

Review my app - Guestlist: online event registration made simple - oneplusone

Guestlist is an online event registration app that focuses on making event registration simpler by removing as much as possible. Our team consists of two programmers and one designer working on it in our spare time for the past 7 months. A lot of effort was spent making our app enjoyable to use though great UI, engaging copywriting, and lightning-fast reflexes.<p>http://www.guestlistapp.com
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oneplusone
Link is <http://www.guestlistapp.com>

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mildavw
I'm building an app in a related space (project planning for event planners)
and bumped into a potential competitor on a message board. Turns out he is
more in your space than mine. We got on Skype and he gave me a tour of his
app. If you want to see the feature set of a mature event registration app for
enterprise, you should shoot him a note and request a demo. Looks like your
market is decidedly not enterprise, but rather casual event hosts, but you
might pick up a cool feature or two.

<http://event-master.com/regis.html>

Simon was the guy who gave me the tour.

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tezza
You'll need a few features

.

* Tally feature to check guests in, correlate to web list after event.

.. A4 Pages of guests to cross out via pen 0-200 guests

.. Barcode scanner db 200+ guests (-idea- maybe an iPhone app with db sync?)

.

* Generate tickets and ticket address labels

.. Customers can print out their own voucher perhaps?

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oneplusone
If you go to the attendee or order list we do have an option to print a list.
Its formatted nicely to print on any size sheet and will allow you to cross
people off at check-in. We also export attendees and orders to CSV so you can
pull it into Excel and format it to your specifications.

The other features we are hesitating on because we aren't convinced that
people really need them. Doing less, but doing it significantly better is what
we are aiming at. We realize that we will not be getting the really large
events to move to us, but they are not our target market. We are aiming for
the smaller events that don't have professional planners that take care of
everything.

That said, we have a list of features that we think we need to add. We plan to
add most of them before we exit beta. Features on our list include a public
attendee list, ability to ask for custom information per attendee, and
uploading of custom background images for events.

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tezza
I guess you'd also want to do a White Label version of your engine so that
small-medium Bed&Breakfasts and Hotels could use you as their guestlist
provider.

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evancaine
I'm impressed by your landing page. You often see sites put up for review on
YC that give little attention to the landing page, even though any PPC
advertiser will tell you it can often mean the difference between a user
clicking 'Signup' or 'Back'

Your landing page let's me know what the app does, how much it costs (kind of)
and the benefits to me of using it. Building on that last point, the only
thing I'd consider changing is renaming "Manage your event" to "Why use
guestlist" and listing the benefits in a bullet list.

Well done on a great design and landing page. Good luck with it

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akamaka
I checked out your app yesterday, after seeing that you'll be presenting at
DemoCamp. I was very interested in this idea, because I've needed or been
asked to develop this type of app in the past.

I'm very impressed with everything I've seen so far. I played around with it
as much as I could, stopping short of making any actual payments, and it all
looks great.

Best of luck!

P.S. I'd also be interested in hearing about what tools you used, particularly
on the front end.

Edit: just remembered one tiny thing that bugged me: I couldn't immediately
figure out what the "Quantity" field referred to. I thought it might mean that
tickets could be sold in sets. Maybe you could fit in a less ambiguous
description like "Number of tickets for sale".

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oneplusone
You have a point about the Quantity label. I will see about including that in
my planned revamp of the ticket type lightbox.

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yankeeracer73
Nice job on putting this together. I recently used <http://eventbrite.com> to
plan an event. Seems to be quite similar to what you've put together and has a
pretty nice UI (a big improvement over evite anyway) - they also have the
ability to charge for tickets, manage your event, etc. Are you thinking the
field for "beautiful" event management apps is still small and you're going to
go after some of that?

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oneplusone
We are definitely going after the "beautiful" market. But it is not just about
beauty. It is very much about usability. Apps like Eventbrite and Amiando are
very feature rich, but their aesthetics and user experience is not for
everybody. If you just want to host a simple event you can get lost in all
their options and may not even find the few options you do want.

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yankeeracer73
I guess that wasn't really my experience. It took me about 5 minutes to set up
an event so as an administrator of an event, it was extremely easy and the UI
was fine. What they kind of sucked at is the options to display an event.
Templates were limited and I'm feeling our event is a bit cookie cutter at the
moment. Perhaps that's a differentiating factor to focus on too.

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joshsharp
The 'create your event now' button on sub-pages appears to go nowhere. I
didn't sign up but otherwise, love the design.

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oneplusone
It does appear that the signup button on the tour page is dysfunctional.
Thanks!

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oneplusone
It has been fixed. Thanks again.

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wmblaettler
What tech did you use to create the app?

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jsg
Merb with Postgres on the backend, jQuery + jQuery UI on the front, served by
Nginx reverse-proxied to Thin. The website is statically generated using
Jekyll.

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wmblaettler
Thanks for the details!

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bdmac97
Nicely done site. Love the layout and design. Very clear what you offer on the
landing page. The tour was also nicely accessible. I didn't sign up because I
don't really have any events to plan right now.

As an aside, my site, launchly has just started offering free web startup
launches again today so if you wanted to list it there for some additional
feedback and exposure we'd be glad to have you. <http://www.launchly.com>

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kilps
I can't say I gave it much time to explore all features - but two comments. 1)
Why is the app limited to US users with the time zone options? What about the
rest of the world? 2) Extra attendee information would be great - I'm often
involved in online registration for sailing competitions and currently use a
rather clumsy custom system. Your design is top notch so I was really
interested in looking at your app for our use, but we have to record things
like boat numbers.

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oneplusone
Custom information is high on our priority list.

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EGF
Overall this is a very clear and concise first page to land on. It explains
clearly what your app does and why I should sign up.

Once I did those things I like the step-by-step flow of filling out details of
my event.

Sites like eventbrite have endless options, but I find that I do not use most
of them. When I need to find something it is usually hidden, but this is not
the case.

Beautiful and simple design with a quality backend usually work best.

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bora
I really like the user interface and simplicity. You're right, there are sites
out there with too many unnecessary features. I liked your approach to only
keep what's absolutely needed and present those features in a lovely way. The
creative and clean placement of Edit links on the event page especially
captured my attention.

Great job and best of luck with this!

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amjith
Great UI and simple design.

But it can use a more testing.

* I created a test event and tried to add attendees, but pressing the button doesn't do anything.

* The signup/login page could use a link to the main page. I pressed login instead of signup and the only way to get out of that page is to hit the browser's back button.

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oneplusone
The button is disabled if you have no ticket types. We added a tool-tip to
make that clearer. Thanks for the feedback!

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tsondermann
Really nicely done app. Fits well in between eventbrite and manually
organizing things yourself.

One thing I'd think about in terms of increasing conversions would be to allow
people to test drive the process of Creating An Event without the need to set
up an account. You can always gather that info later on in the process.

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l0nwlf
Time-zone doesn't include IST. (GMT+05:30)

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arthurk
The contact form doesn't show error messages. It just displays a dialog with
"submit" set as the text.

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oneplusone
Thanks! will get that fixed.

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jsg
fixed.

