Monday, January 23, 2012

PlanCast Failed For Not Catering To Its Power Users

Image representing Mark Hendrickson as depicte...Image via CrunchBaseMark Hendrickson, CEO, PlanCast: The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast

PlanCast is a liked service. And it is still going down. Why?

Robert Scoble's comments to the post are enlightening. Scoble is a power user. PlanCast needed to cater to his needs to take off.

PlanCast needed to engage people who create events, promote events.

PlanCast's Facebook, Twitter, EventBrite, MeetUp Integrations

Robert Scoble's Comment
Image representing Robert Scoble as depicted i...Image via CrunchBaseI'm really sad that you are killing this. Unfortunately there were several other things you did wrong:

1. You didn't have ways to share a calendar of things for my readers that's SEPARATE of those that I'm actually attending.

2. You never improved it and you didn't listen to users.

3. It wasn't integrated with Facebook events. I would hear about things on Facebook and adding them to Plancast was a real pain.

4. Whenever I heard about events almost always I would be mobile. But the mobile version of Plancast sucked.

5. Searching for things or adding them was difficult.

6. You never really got to the business model. That should have set off red flags for me. Yet no one else knew about my travels. I'm in Europe right now, which meant I spent more than $4,000 on travel and you couldn't monetize that at all? Nope. Why? Because you never made deals with AirBNB or Kayak or Hipmunk or other travel sites.

7. I couldn't create calendars for specific kinds of events. For instance, I could never create a calendar of just Barcamps around the world.
It bums me out a service I actually liked using won't be improved and, even, will disappear. So sad.

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2 comments:

Anthony Barba said...

I am really surpirse that more people/brands are not using FB events to promote to their real fans.

sperl said...

maybe something else is coming up?