Hi, I’m Maria, founder & CEO of eventriX
Here’s the brief story about why we started to build eventriX.
Years ago I founded Agile Works, an open community for people passionate about producing better software & producing software better.
Besides speaking at various local and international events, back in 2009, I’ve organized the first edition (from a series of 10 editions) of Open Agile, a non-profit community conference.
Given my little knowledge on the subject, combined with my desire to give back to the community as much as I could, I did the entire organization on my own.
Organizing a conference might be brutal. At the time I knew very little about the difficulties of putting together the puzzle formed by:
- speakers (with attractive topics)
- suppliers (for a non-eventful conference)
- participants (with their own expectations for the day)
Hundreds of e-mails to speakers, hundreds of e-mails to leads and participants, let alone the sponsors (if you are in luck) and entire logistics (venue, lunch, breaks, materials, etc.).
The unexpected can appear at every corner: speakers arriving later than scheduled, last minute cancellation from participants or speakers, mistakes from suppliers with little time left to correct them, to name just a few.
Many lessons were learned the hard way. One lesson that stuck with me is that e-mail is great for many types of communication but not great for organizing conferences.
Organizing events as a team adds complexity too. After building a team that professionally organizes events (including commercial events as conferences, training, and workshops), we had to tackle a new level of complexity.
Many questions can keep organizers awake at night:
- How do we keep an eye on everything, at any moment?
- How do we stay in sync?
- How do we keep speakers in the loop( with the organization, logistics, etc? among many other questions, we asked ourselves to stay organized and efficient.
So we’ve looked for ONE tool to solve the issues, but there were either complicated, hard to use or too simple, needing additional tools to organize the event.
In time we’ve built an internal framework to make our life easier. But it was still not feeling right. We noticed waste in the process and thought we can do better.
Last year we decided to build our own tool for program creation: invite speakers, and manage call for papers/speakers.
We’ve got good feedback from the speakers. Some wanted to use it in relation with other speaking engagements. Some are also event organizers and asked us to manage their event in there too.
So, we’ve polished the internal tool to become the eventriX platform, by integrating the received feedback.
Today we are unveiling eventriX: a platform that helps speakers and organizers to work better together, to make a valuable program for their audience. They can easily collaborate with reviewers too.
We won’t stop here.
Our goal is to make your working life easier & happier either when organizing an event (conference, training, workshop) or when involved in one (as speaker, trainer, attendee).
Together, we can shape the future for the better. Education, in any form, has our attention. We welcome everyone engaging in shaping the future, through sharing, learning or facilitation.
Being a customer centric team, we’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions. Check out eventriX and find us on Twitter at @eventrixco.
Thank you for your involvement!
Maria Diaconu, Founder & CEO, eventriX (a MozaicLabs product)
Also published on Medium.