Konawaba, Couchsurfers! Today we’re addressing a question from the Beta Panel: Why does Couchsurfing launch new systems on the website without obvious features?

We’ve been discussing how this strategy applies to the Events system as we get close to launch. There are a few additional features that members of the Beta Panel have requested we build before launch, like calendar integration and allowing events to have multiple organizers. My response has been: “I totally agree, but we’ll wait until after launch to include it.”

As you can imagine, this can be frustrating for members who have sometimes spent years asking for specific features we have yet to build.

How We Develop Software

When we develop software at Couchsurfing, we’re creating a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, an idea popularized by Eric Ries.

The basic MVP strategy is to gather validating data that tells you what your community needs, then build a system to satisfy those needs. Once you’ve released this system you can learn from the ways people use it. By first assessing user needs, then testing whether we met those needs by releasing a minimum viable product, we’re trying to find what is called “product-market fit.” Product-market fit means that you built a system that meets your user’s needs.

During most MVP processes, the development team has to gather data by creating mock websites that measure whether there are customers that would use the product they’re building. Since Couchsurfing has been around for some time, we already have members. We’re able to watch how Couchsurfers are currently creating events across Couchsurfing, Facebook, and Eventbrite. We’re also able to talk to Couchsurfers about what they need from an Events system.

Before We Start Building Software, We Look At User Needs

Before we started building the Events system, I gathered validating data for Events in a few ways:

• I interviewed Couchsurfers who organize events like CouchCrashes and weekly meetups about how they organize and what their needs are;
• I cataloged all the features that Meetings and Activities currently offer; then
• I asked even more people what else they were missing.

Interviewing users gave me a lot of qualitative data about their frustrations with the current systems. I catalogued all the features users currently have access to in Meetings and Activities, then reached out to about 100 more active event organizers across the world to gather what they thought was missing. I also collected ideas for features they believed were necessary. After doing this, I determined what our MVP for Events should be.

Developing Events to Address Two Un-met Needs

The two most notable features event organizers wanted that we didn’t have in our existing system were creating recurring events, and mass-messaging event attendees. By including those two features into Events, I think we’ll have created a system that better serves the community needs than either Meetings or Activities.

This is where we come back to developing a Minimum Viable Product and why we launch systems without additional features. I’ve made a number of assumptions in developing the basic functionality of Events, the MVP. If I’m wrong about how Events should work at their most basic level of functionality, I want to learn that as quickly as possible. The only way to learn about how people actually use software is to let them use it.

Releasing, Learning and Improving Events

By releasing an MVP of Events and learning from it, we’ll be able to quickly determine what to fix. Getting basic functionality down first is more important than whether a system has all the features that seem obvious from the first day.

This is why we release software without every additional feature (like adding Events to your Google calendar). Events should still serve the broad needs of our members without additional features, while also giving us time to learn before building additional “nice to have” features.

I’m aware that software was released in an incomplete state at Couchsurfing in the past and perpetually remained that way. The Activities feature is a great example of this approach. Activities has very limited functionality compared to Meetings and it hasn’t been improved since.

In contrast to our current approach, Activities were not rigorously tracked in order for  the team to keep improving it. Continuing to work on a system once it’s been released is a hallmark of maintaining product-market fit once you have it.

As an organization, we know a lot more about how Couchsurfers want to use Events than any other system we’ve launched. We’ll be collecting both qualitative and quantitative feedback after we launch Events about mistakes we made while building it, as well as features people need to create successful Events. And once we have a solid system that satisfies event organizer’s needs, we’ll start adding additional features.

Privet, Couchsurfers! We’re really excited to announce the upcoming launch of our new Events system. Members of the beta panel have been working with us to test Events for almost two months now, and we can’t wait to share it with the larger community very soon.

Background

Before we started developing Events, we already had another other meetup feature on Couchsurfing: Activities. (Some members also still have access to the predecessor of Activities: Meetings.)

For each feature we rebuild on our new technology platform, we have to choose whether to simply copy it from the existing feature or make serious improvements. Activities are a simplistic feature. There are a number of basic communication and promotion tools that Activities just don’t have (mass messaging, ability to repeat, etc). So we decided to create a new, easy-to-use and powerful system to support the meetups Couchsurfers organize every day, all over the world.

Our first step was to reach out to active event creators: people who have been organizing weekly meetups and Couch Crashes for years. By the time we launch Events, we will have spoken with over 100 active members about what they want and need from an events system. Twenty-five of those individuals have been testing Events with us as members of the beta panel for almost two months.

Let’s dive in to what we came up with together!

Highlights of Events

Events can happen once or on a recurring basis. Allowing events to repeat was easily the most requested feature of the new system. We never once considered making a new Events feature that didn’t include repetition.

Members will be able to create events that recur every day for up to two weeks. This type of repetition should help members who are organizing ride shares and roadtrips, as well as the people who organize Couch Crashes.

Members will be able to create events that recur weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. The “CS Weekly” events that happen all over the world are some of the highest quality events within the community. These events are fantastic for new members to meet locals to give them references before a trip, and provide a place to meet each other.

Members can “follow” recurring events to get messages and updates from the event organizer. We wanted a way for people who create popular recurring events to get an overall list of members interested in their events, so we made recurring events follow-able. This means the event organizer can easily message everyone who’s interested in their event about a special upcoming weekly or other opportunity.

Event organizers can mass-message members going to their event. With one simple message, any event organizer will be able to get in touch with the members who have joined their event. This will simplify giving directions, phone numbers and other information. And, if the event is updated by the organizer, the changes will be automatically shared with the attendees.

Members can share events with their friends. For a public event, any member who has joined an event can share it directly with their friends on Couchsurfing.

Keeping Activities Online

We’re planning on keeping the Activities system up for some period of time, to allow everyone to move their Activities and Meetings to the new Events system. We will not be migrating Activities into Events.

Activities will be listed along with the events on Place pages but you will need to directly access the Activities URL in order to create one.

Once we’ve moved most event creation to the new system, we’ll shut down Activities and Meetings for good.

The new system will do a better job highlighting your event, since they’ll have more visual prominence and be easier to navigate and discover. Since the system is designed to help make your events more successful, please move your previously creating events onto the new system! And let us know what you think. We’re excited launch this, and continue to improve it with the help of additional Community feedback.

Thank you, Beta Panel!

Many, many thanks are owed to the thorough work of the beta panel for testing and using this system over the last two months. Without the help of Kalyan Pokala, Brian, indoneezyan_gurl, the_juanderer, Tobias Kick, Geoff Soper, JessRK, Fabian Dreher, Olivier CHARVET, Stefano P, Piotr Mikita, Darek Wedrychowski, BRAMZ, Adam Danz, Mimmo Panza, Gerrit Deterts, Marcio Cota Martins, Ilmer van Golde, GPIKKIO, Giampiero Calabrese, and Massimo Bennardo we would not be where we are today.