Yesterday, on 1 Feb 2022, we have opened the ticket sales for the European Cloud Summit 2022, and for that we have used run.events – our own event management and ticketing platform – which went live on the very same day. Obviously, it was a big day both for our event team, and especially for our dev team.
Therefore, I would like to share the story of run.events with you here.
An average event organizer uses six different (disconnected!) tools for organization of only one event (this number can grow), in addition to using hundreds of Excel spreadsheets. Even this sentence alone is enough to make the brain go spinning. I know this very well from organizing CollabSummit and CloudSummit. There are various event management platforms available on the market, we have used some of them, we have tried some of them, and we have got sales pitches and demos for the most of them. And all of them suffer from the same disease: they cover some aspects of the event organization (some better, some worse), and none of them is actually capable of helping us to manage our event business as a whole.
On top of that, all of the platforms that we have seen require high upfront payments, installation and configuration costs, and often even require external consultants (!) in order to ramp up a functioning system or even to be present (!!!) at the event.
Hello, run.events!
Sometimes during the pandemic summer of 2021, after we realized that we cannot buy software which we need, the developer in me came up a crazy idea, which was effectively the only viable alternative left: we will make it ourselves. Isn’t it always crazy moments like that, which get great stories started?
Yesterday, after almost 200 000 lines of manually written code, run.events went live. “Dogfood” live, that is. We will be organizing CloudSummit 2022 on it, and we have already successfully sold our first tickets.
We have built run.events in the cloud. In Azure, to be more specific. It is built entirely as a SaaS platform: organizers, attendees, speakers, sponsors can visit the site, create an account, and start whatever they intend to do – organize an event, buy tickets, submit sessions. It will be instantly ready-to-use, without the need to reach out to our sales team for customized price offer, or software demo. We will not be haunting people with the dreadful sales calls. Create an account and try it. If you like it, use it. Event organizers will be able to start creating their event, or simply to test features by creating a free test event. A well-designed, user-friendly and clearly structured user interface (enriched by short explanatory videos) will guide them through all the features and help them to make the best possible use the platform.
For private events (your beloved one’s birthday party, family events, etc), run.events will forever be free to use. Actually, as long as people don’t earn money on their events, run.events will be free, including all of the the features. Furthermore, we will also make run.events free for charities, NGOs and community projects (they will have to reach to us for that). Commercial event organizers will be charged according to a pricing model which is based on ticket sales commission, with no upfront costs, similar to what well known ticketing tools do. There will be one crucial difference, though: we will be offering a fully integrated enterprise system, not just ticket sales. That pricing model will enable event organizers to avoid upfront costs and financial risks, and to pay for the software according to their financial success.
re:virtual – run.events goes metaverse. For us, it is not just a buzzword.
Back in October 2020, we have organized the “Networking Day”, the first event in our industry which has been organized completely in VR. Again, we have used yet another (disconnected) technology which didn’t really work well for many reasons. Many events have been doing similar things after us, and they all suffered from the very issues we did.
However, it is the fact that event organizers’ problems have been further amplified by the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has overnight shifted most of the events towards digital format. As offered today, “standard” digital events focus on video streaming, and neglect all other aspects of events, such as business networking, meetings and casual conversations. That is reducing digital events merely to learning platforms (making them compete with YouTube channels!) and completely neglecting networking and trade show elements, mostly reducing sponsors’ digital presence to a web site with chat functionality.
So, if the most popular VR tool wasn’t really working for us (or for anyone else, really), and if standard digital events cannot provide the experience which would be satisfying for sponsors and attendees alike, what was the alternative?
I think you can guess the answer. 😊
With our own re:virtual platform, run.events will offer a vision of future, and technological means for achieving that vision: exhibition halls, expo booths, and theaters in VR will be “one click away”, available and affordable for everyone, making events in metaverse and hybrid events a viable way to expand the customer base and to be prepared for the future of the events industry. There is a promise I need to make here: re:virtual avatars will always have both arms and legs, there will be no compromises on body parts. We actually made them look beautifully human.
From Q3/2022, re:virtual will be available to all event organizers who will be using run.events. In the future, we will look into offering it to all event organizers, regardless if they are using run.events or not.
It is important to state that re:virtual is a complementary platform, fully integrated with run.events, but it does not have to be used for in-person-only events. However, it is our answer to problems with current digital and hybrid events, and our best bet for the future of travel-heavy event industry.
Hugs and credits
This all was only possible with the ninja-team spread between Bingen (Germany), Sarajevo (Bosnia), Nice (France) and Edinburgh (UK), and aided by the best possible partner that we could ever imagine: development house MAUS from Sarajevo, founded and managed by a brilliant young man whom I was privileged to employ to his first job 16 years ago, and with whom I am privileged to work again today – thanks for everything Davor Zlotrg, you have created a brilliant team. Afan Olovčić has, together with me, worked on the re:virtual project, and he is the creative brain behind re:virtual and all our metaverse efforts. Elena, Spence, Margit and I spent countless hours on scoping it all, Emir happily took the role of database guru, and Amna is the silent power behind documenting everything and managing Azure DevOps. Huge tip of the hat to the Microsoft Founders Hub for accompanying and supporting us along the way – for those who didn’t realize it, Microsoft is very much involved in supporting start-up scene nowadays.
You see, we have passionately created run.events to support us, and all the other professional event organizers out there, in our entire business: year on year, event after event. You are welcome to already create run.events accounts – you will anyways need them to register for the European Cloud Summit (see you in Mainz!). In April, we will start a private beta programme for event organizers, starting with a few selected events (you can apply for it at https://run.events).
And sometimes in Q3/2022, we will go live for everyone – organizers, speakers, sponsors – with only one mission: to be the only tool which event organizers will ever need to manage their event organization business.
