Eventa

The room is already full of the right people

The product hypothesis begins with a room of people connected to the same hosts but separated by table plans, family groups and incomplete information about one another.

That creates a short, event-bound interaction rather than a general-purpose dating context. The source reflects that framing through QR entry, event-scoped profiles, matching and private messaging.

Onboarding is the entire product risk

Everything depends on one number: how many guests get through onboarding during an event. If that fails, no feature downstream matters, because a matching product with four participants is not a product.

That framing rules out an enormous amount. No app store install — nobody downloads an app at a wedding. No account creation with email verification. No password. The path from a QR code on a table card to a usable profile has to be short enough to complete while standing up, holding a drink, in bad lighting.

It also made privacy a framing constraint rather than a settings screen. These are not anonymous strangers; they are the bride's cousin and the groom's colleague, and they will all see each other again. A social product for a room full of people with mutual acquaintances has to be built on the assumption that every interaction is semi-public and permanently attributable. Visibility and messaging had to be designed with that in mind from the start, not softened later.

Accessibility sits in the same category. A wedding crowd spans every age and every level of comfort with technology, in a dim room, on whatever phone they happen to own. That is not an edge case — it is the median user.

The only test that counts happens once

This product cannot be iterated the way normal software is. An event happens once, it cannot be replayed, and a failure during it is not recoverable — you do not get a second attempt at a wedding.

So validation has to happen before the event rather than during it: walking the full path on the oldest and cheapest phone available, in poor lighting, on venue wifi, with the assumption that the person holding it has never seen the product and will not read anything.

The metric that would matter is completion rate through onboarding, and it should be measured before any live-event claim is made.

Iterating on the journey, not the feature list

The source snapshot shows a deliberately short path from QR entry to an event-scoped profile, with product copy and onboarding treated as part of the same interaction.

That is evidence of implementation, not evidence that guests completed the flow, that conversations occurred or that an event produced an outcome.

Eventa was later discontinued. I published the source as a portfolio artifact rather than presenting an unavailable service as a live product.