The Merits of Doing Things Manually As An Early-Stage Startup

When I first launched Revelr, I thought I knew exactly what to build in order to solve the age-old problem of event venue sourcing and booking. I had suffered firsthand the pain of venue scouting in my corporate job for so many years that I was convinced I knew the best way to solve this problem. But looking back, I mistakenly (and naively) thought that simply by virtue of the fact that I had experienced this problem numerous times, I would be an expert when it came to figuring out how to make event planning easier.

What I underestimated was the myriad of reasons why my dream product hadn’t yet come into existence. I surely wasn’t the first to dream up the solution for finding and booking event venues. I knew that some of the driving forces for the difficulty in booking venues were structural; the technology out there just wasn’t that good, and a lot of the technology products that hotels and large venues were using intentionally avoided giving end users more transparency into pricing and availability. But it wasn’t until I started helping customers manually that I learned the importance of also taking stock of the psychological factors at play, like how customers reacted to different types of messaging and which steps of the process they found to be the most critical or painful.

The first large-scale dinner where we had the opportunity to be behind-the-scenes

With limited time, money, and resources, my team and I knew we didn’t have the luxury of holing up for years to build a dream product that may never be used. So we decided to help people by doing the analog version of what we wanted our product to one day do: we became corporate event planners ourselves (albeit efficient and tech-savvy ones). It was old-fashioned, unsexy, and the kind of thing that your friends would side-eye about at cocktail parties. “So you guys plan corporate events?” became a common refrain. “How’s the party planning business going?” was another one. Friends and family had a hard time understanding why I would leave a high-paying job in finance to become a corporate event planner. I often wondered if even calling my venture a “startup” was a misnomer in those days. Rather than attending tech meetups and telling everyone how our site was “crushing it,” my life was spent prettifying spreadsheets of venue options to present to my clients, taking multiple crosstown busses a day to meet them for venue tours, and even mopping up beer and chasing down caterers to refresh coffee at the events.

Always with walkie talkies at events!

Despite my chagrin at times about being a corporate event planner (when that wasn’t exactly what I set out to do), doing the manual/non-scalable version of our product for 9 months taught us invaluable lessons that would have otherwise taken years to understand. Every startup founder should take heed: doing things that are unsexy and not scalable can often unlock insights that no user interview would ever reveal.

Here are some benefits that come from manually serving customers for 9 months:

1. You understand user psychology. This cannot be emphasized enough. When you have a tech platform and sit with an anonymous user for the first time, you have only a couple of hours (at most) to distill all of their emotions, their feelings, and how they feel about the problem you’re solving and how you’re solving it. But when you manually help customers and serve them directly, you develop the type of relationship with them where you can observe their emotions and reactions in real time. By planning events on the ground, my team and I were constantly barraged with emails and calls from our clients, asking us to deal with whatever issue was at the top of the list, and we became intimately familiar with the stresses, the emotions, and the anxieties that these customers experienced in the venue sourcing process. Even spending a full day with one of our site’s users today couldn’t hold a candle to this kind of intimate glimpse into their psyche. Frantic phone calls and panicked emails were not necessarily fun to handle, but they really highlighted exactly how and why people were frustrated with the status quo.

2. You become an expert on how others are solving it. Before helping customers plan events in the non-scalable way, my team and I used a lot of other products out there that were trying to solve the same problem of venue sourcing/booking. Because each of the sites/apps was solving the problem differently, we were able to clearly understand the pros and cons of each approach as we were using them to solve real, live problems. We had previously spent hours poking around on these sites (and even logging test requests on them), but it’s not until you need to rely on the sites under serious pressure to fulfill a real customer’s needs and wants that you truly comprehend each site’s benefits and drawbacks. These experiences greatly informed our model and all the ways we’ve been able to improve on the status quo.

Goofing off before the start of a cocktail party

3. You begin to understand what a true MVP is. Someone once told me that MVP does not stand for “minimal viable product” so much as “minimal valuable product.” Your users determine what’s valuable, and by planning over 120 events in 9 months time, we started to very clearly see what users saw as valuable. By the time January 2017 rolled around, my team and I were ready to launch our tech site, and thanks to our experience on the ground, we did not have to do a lot of guesstimating about what the core feature set of an MVP would consist of. We knew.

4. You make money. All startups need to make money to stay alive (or raise capital to do so). The nice thing about doing something that doesn’t scale is that it often makes you much more money than you’d make from the users of your tech product (at least in the short-term). Eventually you’ll likely have to decide whether you want to keep making money running a successful mom-and-pop business or whether you want to try to do something grander and more scalable, but it’s nice to have revenue coming in while you figure this out.

5. You commit. Laughing at ourselves during those late nights spent taking out garbage or cleaning up after a stressful event bonded our team in a way that is hard to articulate in words. That “can’t believe we just pulled that off” sentiment created a unity amongst us three cofounders and reinforced our fierce commitment to solving the problem we set out to solve. When you suffer the pains alongside your customers, you’re living and breathing the problem every day, and every time you become frustrated by another half-baked solution out there, it reignites your desire and commitment to solving the problem.

While doing the manual version of a technology product isn’t particularly cool or in vogue, I can’t emphasize enough the benefits it had for our product, our team, and our commitment to solving this problem. Picking up bottle caps, busing tables, and giving out name tags at events — it certainly was never what I aspired to do. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes miss those days of intimately knowing my customers. You learn how to truly delight your customers when you observe and listen to them on a regular basis, face-to-face. While we’re no longer working as closely with our users, incorporating our on-the-ground lessons into our product has proven indispensible as we begin to scale.

The Revelr team (Steve, Anne, Danny)