Ask HN: What is wrong with my side project (RSVP service for private events)?

3 points by uallo ↗ HN
I created a side project out of a need of myself and friends. We thought that it is annoying to invite people for private events. Not all of them have Facebook, not all of them read their emails, not all of them have Whatsapp or Messenger X. So you have to use many different channels to invite everybody and it is hard to get an overview on who is coming. The service I created can be used as a centralized RSVP tool. You create an event and get a unique URL that you can send to people on every channel you like. Then the invitees can open that link and RSVP. Everybody can see all the RSVPs.

I use it regularly for recurring events with different groups of friends. And whenever I get an email/SMS/message/letter invitation with a request to RSVP, I suggest to use that service instead for next time. The service has been online for over a year and at least a couple of hundreds of people have seen it.

There hasn't been a single person to ever use it for more than creating a dummy event.

I'm wondering what's wrong with it. The goal was never to become the-next-big-thing, I never submitted it to the usual websites, I never created an ad, I never updated its Facebook page or tweeted about it. So I'm not complaining that there are hardly any visitors. I'm just not sure why the conversion rate of creating events and inviting people is 0 and I wonder what you think about it. Is it not solving a real problem? Is it unclear? Does it have a bad UX? Is it a bad execution? Does it have to be a mobile app? Chat bot? The answer of people I asked about this mostly just mentioned, they feel comfortable about the current solutions or "uhm, I don't really know".

The service is called 'invike' https://www.invike.com/ You can find a dummy event at https://www.invike.com/ryWlyZCgG

PS: If you want to use it, feel free. As I use it regularly myself, it will stay online.

3 comments

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At least for me and my circle of friends and family, enough people have Facebook that we use Facebook for our event invites. Out of all my family and friends I have one Uncle that doesn't use Facebook and he wouldn't use another service either.
OK, thanks for the reply. I guess, if I would want to push invike more, I would have to find a niche for it.
Nothing is wrong with it - it scratched your itch, but not necessarily anybody else's. I used to use a similar service about a decade ago...and then everyone got onto Facebook, and started using the events there.