Hi!Each month I organize and moderate an event called the Feedback Forum. Here is a blurb from the Eventbrite page:
The Feedback Forum is a monthly gathering of NYC entrepreneurs and technology-based startups or businesses in the NY metro area. We focus on a specific company and discuss critical operational challenges in an open environment that creates a learning opportunity which can benefit the broader NYC entrepreneur community.
What I do is find companies that want feedback on their business and then bring other entrepreneurs (seasoned, aspiring, curious, anyone really) to discuss the business we are focusing on. I limit the # of attendees to 20 people so that there is a productive discussion.
It’s a two hour event that’s broken up into segments. The first segment is a round of brief introductions of the attendees and then a round of discussion to get familiar with the business. The rest of the event is broken up into segments to discuss the challenges the business may be facing.
Last night I was a little self serving and held a Feedback Forum for Plan.FM. For the event Min and I put together a deck to help describe the service and highlight some items we wanted to discuss:
The discussion was very open. Here is some of what we discussed and what came out of it:
Usability - The online event space is fragmented with over 70 different event scheduling, personal calendars, and social calendar services. Our mission is to separate the signal from the noise within this fragmentation. What are some ways in which Plan.fm can be an indispensable compliment to a users preferred calendar/scheduling system?
There was a lot of focus on making the calendar simpler, but without replacing a users existing calendar. Users prefer Google Calendar, iCal, or Outlook and there is no need to create an alternative calendaring system. The ability for Plan.FM to synchronize invites and rsvps to a users existing calendar is what people were most interested in discussing.
Simplifying the functionality was another area that the group had directed attention to. There’s a lot of long term vision on how a service like Plan.FM can be a social tool for attendees of events or even coordinating with other people within your social and professional networks, but a lot of that gets lost in the current offering.
Strategy – Does it make sense to focus on certain vertical networks as a growth strategy? Is there value in focusing on networks like Linked In that allows users to find events their colleagues, competitors, and potential clients are attending? Focusing on professionals may also opens up more possibilities for providing lead generation opportunities for industry conferences. Are there any other verticals that we should be thinking about?
“Do one thing, do it well” seemed to be the theme when there was a discussion about strategy. Reaching that 20k user mark will surface who the real target audience is and how they are using the product. This will then help define where to focus user acquisition initiatives.
Branding was briefly discussed on whether or not Plan.FM was the right name for the product. However a larger consensus was that the focus should be on the product right now, not the branding.
Revenue – The focus of revenue has been on sponsorships in emails, sponsored event listings, and affiliate programs (fandango, live nation, eventbrite, open table, stub hub). We’d love to hear the experiences other entrepreneurs had with various similar methods as well as discuss other opportunities.
There were clearly ideas an opportunities about how to generate revenue, however it really depends on the direction the strategy taken. I illustrated how focusing on larger and more expensive events would be more interesting than smaller ticket items like movie tickets.
In general the response to revenue was to focus on isolating the value and focusing on that before focusing on monetization.
I really want to thank all the people who attended and gave feedback! We had a stellar mindshare attend and it was exciting getting a lot of thoughtful responses from what we are trying to accomplish! In alphabetical order we had Marc Alter, Dean Collins, Roman Fichman Esq., Jeanne Goulet, Jake Howerton, Wayne Mulligan, Saadiq Rodgers-King, Ray Schmitz, Ron Suarez, David Wang, Jonathan Wegener, and Vinicius Vacanti in attendance!
Lastly special thanks to New Work City (@nwc) for being our host for the Feedback Forum!
