Dineout launched an events marketplace in the middle of the pandemic…
There is always a light at the end of a tunnel.
For the chosen few who worked on building a greenfield events marketplace, as a new line of product-led business in Dineout, events became that proverbial light at the end of the long and dark covid tunnel towards which all of us persevered every waking hour of our existence for weeks and months on end.
Finally on the 9th of November, 2021 we launched our events marketplace in 18 out of the 20 cities we are present in.
Dineout has been catering to only diners for a while now. These very users are also amongst the ones who frequently step out of their homes for entertainment and adventure. The discovery of this synergy encouraged us to explore avenues to expand our offerings so that we can be in the consideration set of our users more often.
An events marketplace was the first of such product-led new line of businesses to tap into an expanded TAM that managed to secure leadership sign-off.
Why build an events marketplace?
The rationale for building an events marketplace was many, the most important ones being -
- Events is a profitable business where for every Rs X of GMV, businesses can earn a commission of 0.14X.
- For every Rs X burnt, around 20X GMV can be earned. In essence, it’s a net positive business.
- Our extremely successful MVP of December 2020 — comprising of only a dedicated listing page for Christmas and New Year events — in terms of tickets sold and GMV generated.
- Acquisition of SteppinOut, our long-time event organising partner as a sister brand of Dineout.
How to build it out?
Once committed to the merits of building out an events marketplace within the Dineout eco-system, we got involved in the ideation, market research, user interviews and feedbacks, user stories, design, development, GTM and post-launch iterations of the events marketplace.
Ideation:
In this phase, we conducted detailed in-depth user studies and research of events platforms both national and international. Our focus was on:
- understanding the table-stakes in the events market
- the key features being offered by our competitors.
We carried out feature level functionalities and benefits comparisons being offered by the key players. This gave us a fair idea of the overall market capabilities, and what we were getting into.
Armed with this knowledge we then reached out to event-goers to understand their perception of these platforms and their behaviours around events discovery, selection and purchase.
In these user-research studies, our focus was on understanding how people discover events to go to, how they browse for an event on these platforms, and finally what influences their decision to purchase an event from one particular platform over the next one.
User personas and user stories:
Once we got familiar with events and event marketplaces, we set about defining the user personas we want to build our event platform for.
We identified four of them viz -
For each of these user personas, then basis our research, understanding and feedback we drafted detailed user stories to cover every aspect of their requirements
PRD, high-fidelity designs and prototype
Once we had our detailed and extensive set of user stories for each of the target personas and the basic mocks of the user flow for the events platform, we set about drafting the detailed PRD to cover each feature, functionality and user flows.
On the basis of these our product designer then got the high-fidelity designs created for a dedicated events home page, listing pages, event detail pages and the events selection, purchase, and post-purchase flows.
These designs then served as the basis for our first Marvel prototype and then we went back to our users, this time to understand their behaviour and ease of usability of our proposed events marketplace. We gleaned many useful insights basis which we made certain modifications to our designs and user flows to take care of the inconsistencies.
Tech grooming and development
Once we were satisfied with our designs and finalised the user flows and set of P0 priorities basis their impact vs efforts required to develop them, we groomed them with our Tech team and then got busy in building, QCing and shipping the priority features in two weeks long sprints.
Our target was to launch an MVP comprising of a dedicated events home page that would support both horizontal and vertical scrolling of events across different genre-based sections. This home page would be accessible from our Dineout home page via a dedicated events section, a bottom nav CTA and a dedicated banner. Each genre-based section will have an associated listing page with quick filters to further ease the discovery and selection of events.
The event listing cards on the events home page or listing pages can be clicked to access the event detail page for checking out all the relevant details about the event. If interested, the user can then go ahead and select the required tickets and buy the same. Once successfully purchased, the user can then go and enjoy the event on the appointed date and time.
GTM and supply
While the platform was getting built, we started on the marketing strategies and supply assimilation. A multi-faceted campaign was planned centred around social media, influencers, email and push notifications to our users to promote our new events marketplace. At the same time, the on-ground sales team was mobilised to acquire events from our restaurant partners and event organisers.
Finally, due to the collective contributions of the tech, design, QA, marketing, sales and content teams, we could go live with the event marketplace. It was a staggered launch, that started with the key metro cities, and once the platform stabilised we made it live across 18 cities.
A/B experiments and the road ahead
As targeted we went live at the beginning of November to test and stabilise the platform before the peak event season starting from December onwards. Once live we analysed the various user flows and key performance metrics on Google analytics and accordingly made the required changes to increase the conversions and decrease the drop-offs. We also started the development of those features and functionalities which couldn’t be picked as a part of the MVP.
As we speak our team is hard at work trying to build the enhancements in the platform to ensure our users have the best of experience while browsing, selecting and purchasing an event ticket. So in case you still haven’t checked it out, do give it a spin and let us know in the comments if we could help you buy the tickets to the event you wanted to attend.
