🎪 Geeky Events - a directory for discovering cool events around the world [2014]

Problem

Being a designer, it’s absolutely essential for me to keep learning. Technologies change rapidly, and we can’t stop learning if we want to stay relevant. One of the best ways to learn and grow your network is to attend conferences, workshops, training, and other professional events.

When I started looking for events in my area, I was frustrated at not finding one place listing all events. I found separate websites created by each event’s organizers or semiannual blog posts compiled by Smashing Magazine or similar publications. Considering all the technology available, it was a shame that nobody had addressed this need.

Solution

A one-stop place for designers and developers to find events to attend using their geo-location and topics of interest.

Status

The project went live in 2012 and got significant interest from the target audience. Our assumption was that after we seeded the initial list of over 100 events, users would be engaged enough to keep the website content relevant by contributing to the directory. However, real-life testing revealed that our assumption was wrong and users only consumed information. Feeding new events to the site manually ourselves was not sustainable. And considering competitors launched their services around the same time, we decided to shut down the project.

Learnings

• Timing and speed mean a lot.

• Manual data input is tedious and can be very time-consuming.

• It’s very very hard to automatically parse data from hundreds of sources using various platforms.