In August 2015, we launched Hivebeat. We wanted to build an events platform for campuses — a cool place for students to explore their campus and find (and stay updated on) all the awesome events and student organizations their university campus has to offer. At the same time, we wanted to help these student organizations manage events, sell tickets and promote themselves to the right students.
We launched at 4 universities in Denmark and Sweden, and people wrote us emails saying “This is exactly what we need! We don’t know what’s going on at our school and this is the product we need.” So far, so good. In October, we got accepted into 500 Startups, a top 2 startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. Things were doing pretty good.
Hivebeat has now been online for ~4 months, and here’s what we’ve learned:
- Students don’t use Hivebeat to explore their campus. Although most of the students we’ve talked to like the idea, the retention is bad and they end up going to Facebook to see what’s going on. We just couldn’t create enough value that they couldn’t get elsewhere.
- It’s hard to build a product for two very different target groups (students and organizations) when you’re an early-stage startup. It’s like trying to build a car that’s both cool and electric … oh, wait.
- But… The number of organizations who use our core product — a tool to manage events, members and payments — is growing, and our churn rate is very close to zero.
- And… We’re getting inbound interest from organizations outside of the university industry who want to use the product to handle members, events and payments. Previously, we had to tell these organizations to go find another product, because they didn’t fit into our “explore your campus”-strategy.
Saying no to potential customers?
As you might be able to conclude from these learnings, we’ve now decided to change direction. From today, we’re gonna focus 100% on making Hivebeat a great product for organizations. This makes sense because:
- We already have 50+ organizations who love the product (9.1 NPS).
- We’re generating revenue from organizations (we didn’t generate anything from students).
- We can see our monthly revenue grow everytime we sign up a new customer (again, we didn’t generate any $ from students and we spent lots of time trying to figure out what they wanted).
So, what is Hivebeat now? Good question. We’re not really going to change the product. We’re just narrowing it down so we can focus 100% on creating even more value for organizations. You should consider Hivebeat if you’re running any type of organization where you deal with either events or members (or both). It could be the local cycling club, a student organization, a yoga club, your high school, a nightclub, a professional network for people who like cats or anything similar. Hivebeat can help you set memberships on auto-pilot (like your local fitness center) and sell tickets for your open or members-only events.
It feels great to be able to make decisions based on what we learn from our customers. I’m pretty sure we’re gonna grow like crazy in 2016.
If you’re curious, go check out the new frontpage — we’d love some feedback: [email protected] 🙌