Context

During my travels in India, the global impact of COVID-19 became apparent. Faced with the choice of enduring a lockdown in India or returning home, I quickly made the decision to return. Meanwhile, Representation Plus (RP), the marketing company specialising in tourism and leisure that I previously worked for, experienced the full force of the pandemic. Like many industries, the travel and leisure sector was engulfed in panic and distress. We faced significant time pressure and limited resources, exacerbating the challenges we had to overcome.

Deep Dive and Ideation

To tackle the crisis, we immediately embarked on a deep dive into RP's operations. Using a business canvas, we mapped out the company, assessing its available capabilities and resources. The shockwaves of the pandemic left our clients, employees, and industry personnel in a state of uncertainty. Budgets were frozen, furloughs were implemented, and the common thread was the lack of financial resources and limited staffing.

Leveraging the insights from our business canvas, we swiftly initiated an ideation process to identify services that would help us retain existing clients, attract new clients, and keep the business afloat. We spoke to our existing clients, our partners and other industry personnel. The common theme was the urgency to stay visible despite everything being shut down. We needed to keep our clients on the radar of consumers, media and trade, but on a shoestring budget. The most apparent solution was to virtualise as many client services as possible and to promote ourselves create crisis management content, an area of expertise for RP. We quickly implemented virtual workshops and events with keynote speakers.

Exploring Virtual Offerings

We initially conducted virtual workshops and events using Zoom. While our clients and audience were satisfied with the outcome, we soon realised that this format fell short for our clients’ ongoing events. We embarked on extensive research to identify virtual platforms that could accommodate our required layout. However, most established players in the market proved too expensive and complex for our needs, pricing out our clients. Although we encountered new entrants offering solutions, they were often poorly built and remained relatively expensive.

Designing a Simple and Affordable Platform

With these challenges in mind, we posed the question: "How Might We develop a platform that is simple enough to meet our clients' needs while remaining affordable within their limited budgets?" By solving this problem, we aimed to offer our solution to our clients but also to other industries, diversifying RP beyond tourism and leisure.

To address this question, we embarked on comprehensive research, evaluating the desirability, feasibility, and viability of creating our own platform as a simplified solution. Our target demographic comprised companies that did not have strong inhouse tech capabilities, had limited human resources, and operated on constrained budgets.

We followed a design thinking process, starting with desk research and conducting stakeholder interviews to gather valuable insights. These insights guided us in conducting discovery interviews to uncover the specific needs and pain points of our target audience. Through insight mapping, persona development, and jobs-to-be-done analysis, we gained a deep understanding of our users' requirements and aspirations.

I conducted around 15 interviews, engaging with our clients, virtual event managers, and consumers experienced in using event platforms. The key insight that emerged from these conversations was the significant tradeoff between investing substantial capital and human resources to create a great virtual event, complete with all the bells and whistles, yet struggling to attract a sufficiently large audience to justify the costs. Alternatively, opting for an expensive platform often resulted in complexity on the event day, leading attendees to feel overwhelmed and discouraged from participating in future events due to the stress involved. Balancing these factors proved to be a critical challenge for our clients and event organisers.

Streamlining Event Creation

Two key questions emerged during our exploration:

1. What are the minimum required features on the platform that will satisfy our clients' needs?
2. How can we streamline the event creation process to minimise friction for our clients and make it easy for them to build events on our platform?

We delved into answering these questions, dedicating our efforts to streamlining the event creation process. Our goal was to ensure that our platform offered the essential features our clients sought while maintaining a user-friendly interface.

Our focus was to empower our clients to effortlessly build and manage their events while meeting their specific needs and budget constraints.

To validate our assumptions about the platform's simplicity, we opted to build a prototype using Wix. Although the Wix site was basic, it closely resembled the structure we envisioned for the MVP. This experiment resembled a "Wizard of Oz" approach, where we operated behind the scenes, running several paid live events for a client. The positive response from the client, exhibitors, and guests validated the demand and willingness to pay for our solution. They expressed satisfaction with the stripped-back platform, which stood out among other platforms they had used due to its minimal learning curve and intuitive design.

MVP

To create our Minimum Viable Product (MVP), I conducted extensive qualitative research, and feature ranking, and created simple mockups to gather feedback from our target audience to determine their requirements. Based on this feedback, I researched various options for building the MVP, focusing on a straightforward front end linked to a database and utilising a third-party API for video communication. I came to this decision because we were aiming to keep development time and short-term costs to a minimum, building a custom video communication tool would come at a later stage when the platform was validated further and when the focus would be on reducing our long-term costs. The domestic development options available exceeded our budget for the project.

Leveraging RP’s connections we reach out to a contact in India, who provided a viable quote for the development. I created a forecast that considered the projected demand from our current clients and the potential to attract new business, along with estimated ongoing costs, RP’s Managing Director approved the decision to move forward with the development.

As the project manager, I took responsibility for setting the project brief, approving designs, and maintaining communication with the development team in India, despite my limited software development knowledge at the time.

Although our MVP exceeded the typical scope of an MVP, it effectively met the needs of our clients. We conducted thorough testing, addressing any bugs or issues that arose.

The MVP platform featured an event lobby with a welcome video, bios, schedules, a networking room, and a help desk. Additionally, we created an exhibitors' hall where guests could search, filter, and engage with exhibitors, entering their stands or meeting rooms and downloading business cards. Each exhibitor had a dedicated stand showcasing a logo banner, welcome video, video conference meeting room (private or open to all), bio, social media links, image gallery, useful links, marketing collateral, and contact details. The platform also included an auditorium for keynote talks and panel discussions, utilising Streamyard for production. Simple analytics were provided to measure event success.

To validate the MVP, we conducted a test event with real clients, exhibitors, and guests, monitoring the user experience and addressing any issues. The event received high satisfaction ratings from both guests and hosts, with compliments on its intuitive and user-friendly design.

Based on user feedback, we made adjustments to improve the user experience, such as refining the event creation process in the backend and enhancing the UI in the front end, such as embedding video communication into pages rather than opening new windows.

Ongoing Development

Insights from initial sales calls revealed that not all leads required assistance with the entire event production process. To cater to this demand, we prioritised the development of the backend to allow clients to use the platform independently. This enabled us to offer flexible options, including platform rental only, event production with platform rental, or complete end-to-end event management.

Another valuable insight was that clients wanted customisation options to align the platform with their specific event layouts and feature requirements. We made modifications to the backend and front end, ensuring that only agreed-upon features were present on the platform. This capability enabled us to provide pricing that matched the desired features, resulting in improved sales conversion rates.

To address security concerns raised in sales calls, we enhanced the platform's security measures. We implemented a whitelist feature, allowing only guests with specific emails to join, and provided the host with the ability to remove and block individuals from the platform. From the outset, we ensured all data was securely stored and handled in compliance with GDPR guidelines.

Additionally, we offered the service of creating dedicated landing pages for events, containing event details and registration information.

Operations

Following the successful initial events, I developed a sales journey and a comprehensive operations manual that could be replicated by RP’s staff and event executives. This included prospecting, outreach, and initial engagement through email and social media, followed by qualifying leads and conducting product demos to showcase the platform's capabilities and fit their specific needs. Also, creating marketing assets. RP managing director and I would handle subsequent calls and demos with the lead's wider team allowing for more in-depth discussions tailored to their event requirements.

To facilitate accurate price estimates, I created a Google Sheet where sales representatives could input event details, generating a price figure based on estimated management costs, platform usage costs, any commission from word-of-mouth referrals, and the required profit margin. The price of an event ranged from £1,000 to £5,000 depending on the length, amount of guests/exhibitors, and the required assistance from us.

We would negotiate with decision-makers involved in addressing concerns, negotiating pricing and contract terms, and exploring upsell and cross-sell opportunities while overcoming any obstacles that arose.

For clients opting for complete event management, our responsibilities included sourcing guests, speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors. We ensured exhibitors set up their stands correctly and provided assistance as needed. I also designed event assets such as schedules, background images, and transitions for the auditorium and accompanying slides. During events, one team member managed the networking room, an engineer manned the help desk, and I oversaw the production of the auditorium using Streamyard. After each event, we conducted a debrief to identify areas for improvement in our processes and platform.

In total, we hosted over 100 events, generating significant revenue for Representation Plus and serving as a lifeline during the pandemic. We successfully extended our platform to the travel, education, and marketing sectors, featuring exhibitors from renowned companies such as Twitter, Spotify, Coca-Cola, and KANTAR. Additionally, RP hosted a virtual film festival focused on travel, including submissions from Channel 4.

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