For the last year, I've had to do a bunch of event logistics for work, and... I really did not enjoy doing this work. It's not a huge deal or anything (I wasn't exactly working in a bauxite mine), and it really was the most useful thing I could have been doing in my function, so I did it. That's startup land. But the work is a combination of uninteresting, repetitive, bespoke, and relatively easy to screw up in impactful ways that make it not really great for anyone, but especially challenging for me.
As I worked on this stuff, the most frustrating thing was that I didn't really seem to be getting that much better or more efficient at it, mostly because it's just not that kind of work. Unlike production processes where there are creative and technical workflows that can be improved and a level of quality you can aim to surpass with each project (even if you don't have to), event logistics are often about just not forgetting some stupid little thing you have to do, or making some small resource allocation decision that no one probably cares about but maybe someone really cares about.
To make this even worse, one thing about me that I usually keep close to the vest at work is that I absolutely loathe letting people down. It's a huge source of stress for me, particularly when I find the work I'm doing itself to be uninteresting, and the main thing driving me forward is just the intrinsic need to be a good teammate and keep other people from getting blocked. And when it comes to third-party event attendance or exhibiting, the pain you -- or your colleague who's sitting in some convention center in the middle of nowhere -- feel when things don't go right is a lot greater than the joy you feel when things go okay.
Despite all of this, events were not going away, because in the space we were in events are how you talk to buyers. It's just that simple. While the direct, dollar-in/dollar-out justification of any given event remains incredibly hard to track (as with anything that isn't PPC, it seems), the long arc of lead-generation, deal-closing, and account renewing really did seem to validate the effort and cost of going to a lot of these events. So I decided to, in my spare time, start thinking about what (if anything) would make this work easier, since no one was coming to take it off my plate anytime soon.
The Problems
System of Record
As with a lot of information entry and retrieval jobs, one of the obvious sources of stress I had was no single, central workspace to wrap my arms around. I had a huge email inbox full of mostly junk, but also a bunch of really important stuff, a couple clumsy Google sheets of dubious reliability, and the information discovery nightmare known as Slack. We weren't doing tons of tons of events -- a busy month maybe had two, and whole months would go by where we didn't have any -- but many of them would have anywhere from five to twenty individual tasks with their own deadlines that had to get done over the course of several weeks or maybe months. So there were these sort of streams of activity that went on for months with long stretches of inactivity for any given event, but really no break from always needing to have a firm grip on what was going on with events in general. Tasks tended to sit around, too, because they often required some vendor to respond to a question or blocker, or an internal (non-me) person to make a decision or commitment that they'd refuse to make a decision on for weeks or longer. Normal stuff, but when you add it up it's just incredibly easy to lose track of some dumb thing and end up paying a late fee for renting a power strip or whatever.
Now, where I've been doing this work, we have basically no central project management of any sort besides people's random spreadsheets, which didn't help matters. I ended up building out my own system using Airtable, which definitely helped, but Airtable had a lot of extra cruft and didn't let me do exactly what I wanted to. It was really hard to make certain bits of information stand out, or feel like I was showing things in the context I wanted to. It felt like I was putting in enough work to design the custom front-end of an application without the actual benefits of having a custom application. I'm a little bit of a nut about this stuff, but then again that's the only reason I was willing to put in the effort to build something with Airtable, so if it's not working for me I'm not sure it's really working for anyone.
Extraction
My Airtable task list held up okay when things came to me in the form of URLs, usually from coworkers in Slack. It wasn't great, but at least it gave me an anchor to put in my task list ("see if we want to go to _____") so I didn't forget about it.
Unfortunately, most things came via emails that contained more than one thing to do, more than one URL, or maybe no sufficiently comprehensive URL at all. In other words, I basically need the email, or I need to transfer a bunch of information from the email into a bunch of different fields in my system of record. This is... well, it's really boring work for starters, and it's also easy to forget to do, or to screw up. This is especially true as stuff changes, and suddenly I'm rooting around for an email from a month ago that I think I got but can't seem to find.
Basically, I want the process of extracting useful information from emails and putting that information in a permanently relevant, highly structured place to be as effortless as possible.
Event-Adjacent Information
Customizing the crap out of an Airtable instance gives you ability to literally map almost any kind of relationship -- this is why I like Airtable -- but I had to admit that it all felt a little cold and removed from my actual, real world of work. With events, I basically have to keep track of three types things:
- the event itself (sponsorship, registration, rules, submissions, scheduling)
- any people involved (their availability, their status, anything they need to do)
- any of our related physical assets (signage, laptops, booth material, collateral, swag)
Then, of course, I have to keep track of the money attached to any of those things. And this is all just to know what we're putting into this!
I haven't even started talking about measuring or assessing outcomes, which is a whole different conversation between you, me, and your CRM. But even then, I'm going to need to get back to this information. So the point is that we're talking about a lot of funny little categories of things that have really specific relationships to the events. There are a bunch of dedicated micro-workflows and views I want of this stuff so I can decide what our options for a 10x10 booth are, or whether it makes sense to ship a bunch of stuff to Florida.
Is this actually a technology problem? And if so, does anyone want to solve it?
This is a question I ask myself all the time, mostly because I already did the "I have this problem, and I built something to solve it" thing with Resolution, only to find out that what I had done was (a) solve my problem, and (b) make something that would solve a problem I have with other people if they used my product, which they probably won't.
As I did this work from 9 to 5 every day over the weeks and months, it didn't get any more interesting, but I started to have more and more conviction in what the fundamental jobs-to-be-done were, or more accurately, the job-to-be-done. Bluntly, that job is automated, comprehensive data extraction, assuming extraction includes both pulling data out and sticking it somewhere permanently actionable (my definition does include both of these, but I'm not a computer scientist so apologies to any of them reading this if I stepped on a reserved word there). That's it. And since I was extracting natural language, and we have all these fancy, highly-subsidized large language models out there, I figured I'd give it a try.
The other thing I learned from Resolution is that while this breaks my heart, it's just really hard to go to market with a general purpose business product. It's not impossible, but I'm not very good at it and I don't really want to spend any money on this, so if this is going to do any good for anyone else, the best thing I could do was focus on a niche. In this case, I'm okay with that because I actually believe that while a VC-targeted macro-solution ("automatic extraction and data structuring FOR ANYTHING") sounds sexy, like most things the utility here is heavily dependent on nailing the last mile, which is turning your structured data into really useful, workflow-specific interfaces for people to actually click on. So while I'm not really an events guy by choice, I decided to keep the focus there instead of trying to generalize the problem into something I had to explain.
How Uneventful Works
- Uneventful is a basic, browser-based CRUD application I built with Bubble. You can do a bunch of normal things in there, like add/create/edit your upcoming events, add deadlines and expenses to any event, manage sponsorship options, or assign people to go. This is the system of record part. There is nothing particularly special about it other than that it's built specifically to stay on top of managing a bunch of third party events for your organization.
- In the background, Uneventful is connected to an email inbox. If you send it an email, Uneventful will use an LLM (and a bunch of custom code, more on this in a second) to pull out any events or event related deadlines, structure them, and add them to your account.
Basically, you can shovel all your annoying transactional emails to Uneventful, and you'll end up with a list of places you need to be and things you need to do, organized by when they have to be done. The system also grabs things like associated URLs and basic descriptions so it's a little easier to do whatever you need to do, and even grabs a copy of the email that you can reference to double check any deadline or event in your list. I basically copied this idea from Rippling, except they do it with expenses, and it was an absolute life-saver for me.
For now, that's it. As Uneventful stands right this second, it's already a big improvement for me, but there are a number of useful things I'd like to expand on that aren't outside the realm of technical possibility, even for our crack team of "one burned out product marketing guy" and "a retired electrical engineer". These include:
- a web scraper where you throw a URL at it, and Uneventful grabs the event and a bunch of related information about the event.
- event discovery based on what you do and what events have worked for you
- "reporting" (eww, lame), but actually good -- this is an example of where this is pointless if you just do standard stuff but could be awesome if you really get biz-dev events
- some way to manage contacts and interactions at a given event; maybe it's just raw numbers because I don't foresee this little guy becoming a CRM, but you never know.
- related but different -- some sense of goals and goal management. Since numbers weren't always a good indicator of value, we'd often try to set up specific goals for an event ("talk to the assistant secretary of ____") because it was actually easier to quantify revenue impact that way.
"DOES IT AI?" (sigh)
Uneventful does use an LLM in the form of the Google Gemini API. When I first started trying to do this as simply as possible, I rigged Airtable's new-ish "AI features" to go and grab me descriptions from events I gave it, and it sort of worked. But that was just spitting out a text description for a human to read -- it couldn't really "break" or "fail".
Uneventful is much more ambitious, and our original plan was to use Gemini to both (a) extract relevant objects from an email, and (b) determine whether those objects were new, existing, or existing and sufficiently different to be updated. As it turns out, Gemini is pretty damn good at the first thing, and maddeningly inconsistent but generally pretty bad at the second thing, even in really simple scenarios where we were using structured schema output from our extraction sequence, and then basically asking Gemini to simply compare two (very, very simple) JSON files. Maybe we're stupid, but despite trying this over and over again, tweaking prompts, and doing as much debugging as a black box LLM will let you do ("please explain your justification for each conclusion you make and put it in this field"), we just couldn't get this to work consistently. My Dad -- my go to technical resource for all my random projects -- is both less cynical about AI than I am (mostly because he's 75 and doesn't give a shit about the tech industry one way or the other) and much more comfortable than I am gritting his teeth and solving problems with brute force Python. He went from being pretty enamored with Gemini to borderline disgusted by this failing as it became apparent that we just couldn't rely on it to perform comparisons. However, it works really nicely for extraction and now that we've built out our own comparison logic everything is cheaper and more efficient, so it's probably for the best.
The front-end of this is all Bubble, which I really think more people should play with. As discussed ad-nauseam here, I am both very much not a real developer AND someone who has taken some computer science classes and written a decent amount of terrible code across BASIC, Pascal, Java, Python, and weird stuff like ActionScript. I can look over my Dad's shoulder and help him figure out what a loop is doing, but I'll be damned if I can actually make what I want with code. It's just too hard for me. If you're stubborn enough to code and build out data structures, but suffer from the same sort of code-blindness that I do, Bubble is weirdly perfect. You get to wire things up, define objects, build logic and workflows, and even make API calls, but it's all through configuration panels and settings. There's a real learning curve, to be certain -- this is my second major Bubble effort and I did a bunch of small, broken experiments before I got to those -- but I really think it's worth it. You can make cool stuff, and do many of the fun internet web/app things everyone is talking about. I could never build something like Resolution with Bubble, as it's impossible to make truly unique, custom UI objects with this approach, but most applications aren't like that and you get a surprising amount of flexibility.
Want to try it?
Now that it works, I'm interested in getting other people responsible for this sort of work to try it out in a controlled environment (i.e., no more than like, ten of you, and all people comfortable enough to let me fix things, rescue lost data, etc.) to see if this is really useful, or even if it's close enough to being really useful that I should put more time into it. If that describes you, let me know at hello@resolution.biz and I'll get you set up!