Those who don’t have much free time often desire to conserve it. ~ @mhendric
I keep thinking about this sobering post-mortem from Mark Hendrickson about Plancast.
I had failed with a similar business back in 2005-2006, and what Mark writes resonates with me, in particular about Sharing Frequency and Consumption Frequency, and the quote in the title of this post: Is it better to save time or to kill time?
It's particularly frustrating because other event sharing businesses, particularly EventBrite, Meetup, Punchbowl, and Paperless Post, seem to be doing well with a slight variation on the same theme. (The pioneer of the space, Evite, also seems to be surviving.)
Mark, I don't consider Plancast a fail at all.
Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.
How much did Plancast ultimately spend?
BTW Scoble's comments are worth a sober look.
We raised $835k, spent most of it (but not all).
What'd you find interesting about Scoble's comments? (curious since I didn't find them very well thought-out)
Thanks Adam. A big difference, as far as I see it, is that these other business focus on professional event organizers (with Meetup perhaps going after the more quasi-professional organizers, but ringleaders none the less). With Plancast, we were trying to get peers to share events more than event organizers, so the incentives and behaviors were very different. And it's a lot harder to monetize, since if you're building organizer tools, you have opportunities to charge (for ticket sales or group management functionality, namely).
That's insightful.
I regularly tried to get people to share my events more than me, but I almost always end up being the biggest promoter.
Perhaps peers don't have the social capital, or perhaps they don't have the commitment to events the way the organizers do.
Yea, I think it's mostly a matter of commitment / incentives. If you've established yourself as a ringleader, either for financial or social reasons, then you'll be much more incentivized to work on getting people to an event and making sure they have a good time, etc. You'll contribute more information about that event and rally everyone to buy into whatever system you're using.
