Krowdpop

PROJECT GOAL

Help promoters plan with data insights to execute end-to-end marketing campaigns of K-pop concerts.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

Concert planning is hard; promoters struggle to predict the successful course of a profitable concert. Organizers are often making costly decisions about who to book, where to host, and venue capacities with limited information. The end result is low ticket sales, poor budgeting, and ultimately, cancelled concerts with huge financial losses.

Krowdpop’s Promoter Portal is a concert planning service that helps promoters execute more successful events by leveraging fandom-based data. The Promoter Portal empowers promoters to create more successful campaigns based on combination of artist, venue, demand, and ticket cost. This fan data gives promoters a data-driven edge in reducing promotional costs, discover new opportunities, and ultimately reduce the overall risk of planning concerts.

By bridging the gap between promoters and fans, Krowdpop not only reduces the business risks of concerts but fulfills the fans’ dreams of seeing their favorite K-pop artist perform in their city.

TEAM

1 Product Designer (me)
1 Product Manager
2 Developers

TARGET AUDIENCE

Artist managers
Concert promoters

SOLUTION

For promoters
Create a full-stack concert planning tool that helps promoters mobilize targeted campaigns for musical events.

RESULT

An intelligent campaign-building web app consisting of sales dashboards, artist demand metrics, and tailored fan-based data insights around ticket pricing to support the right business decisions.

DISCOVERY

When I joined Krowdpop, the site’s fan-facing experience was already partially built. The leadership team had a confident idea of the pain points for fans, based on the history of usage and interviewing K-pop fans.

However, we lacked experience in concert promotion. Our team interviewed promoters to learn about the contextual pain points of concert planning. We actually ended up partnering directly with an agency to plan a marketing campaign while designing in parallel.

This experience helped reinforce our conversations about what our customers needed. It showed us what we did well, what problem solutions needed to be prioritized, and for whom.

Persona: Jonny R.

(modelled after our actual concert promoter partner)

Jonny has been promoting concerts for 3 years. He’s always on the lookout for the next big concert hit. Jonny knows there are cities with high potential for ticket sales, but he needs the numbers to back him up. He struggles to keep track of the varying costs of concert production per city venue.

He’d like to be able to pitch his concert proposals more quantifiably to investors and accurately produce more profitable concerts.

Goals

Reduce cost of production and promotion.

Provide accurate concert estimates and projections.

Sell out all shows on tour locations where they’re the most in demand

Wants & Needs

Wants to accurately produce the most likely profitable concerts.

Would like to be able to pitch concert proposals more quantifiably to investors.

Motivation

Profit

Connect K-pop artists with fans.

DEFINE

Our research revealed that promoters were the key managers to concert costs and venue decisions. By helping them trace and leverage the data from fan engagement, we envisioned the future of concert planning to be more accurate, effective, and co-beneficial for both fans and promoters.

Focusing on pain points

Pain 1: Concerts are highly risky in the wrong city.

K-pop concerts are costly investments by location, so it's important that promoters and investors can locate where artists will attract the most fans.

Krowdpop's tool needed to show promoters the data that could quantify and validate demand for K-pop artists with the biggest potential audiences. One way to validate market potential and ticket rates was through crowdfunding.

Pain 2: Managing concert venue fees is complex.

When reserving concert venues, keeping track of the fees and costs of preparing for the event can quickly add up. Our solution would have to anticipate the variable fees that promoters could run into and simplify his accounting life.

Solution Approach

Translate fan demand into measurable actions.
Algorithmically group actions into metrics that represent intent.
Design modules that visualize intent as data.
Determine and assemble pages that host relevant modules.

Journey Mapping

Prioritizing speed to market, we started with mapping out the promoter’s user experience. Though this decision did not help us ‘weave’ the two journeys of promoter and fan, it allowed us to focus and make better decisions on improving the quality of each path respectively.

During this phase, many of our discussions revolved around deciding what data to display relative to the business.

WIREFRAMING

We used wireframes to communicate what business data to present, what features were needed, and where they needed to be constrained in each stage of the user journey.

We referred to our research results to flesh out the features we needed to build.

With wireframes, we verified that the information displayed to promoters were easy to understand, valuable to their situation, looked trustworthy and readable.

Early Design System

Krowdpop did not have a standardized library of components, styling guidelines, or documentation on the principles of how the product should look and feel.

Creating a scalable design system for reference improved quality and time of collaboration with the product manager and CEO. It unified our stakeholders and made the decision-making process easier to articulate the vision and purpose of each page.

Once developers had the styles set, they were able to independently create repeatable components and group them with less reliance on feedback from PMs, designers, and the CEO.

Exploring component designs

The Buy Widget design was a heated topic amongst our teams; we had countless debates amongst stakeholders about what information was critical to include, how flashy it should be, how it’d fit within the dimensional constraints of the site.. paving the path to design hell.

But having a design system helped us mock and iterate widget variations at a quick pace.

Final product

Promoter Portal was launched as a closed beta with two goals:

To identify the most financially feasible locations for concerts
To simplify the financial duties of promoters.

Reducing the risk of selecting venues

We designed custom widgets and graphs that illustrate which cities had the most potential for being profitable, based on fan demand, production cost, and agency fees for each major K-pop artist.

The result is a more confident approach for promoters to choosing cities with the highest potential of profit and successful shows.

Smarter management of concert venue fees

To help promoters better manage their finances, we designed special data entry points for tracking concert setup costs (venue deposits, agency fees, security, etc.)
When it came to determining the cost of ticket sales, promoters can easily trace the impact and justify their pricing based on their fees.

Empowering promoters to plan more successful concerts.