Hey there 👋

Just a reminder that’s it’s okay to give yourself a break. I used to publish these newsletters every week and got pretty burnt out after a year. So I moved to publishing bi-weekly and it made a huge difference!

Do what you have to do and chill out every once in a while. Or switch up what you’re doing to keep things fresh.

e.g. I’ve been focusing a lot more on bringing high-quality Q&As to this newsletter lately, and it’s been a lot of fun. Feels a lot better collab-ing with others as opposed to just writing by myself.

Anyway—I hope this renewed energy comes across as you’re reading!

Q&A 👊

How River Is disrupting the Event Software category

“Tell me the origin story of River and the gap that you saw in the market”

It was a total accident. I’m a huge fan of the All-In podcast and wanted to host a listening party for their 100th episode last year. I tweeted a sign-up form for folks in other cities to host, and it went viral after one of the podcast hosts (Jason Calacanis) retweeted it. By the time the episode was published, we had 24 cities hosting listening parties on the same day around the world!

Six months later, everyone wanted to do another event for episode 125. But it was so much work with the tech stack we had in place. There was no easy way to find hosts, check to make sure they were engaged, and keep attendees’ sensitive data private all at the same time. Still, we gave it a shot and managed to host another listening party—this time in 50 cities around the world.

But we only managed to make it work with a lot of people involved. We passed that feedback along, and Jason Calacanis ended up offering us $100k to build software to manage these in-person events instead. We took it, started building River, and have since supported other podcasts’ meetups like My First Million and The Tim Ferriss Show!

“How do you differentiate River from established competitors in your space?”

Luma and Partiful assume that hosts want to initiate and own all of their events—so they don’t have any permission layers, reminders, automations, dashboards, etc., at scale.

With River, we give businesses and creators an opportunity to essentially franchise their branded events. They maintain control though by crowd-sourcing the hosts themselves—the only way an event takes place is if a host applies and gets approved by the business or creator themselves.

This allows as many events as possible to take place that effectively capture all the energy generated by the creator, brand, or influencer the event is based around.

“What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced while trying to disrupt the market? How have you tackled them?”

Everyone else in our space has raised a ton of money. Partiful, for example, raised a $20M series A, whereas we’ve only raised $150k in angel funding.

So we’ve had to be ruthlessly scrappy about solving the problem of scaling events. As a result, we’re lacking a bit of the polish that you’d see from a tool like Luma. Once we close our pre-seed round, that’ll allow us to start developing the quality-of-life features that everyone expects.

But today, we can solve a lot of problems for Community Managers specifically. Just last year, for example, Superteam used Luma to host 20 events. This year, they launched with River and have hosted 500 events.

Community Managers know that there’s no way they could do 500 events on Luma—they’d have to hire a team of 10 to make that happen.

“What's one insight or lesson learned that's been critical to your competitive success?”

Most founders are software engineers who look down on sales and marketing. They just think “if you build it, they will come,” or you can just launch on Product Hunt and call it a day.

It’s just not true. Knowing how to…

• launch a website

• build an audience and funnel

• create a compelling call to action

• come up with positioning and messaging

• send DMs to billionaires that’ll actually get read

…are all skills that marketers have, and skills that we really lean on at River. That, coupled with being ruthlessly focused on our product, has allowed us to land some pretty big customers and gain a lot of attention.

JUICY SCOOPS 🧃

What’s happening now

• 🤖 | Amazon’s developing a ChatGPT competitor [more]

• 📺 | Streaming platforms mull ways to differentiate [more]

• 🛒 | Retailers are trying to steal Prime Day’s thunder [more]

• 💬 | Microsoft is in hot water for its bundling of Teams [more]

• 🍔 | Casual-dining restaurants are taking on fast-food rivals [more]

• 🔎 | This new AI-powered search engine is going after Perplexity [more]

EXAMPLES 🍊

Your weekly dose of vitamin C(ompete)

Don’t punch down if you’re a market leader.

Heard of Hydrox? Probably not. They’re the ORIGINAL Oreo that were first manufactured in 1908.

When Oreo came along in 1912, Hydrox did the worst thing they could have possibly done—publicly acknowledged them in a marketing campaign. This only educated their target audience of a new competitor, and the rest was history.

COMPETE GEEKS ONLY 🛑✋

From the Community

Here are a couple threads that got folks talking this week.

“Wait, what’s the Healthy Competition Community again?”

It’s where 100+ Product Marketers and Competitive Intel practitioners connect and share tips to help each other win.

ICYMI 👀

Here are the most popular Q&As I’ve published:

• Asana’s Head of Compete: No one wants your research

• RevenueHero’s Head of Marketing: Be a partner; not a vendor

• Procore’s Competitive Strategy Lead: 3 traits of exceptional competitive intel

Stay Healthy, my friends.

💚Andy

PS: Let's connect on Twitter or LinkedIn! Give my latest post a like? 😙👉👈