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MyShindig: not a portal, but a community

With support from Cantiere Creativo and the Lean UX methodology, MyShindig built a close-knit community instead of just another web portal.

Project in numbers

events organized (within three months of launch)

29

users acquired

2.500

in regional funding secured

80.000€

Entrepreneurial training

The CEO of MyShindig learned to work with Lean methodologies.

User targeting

MyShindig found its target audience and its community.

Faster time-to-market

The new method made it possible to go to market in record time.

What is MyShindig

MyShindig is a platform for one-of-a-kind gatherings called “shindigs”: non-commercial events like an evening on a rooftop, in a garage or at a friend’s pool. The platform lets organizers create events and lets people join them.

Six months of experiments just to get to know a target audience? Not only that.
After six months, Emanuele had:
  • signed agreements with 20 handpicked venues that were featured on the website;
  • collected around 800 organizer emails;
  • received roughly 100 contacts through the chatbot;
  • started about 6 partnerships with organizers in Milan;
  • organized 4 MyShindig-branded events in the Milan area;
  • collected 1000 emails from event attendees.
And the time-to-market?
The first experiment went live within three weeks, with 50 hours of work across UX, design and development. The other experiments followed the same approach.

What was wrong with the old platform

Emanuele had spent two years working full-time on his project, MyShindig, first through SpeedMIUp, the Milan accelerator backed by Bocconi, and then through Florence’s own Nana Bianca.
When the platform landed in our hands, it had a number of critical issues.

Our platform had serious IT infrastructure and data security problems. Many sections of the site didn’t work and the user experience was terrible, so lots of users dropped off and we couldn’t convert.

Emanuele - CEO of MyShindig.events

A fresh start

So did Emanuele and his team waste time and money? No, that’s not what happened. They went through what every entrepreneur faces at the start, and often along the way: failure. It was refusing to give up, and embracing more demanding methodologies like Lean UX and Design Thinking, that turned Emanuele into a web entrepreneur.

New challenges

A fresh start always brings new challenges:
  • targeting the right users;
  • building a loyal community;
  • networking and branding locally;
  • creating a platform that is fast, beautiful and user-friendly.
But this time the key phrase was: let’s cut time-to-market.

Project kick-off

Emanuele fully embraced the approach and, through Lean UX and Design Thinking exercises, worked with Cantiere Creativo to produce all the material needed to clarify the target audience and the strategic direction.

From the known to the unknown

One of MyShindig’s main problems was not knowing its users; and if you don’t know your users, you don’t know which features are most worth building. You don’t even know how to build a community.
Over the first six months, Emanuele used the framework we proposed to run small market experiments with these goals:
  1. targeting users;
  2. figuring out how to build their loyalty;
  3. reducing the risks that could sink the project.
To do this, Cantiere Creativo built a series of landing pages over several phases and drove paid traffic to them. The strategy was to offer a different navigation funnel for each target audience. Visits generated leads, and leads generated insight. That’s how Emanuele learned who was genuinely interested in MyShindig, and what they were interested in.

The Cantiere Creativo team is always there for the client’s requests. Their support matters not only on the technical side but also for the project’s strategic development, through consulting, sprint planning and other working sessions.

Emanuele - CEO of MyShindig.events

From insight to platform

Development of the platform itself started in May 2019, and it went live in early July.

The difference now is that Emanuele has a network and an open line of conversation with the people he serves, and no longer builds for a distant, unknown audience

The work today

They say the real design work begins at launch, and it’s true. To this day, Emanuele has never stopped working with Cantiere Creativo day by day, proposing short-term strategies to meet users’ needs and build around them. He is fully covered on business strategy, administration, marketing, design and development. Just as he wanted from the start, Cantiere Creativo is truly his partner.
Since launch:
  1. new features have been fixed and developed based on conversations with users;
  2. Emanuele’s team has grown, with the hiring of a marketing manager and a business developer;
  3. new ad campaigns have been designed and funnels optimized;
  4. €80,000 in funding was secured from the Region.
What are the goals now?
  1. Refine the user base to build a high-value community.
  2. Design a small monetization system.
  3. Keep building around what users want.

Conclusions

Taking on a project with a Lean UX approach isn’t easy, but once Emanuele realized that it’s all about falling in love with results rather than with your own product, he started to enjoy it.
Today Emanuele doesn’t just have a platform and a community (which still has plenty of room to grow): he has absorbed a set of strategic tools and become a lean entrepreneur in every sense.
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