No one on their death bed says “all the things I could
have owned?!” It’s “all the things I could have done?!” The world is
shifting from a material culture to an experiential culture. Many of our
most prized possessions like photographs and music have become
digitized. We now have the Internet to find experiences, devices to
capture them, and social networks to share them. It’s memories that
matter.
Everfest wants to accelerate this shift. Launching today, Everfest is a global calendar and search engine for festivals.
Music, film, food, drink, art, sports, culture. Wherever you are or
wherever you’re going, it can find a nearby festival that’s sure to give
you a rich experience. With $1.5 million in funding, Everfest wants to
connect the revelers who attend festivals, and build location sharing
technology to help you find friends while you’re there.
Revelry
It took isolation to spark the idea for this community
celebration tool. Paul Cross had sold his event ticketing startup
TicketBud in 2012 and ditched out to Spain. An 11 mile hike into a
nature reserve made him realize that all around the world, people love
to congregate. “It’s like the Hubble Deep Field project” Cross tells me.
“The more you adjust the lens, the more galaxies you see.” There’s more
than Coachella and Burning Man, Mardi Gras, and Diwali. Festivals are
everywhere if you look close enough.
Cross believes
our sudden immersion in cyberspace has nudged people to seek out IRL
gatherings, leading to a recent explosion in the number of festivals
held. But when he started Everfest, he admits he didn’t even know about
festivals going on a few cities over from his home in Austin, Texas,
like a half-million person Renaissance Faire in Houston. But after a ton
of digging, Everfest now indexes over 9000 festivals.
When you sign up, you can tell Everfest where you live,
how far you’re willing to travel, and what kinds of festivals you’re
into. It then shows full-screen previews of relevant festivals that you
can save to a calendar. A search engine lets you find events in specific
categories, locations, and time frames.
Cutting Through The Chaos
My biggest concern with Everfest is that it wants to do
everything. The long-tail festival discovery feature seems useful, given
most competitors are either specific to music like Festival Finder,
focused only on larger events like Fest300, or feel stuck in the 2000s
like Festivals.com. Everfest’s other ambitions may be harder to fulfill,
though, even with $1.5 million from Bob Kagle (Benchmark), uShip’s
founders, angels from Google, and Austin investors via ATX Seed
Ventures.
The startup wants to be a community forum for each
festival, but I’d bet official forums run by the larger festivals will
have more traction. And honestly, having gone to 11 Coachellas, 7 SXSWs,
and countless other festivals, I’ve never really wanted to connect with
people from them on a forum. Everfest also imagines becoming a social
media hub where all the photos end up.
Eventually, the company hopes to solve possibly the
biggest problem with festivals: meeting up with friends amongst the
chaos. Many event-specific apps, Facebook, Apple, and more have tried to
solve the issue by letting you share your real-time location. But on
long festival days, avoiding battery drain is critical. Constantly
checking the schedule, texting friends, and taking photos in crowded
network conditions can decimate a mobile device. “There’s also the
creepiness” says Cross.
Everfest’s
solution is to create accurate maps of event grounds, unlike the wonky
illustrated PDFs found in most festival apps, and let you drop a pin
that friends can see. Friends can ask you to drop a pin if they want to
find you, and the pins decay with time so you don’t try to find someone
where they were hours ago. This method has it’s own problems though, as
you’ll have to remember to drop pins, update them if you move, and they
could still become outdated quickly.
To pay for everything, Everfest has a bunch of ideas too.
It plans to host targeted ads on festival pages that appeal to the
corresponding demographics. Cross also believes that by surveying all of
the festival organizers, Everfest could become an aggregation layer
that sponsors could go through to run campaigns at scale at multiple
smaller events. Its immediate plan to keep the lights on is to license
data on when and where people are traveling to festivals to flight and
hotel companies, which it already has relationships with.
Cross likened Everfest to five prong spear, saying “We’ll
get them with one of the prongs”. But mobile doesn’t necessarily work
like that, and doing too much could make its forthcoming mobile app feel
bloated and confusing. Festivals are supposed to be a vacation from the
rigamarole of our online lives. If Everfest can stick to getting us away from our screens and out making memories, it could become an essential tool for the adventurous.