Spiny Events was not born in a hackathon or over a cup of coffee. It was born out of frustration, experience, and a desire to solve real world problems that conferences and events face.
We come from both web development and event management backgrounds. We’ve organized multiple conferences, and we have experienced the pain firsthand.
Back in 2015, we used to organize conferences without having a website. We would print out schedules and hand them to attendees. But as our events grew, things got difficult. Last-minute speaker changes, session time adjustments, room changes – these things happen at every conference.
As, we come from a website development background, we move from printed schedule to a website solution. So we tried using tools like WordPress, Webflow, Wix and even mobile apps. They worked to an extent. But every time we had a new conference, we had to go through the same cycle: install themes, configure plugins, custom-build schedules, and custom coding where needed. it just took too much time and effort than was really needed.
The problem with these website builders is that they try to do everything. That’s fine for many other websites, but for events? It’s a completely different architecture. Events need the simple control Management system that have section to add speakers, sessions, sponsors, schedules – not post type or products or custom fields. With these generic website builders, we had to hack our way around with plugins and custom code just to get basic features that is needed for event website.
There are some other event-specific solutions, but most of them just give you embeddable widgets or a script to install on your website. Which means, we still need to build a website elsewhere and then embed their schedule or speaker list into the website. And as an event organizer, it does not make sense to deal with tech setups when we are already busy juggling 100 other things related to the event.
But it wasn’t just about us as organizers. As conference attendees, we faced problems too. A few years back, I attended a conference in Singapore and Bangkok; last year, I attended several conferences in San Francisco and Portland. These were pretty big, well-funded events, but their website experiences were terrible. The conference I attended in Singapore had five parallel tracks. Their schedule looks like a large calendar with the entire session list spread across. Which looks great on a desktop, but viewing on a phone was a Total nightmare. We had to do both horizontal and vertical scrolling to find what was going on.
Even at the other conferences in San Francisco and Portland, it was the same story. Beautiful sites on desktop, but not optimized for mobile. No live indicators showing which session was happening right now, or how much time was left until the next one.
These might sound like small details, but that matters a lot in real-time during an event.
While we were organizing conferences, another frustration we had was the technical dependency. Every time our team needed to update speaker information or change session details, they had to come to me because I was the only one who understood the technical side. So, we wanted to build something where anyone on the team – even someone with basic computer skills – could make updates without needing technical knowledge.
That’s why we build Spiny Events, to address the pain point of both organizers and attendees.