Really cool that you built this from scratch for so many major cities! I am located in Chicago but browsed SF and the list returned there looked like a logical categorization of events & things to do.
Re: your question of whether to pursue the project, my thoughts from the perspective of someone who works in the tourism & travel industry.
Collecting and aggregating event listings is, as you note, time consuming. It can't all be done by crawl/scrape. Curation is an important factor here, and so perhaps you tailor the product to the perceived needs of a specific type of end user.
First user type that comes to mind: those of us who maintained Facebook accounts for the event listings/invites, but have all but fallen off of Facebook over the years due to... everything else that's wrong with the product :)
I'll say this, too — Airovic is entering a space where your number one competition is Google. Google orients its event listings geographically, around a "place," and I think your opportunity is to orient around people and their preferences.
To that end, another competitor here is Spotify for concerts — much as I hate to admit this, as a retired "Cool Person," I'm generally made aware of bands I want to see touring in my area first by Spotify, and then by social and local media.
That said, in identifying and meeting the needs of a narrower band of users, you may find that emphasizing curation and personalization could position your product as a more useful method of discovery.
I agree with you, narrowed down will make everything sharper.
But I don't know, I need something like this, all-in-one-events, probably the issue are categories and curated information. First month has been very time consuming, but it's something we can go refinating.
I think events make it much easier to sell flights, hotels or other events tickets...
What do you think about the events categories? do you miss anything?
Kids probably is a good niche, the most difficult to get right.
They've been separate entities for years. The Onion under Univision became more of a digital production house. Editorial staff was always distinct. I presume that the handful of people leaving are writers, and they'll need to staff up around operations.
Really neat application of the data. I'm the Director of Marketing at a mid-sized destination marketing organization (DMO) represented on your map (Aurora, Illinois -- we're actually a terrific place to visit in winter!). Curious to learn more about the variables used to deploy the "best time" pages and get a sense for where you'd like to take this further.
Wouldn't be so certain about blizzards. Warming increases the amount of moisture in the atmosphere during the cold months, producing more blizzards. My only fear about living in the Great Lakes is that we may end up snowed under before our ready access to fresh water makes a difference in terms of climate change preparedness.
Closing up shop as a marketing strategy is interesting as a high-risk/high-reward last ditch effort.
If under a particular set of circumstances, the most viable path to attracting eyeballs is to go under, it could be really effective to give potential users a "last chance" and then pivot to a new name.
Pretty fine, but it's not a common thing to eat though. Raw salad, carrots and tomato, with a pinch of salt and vinegar. A bit of meat. One thing I recently discovered is that whole grain mueslies do feel nice on your mouth without triggering pain in my case. Maybe more fibers that help feeling satiated.
Thanks for the insights. Sounds like a fair procedure.
Curious to hear more about what you found cool about their communication methods. I've been thinking about this a lot as I'm surprised how inefficient a lot of Big Corp communication methods can be, especially those with a field/regional organization. Inclined to agree that knowledge radiates outwards, but tinkering with ideas about how to best receive feedback inwards and what are the most effective methods of radiating that knowledge. Easier said than done.
I can't speak specifically about Uber (not sure what is fair to disclose or not) and definitely not about Rocket. However, I can speculate on what I learnt from both. It's not (or not "just") about "communication methods" but an organisational problem.
In the hypothetical case where I'd be running a company like that, I'd want a small team of people who are both technically and operationally extremely able, and personally likeable and politically capable; preferably people who have proven themselves and have credit internally (or such achievements as to reach the same reputation even as an external hire).
I'd task them to overview everything that is happening globally, coordinate trials and experiments so that several hundred could run at the same time globally, and share back information and results across the world. They'd be in effect the repository of knowledge of the company, the institutional memory (so much wheel gets reinvented!) and they most crucially wouldn't be based in HQ in the Bay Area, but a distributed global team constantly roaming and meeting all the local teams. They wouldn't have or need authority to "get things done" by steamrolling over the local office (as the IBM Black Team did [1]), instead convincing them that it's a good idea to try.
They would include specialists in every discipline that is important to the company from finance to statistics, to make sure that there is always at least one team member that can be on the same level as a local specialist (both to avoid taking stupid decisions, and to be credible in conversations).
Re: your question of whether to pursue the project, my thoughts from the perspective of someone who works in the tourism & travel industry.
Collecting and aggregating event listings is, as you note, time consuming. It can't all be done by crawl/scrape. Curation is an important factor here, and so perhaps you tailor the product to the perceived needs of a specific type of end user.
First user type that comes to mind: those of us who maintained Facebook accounts for the event listings/invites, but have all but fallen off of Facebook over the years due to... everything else that's wrong with the product :)
I'll say this, too — Airovic is entering a space where your number one competition is Google. Google orients its event listings geographically, around a "place," and I think your opportunity is to orient around people and their preferences.
To that end, another competitor here is Spotify for concerts — much as I hate to admit this, as a retired "Cool Person," I'm generally made aware of bands I want to see touring in my area first by Spotify, and then by social and local media.
That said, in identifying and meeting the needs of a narrower band of users, you may find that emphasizing curation and personalization could position your product as a more useful method of discovery.