles]

Having worked on a local events app in the past (which I ended up abandoning), I have a few thoughts. These aren't necessarily unsurmountable, but they were sticky points:

- Event database curation doesn't scale very well. If you want high quality and accurate content, you're either going to need to have people double-checking stuff or come up with some nice algorithms to pre-filter it.

- Event entry is a hassle. At the start, you're going to be entering a LOT of the content by hand. This is pretty normal across a lot of different types of product, but with event data, the data has a very definite shelf-life. As soon as the event is over, you've lost a piece of data and you're going to need to replace it with something else.

- Chicken & egg: when you haven't grown to be the place to search for events in a city, you're not going to have people entering events for the city (e.g. people who work at venues who want to advertise their events). There are so many different apps that advertise events for you, and putting events into all of them is going to pretty onerous.

- Facebook: for a venue, or a band, Facebook is a super easy captive audience. I follow venues I like on FB, and they advertise all of their coming events right there. That's your competition.

- Reasonably high cost to drive traffic. If I recall, we were paying somewhere around $0.25/user that came to our site. We got decent inbound traffic, but almost no sign-ups, and even fewer self-posted events.

- How do you monetize it? Your two big competitors are Facebook (free for posting events) and posters stapled to telephone poles (25¢/poster to print it).

[nameiscarl]

Thanks for your feedback. This is very interesting.

> Your two big competitors are Facebook (free for posting events)

Facebook is not exactly a competitor because it's a walled garden. So you have to be part of the right groups or be suscribed to official pages to get events.

It don't know about you, but all this facebook overhead is starting to bore me. I love salsa, hip places and fancy. I want the best events for me NOW. I love dive bars, cheap beer and sweaty rock. I want the best events NOW.

> - Chicken & egg: If you can't populate your event base with pre existing data, you may have a chicken/egg problem.

Unless you have some magic crawler technology...

I'd love to have a access to a event central database that curates events for me matching my taste and previous choices.

I could pay a flat fee for a mobile app that could do that. And I wouldn't mind it having ads for other places/events that could suit my taste.

I have a hard time imagining that events curating is not a real problem. Finding new places and fun events to go to is actually a pain.

Is it a monetizable pain ?

The linked article implies that Paul Graham thinks that this is not worthy of a shot (or a second shot). Is it not monetizable enough ? Is it a nut too tough to crack ?

I wonder what the reasons are (I wish I have more research on the subject).

Well, this problem got me thinking.

If you want to keep talking about it, here's my email name.is.carl (@) gmail (you know what)

[kpennell]

Thanks for writing these tips...

So hard to resist making a nice event finding app!

[chourobin]

There's an app called Now that fits that kind of description. http://www.getnowapp.com/