Before we wrote a line of code for krowd, Alex and I did something that's increasingly uncommon in B2B SaaS: we spent two months talking to customers instead of building. Fifty calls, thirty to forty-five minutes each, mostly with independent event organizers running between five and fifty events a year.

This post is a summary of what we heard. Not a rigorous analysis — the sample is self-selected and the interviews are qualitative — but a record of the patterns that showed up often enough that we built product decisions around them.

The consistent complaints

A few things came up on almost every single call, usually unprompted, usually within the first ten minutes:

  • "I know we have the data somewhere." Almost every organizer I talked to said a version of this. They had attendee data spread across three to six systems — Eventbrite, Mailchimp, Stripe, a CRM they set up in 2019, a vendor database, a shared drive — and none of it was combined. They knew the data existed. They just couldn't get to it in time to do anything with it.
  • Ticketing fees are the #1 cost complaint. Not the venue. Not the talent. Not the marketing budget. The ticketing platform. The average organizer we talked to was paying five-figure annual fees to their ticketing provider and felt like they were getting a QR generator in return. (We wrote more about that here.)
  • Sponsor renewals fall through the cracks. Multiple organizers described the same workflow: a sponsor pays for one event, goes quiet for four months, and then gets re-pitched during next year's planning cycle — by which point the relationship is cold. The common self-criticism was, "I know I should be keeping in touch, I just don't have a system for it."
  • The morning-after report is a universal pain. Every organizer produces some version of a post-event summary, usually for sponsors or a board. It takes between four hours and two days, it lives in Google Slides, and it's built by hand from three different data sources. It's the single most hated ongoing task in the job.

The surprises

Some patterns were less expected:

Organizers already do informal CRM — they just don't call it that

I went into these calls assuming we'd have to educate organizers on the value of customer relationship management. We didn't. Every organizer we talked to was already doing some form of it — tracking VIPs in a notes column, remembering which sponsors like which types of events, knowing which attendees bring their friends. It just wasn't in software. It was in their head, or in a sidebar of a Google Doc.

This reframed the product pitch. We aren't asking organizers to adopt a new discipline. We're asking them to move what they already do into a system that can scale with them.

The appetite for AI was higher than expected, but qualified

We expected skepticism about AI. What we found was the opposite — high enthusiasm, with one consistent caveat: organizers didn't want AI that did things for them. They wanted AI that told them what to do. The job of running an event has too many judgment calls and relationship elements to automate end-to-end. The pain is decision fatigue, not execution.

That insight shaped the entire intelligence layer we're building. It's not an AI agent that sends emails or closes sponsor deals. It's an AI that reads your data, surfaces a short list of next-best actions, and hands them to you in priority order every morning. You make the calls. The AI just tells you which ones are worth making.

Mobile-first is not optional

I underestimated how much of an organizer's actual work happens away from a desk. Event day is obvious — they're on the floor. But the pre-event work is almost as mobile: venue walkthroughs, vendor meetings, sponsor pitches, volunteer briefings. Multiple organizers said some variant of, "if I can't do it on my phone, it doesn't happen." We adjusted the product roadmap to make every major surface mobile-native, not just a responsive afterthought.

Nobody wants another login

Almost universally: organizers are suffering tool fatigue. Adding krowd as the seventh login in their stack isn't a win, no matter how good the product is. That reframed our integration strategy — krowd absorbs the workflows of the tools it replaces (ticketing, email, CRM) rather than sitting alongside them. The pitch is "delete five logins," not "add one more."

What we dropped from the roadmap

A few things we were planning to build didn't survive contact with customers:

  • Fancy session/agenda management. We had a set of features drafted around multi-track conferences. Almost no mid-market organizer needed them. The organizers who did need them were running corporate conferences and already paying Cvent.
  • Deep attendee networking features. A "meet other attendees" product felt like it would be a differentiator. Nobody asked for it. Organizers care about running the event, not running a social network inside it.
  • Complex permissions hierarchies out of the gate. Most organizer teams are fewer than ten people. Role-based access control matters, but the three-role (admin / staff / scanner) version is fine for v1.

What we added because of customer calls

Conversely, a few things weren't on our original list at all and ended up as v1 priorities because they came up so often:

  • Lifetime value reports by attendee. We were going to ship revenue-per-event reporting first. Customers pushed us toward LTV instead because it maps more directly to their most common decision: "which of our past attendees do I most want to re-engage for next year?"
  • Automated morning-after sponsor reports. We knew post-event reporting was a pain but hadn't appreciated how much of it was specifically sponsor-facing. Auto-generating that report is now a day-one feature.
  • Import flexibility for existing data. Every single organizer had a pile of historical data in various formats, and none of them wanted to start from scratch. CSV import with flexible column mapping moved up the priority list and we now offer free migration assistance for founding members.

What the calls confirmed

The core thesis — that there's a real CRM-shaped hole in the event organizer market — was confirmed strongly. The specific shape of that hole was narrower than we originally thought, and more insistent about certain features (sponsor pipeline, mobile check-in, automated reporting) than others. But the market is real, the pain is acute, and the tools available today aren't close.

If you're an organizer and we haven't talked yet — Alex and I are still doing these calls. Join the waitlist and drop a note in the form that says you'd be up for a 30-minute conversation. We'll reach out. The product will be better for it, and founding member status comes with 40% off for life regardless of whether we end up talking.

Building in public means more of this kind of post is coming. We'll share what we learn about pricing, about onboarding, about what breaks in the first twenty customers — as we learn it.