Welcome to Episode 4 of The Craft of Conferencing Podcast. This time around we have another great conversation with an event-tech innovator.
Ari Driessen is the co-founder and CEO of RSVPify, an event tech platform that began as something very personal for Ari. His wedding. As Ari puts it, he likes to automate things.
This compulsion to automate meant Ari didn’t want to do paper wedding invitations. And the existing platforms out there that did automate the invitation process (e.g., The Knot, Evite, etc.) lacked features Ari considered essential.
For example, he wanted privacy features that would allowed him to invite different guests to some wedding sub-events (e.g., rehearsal dinner, bachelor party, etc.) and not to others. And so RSVPify (which Ari launched with his best man Adam Hausman) was born.
Ari had enough of a technical background to build V1 of his wedding invitation app. But he didn’t believe his version would cut it and he wanted to start over. So he reached into the global talent pool and found an engineer in Bosnia named Sunil.
Here Ari talks about discovering that his prized engineer wasn’t exactly who he thought he was. But in the end, it didn’t matter. Sunil has been on board for the entire RSVPify journey.
In this clip, Ari talks about how the latest version of RSVPify is focused on improving the event onboarding experience.
And here Ari shares explains how AI will make measuring the return on event investment much easier.
We hope you enjoy this episode.
Interested in joining The Craft of Conferencing Podcast as a guest or sponsor? Write to us at Charles@craftofconferencing.com to start a conversation.
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Time Stamps — The Craft of Conferencing Podcast Episode 4
The RSVPify Origin Story [02:17]
On the Internet, No One Knows You’re a Bosnian High School Student [8:47]
From Weddings to B2B Events [15:44]
The Post-Covid Events Landscape [22:56]
Privacy as a Differentiator [27:56]
What’s Next for RSVPify [35:58]
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