We started Digital Lodestone Group to solve a true market need: People couldn’t find local events. Not good ones and often not event bad ones. Local events were coming and going and consumers were terribly unaware.

Why? Well basically you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s tough to find out about events you know nothing about because you can’t go to a search engine. What good is Google when you don’t have any words to type in that little box? What was missing was a place where consumers could discover events. A website that would take their preferences and interests into account and deliver event recommendations to them.

Enter Digital Lodestone. Breaking convention we set out to build the next great web application - an event discovery engine.

Funny thing happened on the way to the forum however. Consumers want to discover local events, but they sure don’t want to pay for this service. No surprise there, which means someone else is going to have to foot the bill. And beyond that, we needed relevant local events to provide consumers. Now we were in a bit of a spot - we needed local events to make our web application powerful and needed advertising to foot the bills. Collecting local data is hard and selling advertising takes expertise (aka not things we wanted to do).

What do you do when you realize your master plan needs a customer that you didn’t count on? You find one obviously - and preferably one that is good at selling advertising and has ties to local data. If you’re lucky, really really lucky, they’ll be trying to grow their online revenue as well. And if you did something nice for someone in a past life, they’ll be trying to grow online because their offline business is failing.

Hello newspapers, tv stations, and radio stations! Hello Event Seek!

Funny thing happened on the way to the forum however. Suddenly we’re selling this great idea to media providers. And they understand the recommendation bit and why it is important, but are constantly asking “How does it affect my bottom line?” It’s a good question and one we needed to understand. Recommendations keep people coming back, they keep people on the website and they entice users to invite their friends. Recommendations create a “sticky” application.

“How does it affect my bottom line?” There it is again, those silly customers asking questions. When I was just trying to sell to anyone using the web (consumers) it’s easy to explain the benefit of recommendation - you find better events. Now that I was selling to media providers there was a whole other layer of the onion to peel back.

This constant questioning allowed us to discover just what we can do for our customers however. Event recommendation is nothing more than understanding the consumer. It’s applying logic to the preference and interest matrix you build for each customer to pick out events from the database. Apply those same statements to advertising and you’re talking about targeting advertising. And doing it with meaningful data about user actions that no one has used before. You’re event history and preferences teach me about what you like and enable me to make sure the advertisements you see don’t suck.

Now we’re starting to deliver some real value for our customers. Suddenly our event calendar is a tool that enables our customers to learn about their consumers, study them, and monetize their actions. Consumers find local events, organizers can get to the most interested consumers, advertisers can reach consumers who are likely to buy, and media providers laugh all the way to the bank!

One small problem however. Everyone has the next great web idea, and anyone with half a brain wants to sell it to media providers (what with their attempts to use the internet to grow revenue). Suddenly we’re buried in a pile of “great ideas to improve the website.”

Funny thing happened…all of these “great ideas” are add-on solutions. They offer media providers a new section of the website, a new place to sell advertising, or a new revenue stream to attack. All of this gives media providers a way to add new revenue to their online property.

Event Seek is different. Our ability to target advertising is website-wide. That means we can help our customers increase their online revenue on the events section of the website, and everywhere else as well. Don’t just bolt-on new solutions - extract value from the property you already own with Event Seek. It’s easy to jump to the top of the pile when you start talking about driving value on 100% of the website, not just 10%.

Consumers are great - they make the whole thing possible and without them we wouldn’t be able to do any of this, but they sure don’t pay the bills. We have one customer - media providers - and we have a service that can do amazing things for them in their time of need. Time to start telling the world about it!

One Response to ““Connor, stop talking about the consumer!””

1. Craig on August 28th, 2008 6:16 pm

   Nice sequential analysis. Sounds like you are narrowing the focus on the target. Being able to be flexible and challenge your original thoughts is a good thing. Nice going.

Leave a Reply