

Ask HN:Product Focus Help - Cantdog

Hi HN,<p>For the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a couple products in the event/ticketing market. I need to buckle down and focus on one specific area, and I'm having trouble deciding which. Let me know what you think, or if you think of any other opportunities to explore.<p>1) Build a Search Engine for Facebook Events. Localize/Categorize the events. There isn't an official API to get ALL events, but there are a couple workarounds that could probably be used. Build a facebook app/website as a frontend for the events.<p>2) Build a Native Facebook application for creating events that you can sell tickets to. Essentially a "super" events app. Ticketing is built into the app.<p>3) Build a web app that integrates into Facebook Events. ie. You create an event on my website, I ask you if you'd like a facebook event, then I create it for you.<p>4) A Subset of (2), build an application solely for Facebook Pages that allows you to create events and sell tickets within the application.<p>I don't have a huge amount of time or resources, so I'm trying to figure out what the best MVP would be. I'd like to keep the product as simple as possible (obviously).<p>Please let me know if you have any suggestions, critiques, or ideas.
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mschaecher
I think number 2 could be huge, especially with Facebook rolling out it new
credits/payment platform. Political campaigns and non-profits would love it
for fundraisers. I ran a Congressional campaign and something like this would
have been great.

I also now a bunch of people in the music/event promotion business locally
that would be the perfect fit for this kind of app.

Some of the issues I think of at first glance for this kind of app regard
around the physical ticket.

The process of selling the ticket digitally is simple enough but, getting
actual physical tickets that work at the door is another task; especially if
you take into consideration fraud prevention and some sort of pos mechanism(QR
Codes by phone??) to verify the ticket in the case of larger events.

I'm surprised no one in the online tickets space is making a move to integrate
the Facebook platform into their current ticketing offerings. Or are they?

I've got experience with events through politics, music, and some work on a
web app for handling event registration for car shows on a car enthusiast
social network. Feel free to touch base with me at schaecher.michael at gm if
you want to bounce anything off me or whatever

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Roridge
If it is only for use on Facebook, I would go for option 4, then expand to
option 2 (if it's quicker).

If you plan to expand beyond Facebook, I would be tempted to start with option
1 and expand to 3.

