EventVue is Growing!

One of the coolest things about running your own company is the opportunity to choose the people with whom you work.

I am stoked to announce a new addition to the EventVue team. Today is Kevin Musselman’s first day as EventVue’s first employee. Kevin was pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Clemson before we talked him into working for us instead. I’m confident that Kevin will add a lot to our company. He’s smart, motivated and really passionate about what we are doing.

It’s going to be fun having a good friend and a fellow tiger working alongside us. Welcome to Boulder Kevin!

When you know just enough to be dangerous

I’ve always been amazed by the number of books that promise to teach you how to program in just a few days or weeks. I recently stumbled across a book at Amazon entitled: Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 10 Minutes. 10 minutes!!!

Why do we think it is possible to learn JAVA in the same time it takes to make a pot of coffee?

It has taken me years to learn how to program and I am still learning new things every day. Imagine if we applied this same thinking to other skills. I’ve never seen a book on how to learn to play the piano in 10 minutes. That’s because everyone knows that learning to play the piano takes countless hours and years of practice. No one should expect to become an expert overnight.

Why are people in such a rush?

Let’s stop spreading this lie that you can learn everything you need to know about programming just by reading a $20 book. You can’t. Sure, you might be able to gain a superficial familiarity, but not the deep understanding that is required to build a real application. Books like this are a great way to explore your interests. Just realize that by the time you finish the last page, you probably know just enough to be dangerous.

We’re funded!

I’ve been looking forward to writing this post for a long time!

I’m happy to announce that we have closed our series A round of funding for EventVue. Our angelic investors include Brad Feld, David Cohen, Dave McClure, Wendy Lea and several other incredible people. It’s exciting to have such an amazing group of people join us as we revolutionize the conference industry.

To our investors: Thank you for believing in us. We promise won’t let you down.

Shut up and listen when smart people are talking

When we first got accepted into TechStars, we planned on building an event registration system. Thankfully we had some awesome mentors who encouraged us to focus solely on social networking. They pointed out that there are plenty of other companies already in event registration and it would be really tough for us to compete with them. On the other hand, we had a decent chance of becoming the best in the world at providing online communities for conferences. We were a little hard-headed at first, but after Brad, David, Noah, Eric and Todd all gave us the same advice, we finally sat up and paid attention. We are really grateful to these guys because they saved us from wasting a lot of time this summer.

Later this summer, Eric Norlin began pushing us to start thinking more like conference organizers. He kept asking “How are you going to decrease my cost or increase my revenue?” This time we listened. In fact, we decided to address his question head on. Now our entire revenue model is an answer to that question: We only get paid when we are successful in driving more registrations to a conference.

I’m going to share a secret: Very little of EventVue was our idea. Instead we borrowed from the insight of dozens of conference organizers and mentors. That’s what entrepreneurship is all about. It’s learning to listen to the right people. One of the most important skills for any entrepreneur to learn to listen.

I’m a TechStars Graduate!!

In a few minutes I will place my keycard on David’s desk and walk out of the TechStars office for one last time.

This has been an incredible summer. I have learned more than I could have ever imagined. I know that the people I met here will be friends for life. We’re forever grateful to the TechStars mentors and the Boulder community for investing countless hours towards our success. The TechStars program exceeded my expectations in every way possible.

The cool thing is, we’re just getting started! We built our current product in three months. Just wait till you see what we have in a year!

Finally! RSS feeds for any website!

There is a beautiful venue in Denver called Red Rocks. The variety of shows offered there would tempt me – if only I knew about them in time. Now, if they had an RSS feed of their upcoming shows it would be different – but they don’t.

And Red Rocks are not alone. There are thousands of websites on the internet that have interesting content, but don’t provide a convenient way for me to consume it.

Thankfully a new service called feedity has come to my rescue. Their tool allows you to create an RSS feed for any website! So if you want an RSS feed for Red Rocks – no problem!

Update: Feedity also allows you to customize which content makes it into the RSS feed. For example, here’s an updated feed that includes the dates for each show at Red Rocks.

A missed connection at TechCrunch 9

Last night Arrington had a humorous post about a missed connection at the TechCrunch 9 party. Rob and I had the same thought the moment we saw it – “If only they had EventVue!”

Missed connections happen all the time. In fact, you usually do not even know about the opportunities you miss. Perhaps someone that represents a valuable opportunity for you is attending the same event. How would you ever know they were going to be there? The way we currently network at events is random, thin, and incomplete.

Think about the last conference you attended. When you arrived, you had no idea who else would be attending with you. You randomly wandered the conference floor, hoping to stumble into someone interesting to you. Afterwards, you have nothing but a huge stack of business cards and your memory to help you follow up.

Arrington’s right. There is a huge need for better networking tool around events. We can’t wait to show you EventVue.

Know any conference organizers?

A lot of people have been asking us what they should expect next from EventVue. After seeing some impressive results from the Community Next conference, we have been working hard to add new features and make our product more scalable. We learned a lot from our Community Next experience. Sure, we made a few mistakes, but we learned from them and we have a better product as a result.

We’re now starting to move into the process of talking to as many conference organizers as we can. We’re hoping to announce several new EventVue-powered conferences within the next month. If you are friends with a conference organizer who we could talk to, please let me know. You can reach me at josh@eventvue.com.

A picture of life at TechStars

It’s 10:45 on a Wednesday night and the TechStars office is hopping! There are 13 guys working here at the office right now. That’s start-up life for you!

IE? Firefox? Safari? Opera?

Your choice. EventVue supports them all!

I’ve found that one of the biggest challenges of building web applications is getting them to work consistently across a diverse set of browsers and operating systems. Every serious website developer has experienced the frustration of opening a site in another browser only to find that nothing works anymore.

In spite of the challenges, I believe it is important to give your users a positive experience no matter which browser they choose to use. Last week we reached our goal of supporting all major modern browsers.

I’m proud to announce that EventVue now supports:

• IE 6/7
• Firefox 1.5/2.0
• Safari 2/3
• Opera 9

I hope this post will provide encouragement to those of you who are currently caught in the cross-fire between the browser wars. Building a cross-browser web application isn’t easy – but it can be done. Keep up the fight! You can do it!