8. If I Were You: The Next 90 Days
The single most important thing
Get 5 venues paying at least $49 a month for a hands-on "we collect and check your vendors' certificates" service by day 45, before writing product code. (3 venues at ~15 hrs/week.)
- Buyer: US venues that allow outside vendors (barns, estates, wineries, halls, historic houses), 50–300 events a year, in 2 states.
- Job: "Every vendor's insurance is sorted before the event, without me chasing."
- How: a concierge service from a shared inbox, a spreadsheet of events and vendors, and a requirement-letter template. You send the requests, read the certificates, chase on the event clock and send the coordinator a ready/missing list. Automate only what you've done by hand at least 20 times.
Why this order: the venue buyer is unverified (10). The as-described wedge is already ruled out. The cheapest way to find out is to sell the outcome by hand.
Week by week
| Weeks | Full-time | ~15 hrs/week | Exit criteria |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Discovery. List 100 venues from their own websites (look for a published vendor policy). Call 25 coordinators or owners. | List 60 venues. Call 15. | You can write the top 3 pains in coordinators' own words, with vendor counts per event and one real story of a missing certificate. |
| 3–4 | Concierge offer. Offer the hands-on service for their next 10 events at $49/month (founding price, locked 12 months). Buy E&O cover and have terms drafted. | Same offer to 10 venues. Terms from a template, reviewed by a lawyer. | First paying venues. |
| 5–6 | Run it by hand. Collect, read, chase and report for every event. Log every step and every minute. | Same, for fewer venues. | Day 45 kill test: 5 paying venues (3 at ~15 hrs/week). Miss: stop. Don't fall back to property managers. |
| 7–10 | Build the thin v1 (web only): event list and CSV import, requirement set, magic-link vendor upload, AI extraction with human confirm, event-clock chasing with host copy, ready/missing view, weekly digest. | Build the same v1 over weeks 7–12, dropping the weekly digest. | Pilot venues move from concierge to self-serve. |
| 11–12 | Free acquisition hook. The requirement-letter generator, 10 SEO pages on vendor insurance questions, and the branded vendor upload page. Move to list prices ($79/$149) for new venues. | Generator plus 5 SEO pages. | First trial from search or a vendor. |
| 13 | Measure and decide. | Same. | 12 venues on the product (6 at ~15 hrs/week), each running every event through it for a month. Hit: continue to 11. Miss: cut to the core and re-test one month. |
Kill criteria (write these down now)
- Day 45: fewer than 5 paying venues (3 at ~15 hrs/week). Stop.
- Day 90: fewer than 12 venues (6 at ~15 hrs/week) using it for every event, or month-1 retention below 60%. Don't add features. Change the venue type (e.g. wineries vs barns, corporate vs wedding) once, then stop.
The one thing to stop doing
Stop planning around AppFolio or Buildium. Small property managers' plans have no API, AppFolio already stores vendor insurance expiry, the marketplace listing costs $25–50k a year, and free tiers cover their vendor counts. Every hour spent there is spent on a wedge the evidence rules out.
A close second: stop treating AI reading of certificates as the product. It's free inside BCS and TrustLayer. It's a component.
What stays on the long-term roadmap (only after proof)
- Vendor profile reuse across venues (the network).
- Host one-day event-policy check.
- Booking-software sync, for the tool most paying venues use, if it has an API.
- Group plan for venue groups and hotels.
- A second event buyer: fair, market and festival organisers.