Choosefest

What was ChooseFest?

ChooseFest was a consumer web app designed to match you to a festival based on you and your friends favourite music artists. It used your social media accounts to tally up which festival had the most coverage of your favourite artists, and assisted in ticket purchase and other festival arrangements.

I designed ChooseFest to be a kind of ‘internet database’ of festivals, allowing users to jump between artists and festivals and see a history of gigs etc.

What did I learn?

As a first solo consumer app project, I learned a lot about the differences between selling B2B and to consumers. I found aspects of the festival ecosystem technologically lacking, and hit challenges with finance planning. Ultimately, ChooseFest didn’t reach the scale I wanted it to, nor product market fit, but I did upskill through the project:

• I ventured into equity based funding and learned to pitch
• I furthered my SEO skills and developed my approach to ‘microsites’
• I refined my programatic SEO, data scraping and processing skills
• I managed a little viral success
• I learned how to deal with contractors on hire

Microsites

One key takeaway from the Choosefest project was that small sites which are solely there to give information or entertainment are much more likely to be shared and therefor linked to. I made several for this project and many since, they’re a great way to boost SEO and add value for your users.

This is a screenshot of Festival Map – a one page app where users could zoom around the world looking at the festivals by location.