Plakatt
An event & venue publication and promotion platform.
One autumn day in 2008 Marko and Darko knocked on the door (literally) of our old office and said that they have this really rough–looking website where people can publish events, and that they needed someone to help with the design. Together, we set out to build something better than Facebook events, our Vimeo to their YouTube.
Since it was already online as a fully functional service, we knew exactly what we are designing, and we were quickly able to pinpoint the weak spots in user flows, and which crucial features were missing or in need of user experience improvement. Working directly with live, actual data is a wonderful thing.
Branding
The first thing Plakatt was missing was visual identity. We knew we didn't want to impose the Plakatt brand on to every page of the site, especially the event pages, so Petar (who was with Superawesøme at the time) came up with a very simple, minimal logo, and a monochromatic color scheme, with green being the dominant color. One of the main motivators behind Plakatt was the inefficiency and non–eco friendliness of printed posters. Plakatt was the green alternative to event marketing.
The New
The new home page has received much praise in the local community, especially because the interactive “poster wall”. We knew we wanted to give space to new and popular events, but we also wanted to reserve some space for promoted events (the ones people will pay us to promote). We came up with a solution in the form of this poster wall as we call it that also has a “sign up” call to action integrated.
The Old
However, there was one version of the home page before this one. Since Plakatt was new, and we were learning as we went, we thought all we needed to do was expose recently published events, and explain what Plakatt actually was. It turned out this was not enough to engage the users; they came to the home page, saw some events and figured out what was fresh, considered that's all that was new on the site, and left. Our home page bounce rates were astronomical.
What was wrong?
- 1. We didn't want to force the users to register in order to use the site, we should have encouraged registration with exposure to the benefits instead.
- 2. We thought everyone shared our enthusiasm towards Plakatt, that was not the case, it was just another site someone told the visitior about, and it was up to us to sell our service to them.
- 3. The home page was designed as an afterthought (it also served as the landing page for not–yet users), under the pressure of a self imposed deadline.
We wanted to let our users use Plakatt while on the go, yet we didn't have the necessary time or the resources to make proper mobile apps (or even a fully functional Web app), so we decided we'll make an MVP of a mobile Web app. We thought: “What's the most likely thing a user would need from Plakatt when they are not at home using their computer?”
We figured out it's probably that they would want to find out what's going on around them, so we built a separate app that lets users quickly search for events based on their location, and find out the details of those events using as little bandwidth as possible. It was a quick and a — for the time being — satisfactory solution to a problem.
Interesting Fact
We took part in 2010 SeedCamp being a first team from Serbia to take participation in such an event. Main takeaway from the sessions with the investors was the realization that we need to somehow make money (it was a new set of problems to us at the time). Building the service was fun, but once faced with the hard questions of sustainability, we realized that the real work is actually ahead of us.
The SeedCamp mentors insisted we pursue the charging for attendance — i.e. selling tickets — yet it was hard for us to explain that the economic situation in Serbia doesn't really allow for that on a micro level, but that's a whole different story. The main point is that the participation in SeedCamp allowed us a glimpse into the business end of startups, and made us realize that “build it and they will come” really doesn’t fly in the real world.
What we learned from the Plakatt experience.
Building a service that needs an active community is hard. Damn hard. We completely failed here because we didn't want to fake activity (something we'd definitely do now), didn't do marketing right, and eventually we even stopped engaging the community.
Why did we stop engaging the community? — Because we found out that building and designing the service was not the hard part, and we got disheartened. Getting the first thousand users wasn't hard either. We stopped investing our time into Plakatt when we realized it will be really hard to make it profitable.
Making Plakatt profitable meant we needed to step out of our comfort zones, start marketing and selling. We obviously weren't prepared for that. Four people can make a service in three months, but making a service doesn't mean they've made a business.
With all this new perspective and history behind us, Plakatt is still alive as a non–profitable service, and we have a roadmap for taking the service forward which we plan on executing in 2012.