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Review my app - Guestlist: online event registration made simple
21 points by oneplusone on July 23, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 29 comments
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.

http://www.guestlistapp.com



Link is http://www.guestlistapp.com


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.


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


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?


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.


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.


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".


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


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?


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.


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.


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


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


It has been fixed. Thanks again.


What tech did you use to create the app?


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.


Thanks for the details!


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.


Custom information is high on our priority list.


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


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.


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!


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.


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


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


Thanks! will get that fixed.


fixed.


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.


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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