2015–16
The idea was born
Event organizers were using spreadsheets to track nearly every operational detail. I spent evenings and weekends exploring ways to turn that fragmented process into one product.
Planesty · The founder’s timeline
Four years to launch. Two days to change everything.
A problem in the events industry became a product, outside capital, a team, and a real B2B SaaS company — launched in March 2020, just as in-person events stopped.
- Role
- Co-founder · Head of Product
- Company
- EventWaves → Planesty
- Team
- I led 6 engineers
- Conversations
- Hundreds of industry chats
- Beta
- 100+ companies
- Launch
- 300+ users
01 · The company
Built one decision at a time.
2017
Capital and a team
I raised early capital, hired three engineers, and welcomed Mike Fuller as co-founder. Hundreds of conversations with event organizers, venues, and suppliers gave us a clear problem to pursue.
2018–19
Beta and growth
We raised more seed capital, expanded engineering, invested in trade shows and partnerships, and onboarded more than 100 companies. Frequent focus groups made the product better in public, not in isolation.
MAR 2020
Official launch
After four years, we launched at a major Denver trade show with 300+ users, a ten-person team, and agreements with two global event partners. The energy was through the roof.
2020–21
The market disappeared
At that same launch, we heard the country would likely shut down. Two days later it did. Our product served in-person events, and that industry disappeared overnight. We kept building and supporting clients, but the pause lasted too long for the company to continue.
02 · The product underneath
Research made it real.
Event pre-planning and onsite execution wasted enormous amounts of time, resources, and money. The prevailing process was manual, static, difficult to share, and impossible to scale cleanly.
Smarter software could save organizations money while creating a collaborative environment for organizers, venues, and suppliers — one shared source of truth instead of a trail of files.
Listen closely without outsourcing the roadmap. Customer evidence and product judgment have to work together.
01
Qualitative first
Deep industry relationships gave us unusually direct access to people doing the work. Focus groups and trade-show conversations became our richest source of truth.
02
Quantitative support
Surveys helped identify common patterns and gave us confidence about which of the many possible directions deserved attention.
03
An audience before launch
Research participants became a natural community for beta testing, feedback, and eventual adoption.
04
Product
We shipped collaboration features, document workflows, online signatures for operations documents, and sharing tools for outside collaborators.
05
Marketing
Two growth teammates built partnerships and campaigns, but we deliberately prioritized customer success before chasing volume.
06
The balance
We learned to listen closely without outsourcing the roadmap — combining customer evidence with our own product judgment.
03 · Perspective
The company stopped. The learning compounded.
I founded the company, raised capital, led product design and research, managed the engineering team, helped build partnerships and marketing, formed a board, and learned every part of running a business while continuing to be its sole product designer for much of the journey.
- 01
Obsess over the problem
Understand people deeply. Better product decisions follow when the problem, not a favorite solution, stays at the center.
- 02
A vision is a product too
Raising money is a design problem: investors are not buying today's interface; they are buying a credible picture of what could exist.
- 03
Get comfortable being uncomfortable
Stress, ambiguity, legal work, sales, leadership, and failure all became part of the job — and expanded what I knew I could handle.
- 04
Teams need shared ownership
Leading engineers and business partners across countries taught me to translate intent, invite expertise, and make decisions visible.
- 05
Failure can compound into value
The ending was not what we chose. The judgment, craft, empathy, and resilience it built have shaped every product and team since.
- 06
My through-line became clear
Across every hat I wore, product design and healthy team culture remained the work I wanted to keep doing.