What is Planesty?
Our B2B SaaS platform provided the tools event teams, venues and suppliers needed to make smarter and more strategic decisions. Planesty automated and streamlined the “madness” (a.k.a. logistics and operations) associated with organizing meetings and events.
Why did I cofound Planesty?
In 2015 I had been a web designer for over 8 years and had a passion for streamlining workflows through technology. I had also been involved in event management at various levels from 2007 to 2015 and there was an obvious need to automate and streamline the way event organizers managed their events. At the end of 2015 I started a journey to design a solution that would make it easier to manage events, and I was able to get this business idea off the ground. You can read the full story below.
Challenge
An enormous amount of time, resources and money are wasted during event pre-planning and onsite execution. Current processes are manual, non-dynamic, non-collaborative and don't scale.
Opportunity
Through smarter technology solutions we can save organizations money and offer a more collaborative and community driven environment for event organizers, venues and suppliers.
Team
I was the original founder, and together with Mike Fuller we built a strong team of engineers, product designers and marketing/growth professionals.
Team Members (for privacy reasons I'm using fake headshots)
Hugo
Mike
Jamie
Tuukka
Deepika
Gabor
Filip
Martin
Petr
Ravi
Design tools used
Photoshop
Adobe XD
Figma
Sketch
Balsamiq
Our Story
This was an incredible journey and even if Covid unfortunately made it impossible for us to continue this business, it was an experience I will carry with me forever.
2015-2016
The ideas was born
The event industry didn't have any good tech solutions to manage all the logistics and operations. Event organizers were primarily using Excel spreadsheets to track all the logistics (agenda items, room assignments, audio visual, food & beverage, presenters etc). I started to play around with different design solutions in order to streamline this process.
2017
Raised capital and formed a team
I successfully raised enough capital from a few investors to be able to hire 3 engineers. Mike Fuller, who had previously been a part of a couple of startups, joined our team and became a cofounder. At this stage we had a solid idea of what we wanted to focus on after having had hundreds of conversations with various event companies and organizers.
2018-2019
Growth
We continued to raise seed capital and hired more engineers. We invested heavily in marketing and attended trade shows. We successfully onboarded 100+ companies who joined our beta program. These companies actively used our platform to manage the logistics and operations and we continued to have focus groups and met with these users frequently. This was an incredible opportunity for us to gather valuable feedback.
2020
Official launch
After having invested 4 years into this business idea we finally had our official launch in March 2020 at a large event trade show in Denver, CO. At this time we had 300+ users who managed their events through our platform. We had formed a team of 10 passionate industry leaders and engineers. The feedback was very positive and we had just signed agreements with 2 global event partners. The energy was through the roof and we could not wait to officially launch our product and see the number of users increase.
2020-2021
Covid entered the world
At the trade show where we had our official launch, they announced that the country was most likely shutting down the following week. And just 2 days later the US did indeed shut down completely. We had built our platform to serve in-person events, trade shows, conferences and meetings, so the organizers could easily manage all the logistics and operations. Unfortunately that industry (in-person events), disappeared overnight when Covid came, and didn't truly come back until a couple of years later. We continued to build our platform and stayed in touch with our clients in hopes that Covid would go away quickly. Unfortunately that didn't happen which made it impossible for our team to continue.
Conclusion
Learning lessons and an invaluable experiences
I learnt more in those 5 years than I had in my entire life. I built a team and a product from scratch, raised capital, promoted our product through many different channels, successfully onboarded companies, learnt all the ins and outs of starting a business and all the legal aspects involved. I formed and managed a board of directors and was leading the product design, user research and the engineering team. It's by far the best investment I have ever made. During all these years, while wearing many different hats, it became crystal clear that my true passion is product design and building a healthy and productive team culture.
A deep dive into our product journey
Phase 1 - ideation
As the ideas started to form in my head, I was initially designing mocks in Photoshop, since there was no Figma or Adobe XD back then. In 2016 I started using Sketch and Adobe XD and primarily worked in XD for a couple of years before moving to Figma in 2018. Our original name was EventWaves, which a few years later became Planesty.
Design Focus
At this stage my focus was primarily on design and while I had a full time job I spent evenings and weekends designing all the ideas I had. The biggest challenge was to narrow down those ideas.
Our Business Name
Our original name was EventWaves since we wanted to include "event" in the name. It also served us well from a marketing perspective. In 2019 we decided to change our name to Planesty for a few reasons.
Business Formation
In addition to deciding on a company name I had to raise capital to build a team and go through all the legal steps to form our business. We hired a legal counsel and an accountant.
Phase 2 - fan empathy
After having spent roughly 6 months ideating and designing, we started setting up focus groups with event professionals (event organizers and hotels), attending events and sending out online surveys to learn more about their day-to-day operations and the pain points they had. We shared my early designs and walked them through my ideas.
Qualitative Research
We had many connections in the event industry (both event organizers and hotels). This served us well since we had easy access to get valuable user feedback through focus groups etc. We also attended a bunch of trade shows. By doing this we built a natural audience that we could target once the product was ready to be tested.
Quantitative Research
We invested most of time on the qualitative research since that was so easily accessible to us. In addition, we also conducted online surveys via email and gathering surveys from all the events we attended (both online and in paper format). We were able to gather general feedback which helped us narrow down our ideas.
Phase 3 - MVP
At this time we had a team of 3 engineers, 2 designers (including myself) and a dedicated person focusing on marketing, sales and partnership growth. We started to onboard beta users and invested heavily in marketing and attended trade shows as an exhibitor. We also applied for accelerator programs but since our engineering team was located in Czech Republic we weren't eligible to enter those programs.
Here is our very first promo video of EventWaves in 2018.
Phase 4 - growth
By now we had validated that the event industry desperately needed a tool like ours, which was a nice feeling. However, we now needed to make sure we could efficiently scale our product and ramp up our marketing efforts.
Product
We hired 3 more engineers to bring our engineering team to 6. We also had 2 product designers (including myself). We knew where we had to focus our efforts and launched new features as fast as we could. It was a fine balance between listening too much to our users and going with what our team thought would benefit our audience. Many lessons learned during this process.
Marketing
We hired another marketing person so we had 2 people focusing on building partnerships and establishing efficient marketing campaigns. Most of our efforts were still invested in working closely with existing clients and onboarding new clients. We wanted to make sure the product was in a great spot before trying to onboard too many users to quickly.
This video shows the evolution of our platform. We've added several collaboration tools, such as online signatures for all the operations documents such as BEO (banquet event orders). We had also added a share feature, to allow users to invite collaborators.
This is me attending an expo in 2018 where we had a booth. It was a great experience talking face-to-face with event professionals.
Phase 5 - official launch
In March of 2020 it was finally time to officially launch our product to the world. We felt confident that our product could scale and it offered unique features that our competitors didn't have. We were READY.
The launch
We had a big booth at a trade show in Denver, CO on March 11-12, 2020 and we had invested a large amount in creative marketing campaigns. Below is an example of a fun campaign that was hung on every bathroom door at the Convention Center, driving people to our booth.
Covid
At the trade show where we had our official launch, they announced that the country was most likely shutting down the following week. And just 2 days later the US did indeed shut down completely.
We had built our platform to serve in-person events, trade shows, conferences and meetings, so the organizers could easily manage all the logistics and operations. Unfortunately that industry (in-person events), disappeared overnight when Covid came, and didn't truly come back until a couple of years later.
We continued to build our platform and stayed in touch with our clients in hopes that Covid would go away quickly. Unfortunately that didn't happen which made it impossible for our team to continue.
We had built our platform to serve in-person events, trade shows, conferences and meetings, so the organizers could easily manage all the logistics and operations. Unfortunately that industry (in-person events), disappeared overnight when Covid came, and didn't truly come back until a couple of years later.
We continued to build our platform and stayed in touch with our clients in hopes that Covid would go away quickly. Unfortunately that didn't happen which made it impossible for our team to continue.
Lessons Learned
I wouldn't trade this experience for anything. This was a true roller coaster with many ups and downs. But most importantly, I was able to walk away with many new experiences and life skills.
Failing can be the most valuable life lessons, if you use them the right way
Be empathetic is a crucial life skill
Learnt how to navigate through countless stressful situations.
You can turn (almost) anything into something positive
You can turn (almost) anything into something positive
Manage diverse teams, from different countries, that have different purposes
I became very comfortable with being uncomfortable
Picked up many design skills
Learnt how to run a business
