We sat down with Ben Vinegar, suave businessman and product developer for Guestlist, to talk about their new event management application.
Refresh Events: Hi Ben, thanks for sitting down with us. Tell us a bit more about Guestlist.
Ben Vinegar: Thanks for having us. Basically, Guestlist is a new event registration service that focuses on usability and design, and not a phonebook-sized feature list. It lets you publish beautiful looking event pages, sell tickets online, and manage your attendees with ease.
RE: Why did you decide to create this?
BV: Back in 2008 we were a bunch of web developers itching to solve a problem, and event registration just kind of intrigued us. We aren’t event organizers ourselves, but as technically-minded folk in Toronto, we sure do attend a lot of them, and it became clear that existing products for managing events could stand to be simplified.
RE: Which language(s)/framework(s) were used to build this application, and why did you choose them?
BV: Ruby + Merb, jQuery + jQuery UI. Honestly, we just chose these tools because we felt we were already strong in them. When you’re developing a product part time, the last thing you want to do is spend half your development time learning a whole new tool chain.
RE: Tell us about the business model behind Guestlist. How are you planning to generate a revenue stream?
BV: We charge the event organizer a commission on all paid tickets sold. Free and charitable events don’t cost anything.
RE: What’s the coolest or most useful feature of your application?
BV: We put a lot of effort into our WYSIWYG event page editor. Basically, as you fill in details about your event, like location, date, and so on, the effect this has on your public event page is visible immediately. With most software in this space, you have to go back and forth between a long edit page (with a million options) and some kind of preview page; not ideal.
RE: What are your goals and plans for the future of this application?
BV: Our goals our pretty modest, and we take them one step at a time. The first was to build a compelling product – and I think we’ve succeeded in that regards. Next up is to have enough people use it to cover our monthly operating expenses.
RE: What advice would you give to someone who is thinking of creating applications/software for the web?
BV: Until Guestlist has reached a modicum of success, I don’t know if I should be giving advice to anyone.
RE: If there is one thing that you could change about this application, what would it be?
BV: We’ve kept our features pretty light, so we haven’t made a decision design-wise that I’ve come to regret yet. But it will come – it always does.
RE: And finally, for the bacon-loving community, how much bacon is there in the application?
BV: None.
RE: Thanks for your time, Ben.
BV: Thanks for the opportunity!
===
For more information about Guestlist, check out:
Company: guestlistapp.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/guestlistapp
Ben Vinegar’s Twitter: twitter.com/bentlegen
Possibly Related Posts:
If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to our RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.
