Some of our closest followers may know that we’ve been talking about EventAgenda for quite some time now. We started to ‘Hello world’ you guys somewhere in september of 2007! You can find it here, our first post (in Dutch).

Back then we thought that EventAgenda should be dedicated to music events only. This alone would be difficult enough to manage! In fact, the first reason we wanted to start building EventAgenda is to more easily update our Partyvibes.nl database with relevant dance events without having to add those events manually. The second reason is that we wanted to give existing partners and visitors of Partyvibes.nl the opportunity to find music events from other categories besides dance related stuff.

So the main focus of this little project was; getting all music events listed, ‘within’ and ‘next to’, our dutch dance guide Partyvibes.nl.

We started brain farting around this idea and sketched a brand new music event guide, the best one around, of course!

We created mind blowing logo’s and tag lines, designed beautiful pages and started to build all this awesomeness in PHP / MySQL.

So where is it then? One might be thinking. Well…

One of the most important things, for us, is always ask ourselves these questions:

• Would this website/tool/platform help us?
• Would we use it?
• Which big problem does it solve for us?
• Is it fun, easy and reliable?
• And last but not least; Are we conquering the world with this?

The big conclusion was; No way, Jose!

EventAgenda.com – your music events guide wasn’t what it should be. It was just one out of dozens other event guides. What we had to offer wasn’t really better than Last.fm’s gigs list, or even older event platforms like upcoming.org…

So it was time to stop the (php) presses and go back to the drawing board! Fully trying to understand the problems we had with events databases (like our own at Partyvibes.nl) and what EventAgenda could offer to release the pain of getting relevant, reliable, and complete event data online before the start date has passed!

The first and biggest change came from talking to many friends and experts. We decided to switch from B2C to B2B. Consumers are more than welcome, but we will be seeing them like small businesses (power users).

The second big change, partly as result from the target switch, was that EventAgenda.com wasn’t the event driven community with tons of social media associations, but instead we would be the application that serves those communities! We decided to go underwater, let other websites (like Partyvibes) worry about getting enough visitors and event lovers. Our focus is design- & developing tools to help others GET (and PUT) relevant event data. Supported with outstanding tools to help the event business to get their events on their websites, social pages and to their target groups! Not limited to music.

The only limit is that it’s an event, public or private. So; “If it has a date, time and location it’s on EventAgenda.com!“.
For all the music makers, event promoters, location owners, speakers, agencies, organizers, sport teams, website owners and communities!

The third change was the focus of the application. We always talked about events and how you could get these events on the places you want with tools like the infamous ‘uberfilter‘. But from now on the main subject of EventAgenda is the Agenda part. We give you the tools to keep your agendas filled with relevant events. It doesn’t matter if that agenda is your;

• google or iCal based calendar
• personal blog
• marketing and business profiles
• bands gigs list
• football schedule
• or plain old html website!

With other words; Create, manage & share your agendas, filled with your (favorite) events!

In even shorter words; EventAgenda. your events. your agenda. your domain!

That means: A new strategy, concept, interface & design

Our biggest problem was getting enough time to work on a platform like this. We all had jobs, own businesses and/or had relationships with the opposite gender… so time was scarce!
One solution to this problem was trying to get (angel) investors to fund our time! This surely would help us getting the application live within a few months. But we didn’t want to give away parts of our little baby yet!
We all kept our jobs, businesses and relationships witch resulted that EventAgenda became our part-time project, getting approximately 8 hours of love from each of us, every week! At least until we get this thing live!

In the mean time another option came across; getting help from a kickass developing company! We found all that we want from such a company in Holder! Those guys are building true art from javascript, are the Dutch leaders in Ruby on Rails, love Apples even more than we and are just a few bicycle kicks from Alkmaar. They came, saw and threw away every bit of PHP code they could find. Leaving us with NULL MySQL statements on an empty database.

But as time flew away, we managed to get:

• brand new wireframes
• the prototype working
• the new application designs ready
• fully understand of our business case and opportunities
• the first feedback from private alpha testers
• my bachelor degree (based on EventAgenda)
• my first son or daughter! (somewhere around now)

After getting feedback from our beta testers we will renew our EventAgenda priority issue. If you love it as much as we do, we know that we need to empty our schedules and focus on building all agenda & event plugins / tools you guys want!

So our apologies go out to everybody who kept dreaming about using this brilliant tool before 2010. We hope you guys can wait just a little longer and play with it before the end of this summer! If you think we made some terrible mistakes, or that we are forgetting something important, please tell us! Just choose your preferred platform, we will listen!

Regards,
Tim
on behalf of the EventAgenda team!