EventHQ
Designed and scaled EventHQ into a cashflow-positive, market-ready platform by bridging event operations and intelligence.
Overview
EventHQ is a modern platform that brings both event operations and intelligence together in one place. It helps teams plan, run, and analyse events from start to finish. Features like ticketing, agenda building, sponsor engagement, and post-event analytics are tightly integrated so organisers, marketers, and attendees can work without friction.
My Role
I joined as the only product designer when the product was still in its MVP stage. Over the next year, I worked closely with the founder and a lean engineering team to define the product direction, design core workflows, shape the brand, and scale the platform across features.
Key responsibilities:
Product and feature design for the core platform
Creating and maintaining a reusable design system
Marketing visuals and brand illustrations
Designing onboarding and internal workflows
Supporting launch efforts with campaign visuals
Problem Statement
Most event tools in the market either focus on operations or insights, but rarely both. Organisers were forced to switch between multiple platforms for ticketing, agenda planning, CRM updates, and photo sharing. These gaps made it hard to plan efficiently and even harder to learn from event outcomes.
There was a clear opportunity to rethink the category with a unified experience. One product that could cover the entire event lifecycle from the first invite to post-event follow-ups and make every part of it measurable.
Vision and strategy
We didn’t just want to build a tool that made event ops easier. The bigger idea was to help teams run smarter events by giving them visibility into what was working and what wasn’t. This meant combining operational workflows with lightweight, actionable insights.
Instead of trying to match everything competitors offered, we focused on the gaps. Where they felt bloated, we aimed for speed. Where they felt disconnected, we built with context. Our strategy was to launch fast, test early, and double down on what users used.
Designing the Agile way
Design wasn’t a linear process. We worked in weekly cycles, shipping usable builds quickly and improving based on real feedback. As the only designer, I moved between Figma, calls, and production-ready handoffs almost daily.
We often scoped features tightly, released early versions, and improved them over time. This helped us stay realistic with timelines and learn from how teams used the product. Every week, the product got sharper and more usable.
User interviews and insights
We spoke to event organisers, marketers, and sponsors from different industries to understand what they struggled with. A few patterns stood out:
Most tools were either too complex or too fragmented
Sharing event photos was chaotic and time-consuming.
Sponsors had little visibility into ROI
Organisers wanted more than just execution; they wanted learning loops.
These conversations helped shape our roadmap and rethink how features like attendee tracking, CRM sync, and sponsor portals should work. We didn’t want to just replicate existing workflows, we wanted to remove unnecessary ones.
Ideation
Since 2022, we’ve been organising large-format conferences like SAASCON and DEVCON through SAASINSIDER. That experience gave us a firsthand view of the operational gaps in most event tools. The problem wasn’t the absence of features, it was that they rarely worked together.
We started by mapping out the event lifecycle as we’d experienced it ourselves: pre-event planning, real-time execution, and post-event engagement. This helped us spot areas where the workflow broke down or became repetitive.
Detailed features & workflow
The early versions of EventHQ were shaped by direct experience running events. Instead of guessing what teams needed, we designed around the things we repeatedly struggled with ourselves.
Guest approval flow
We introduced a structured flow for managing guests from “In Review” to “Approved,” “Declined,” “Waitlisted,” and even “Yet to Pay.” These statuses gave organisers better visibility and helped reduce the usual inbox clutter.
Ticketing and coupons
Teams could create ticket types with pricing, limits, and rules, plus offer discounts using time-bound or quantity-based coupons. Each ticket or coupon could be connected to share links for easier tracking.
Event goals
Organisers could set measurable goals like registrations, attendance, pipeline, and revenue, each with its own weight. This helped answer the post-event question: “Did we actually succeed?”
Budgeting
We added budget tracking at both the event and org levels. Users could create budget categories, log expenses, and track real-time totals to avoid last-minute surprises.
Marketing module
Teams could create and send email campaigns using a drag-and-drop editor. Messages could be targeted to specific guest types, statuses, or pre-built target lists, all without leaving EventHQ.
Social Share
Organisers could create branded templates for “I’m Attending” or “I’m Speaking” posters and send them directly to speakers, sponsors, or guests. It turned event hype into user-generated content.
Share Links
We made it easy to generate pre-approved registration links for VIPS, speakers, and guests, skipping the awkward “pending approval” emails and streamlining onboarding.
Agenda builder
Organising multi-day conferences meant juggling a lot of moving parts. We created a tool that lets teams create stages, add sessions, assign speakers, and publish updates without breaking the flow.
Photo sharing
Instead of uploading photos to a drive and asking attendees to scroll, we let them scan a selfie and instantly access photos they were in. Admins could also organise folders and feature default photos on the landing page.
Speaker and sponsor portals
We built dedicated portals where speakers could upload content and sponsors could manage leads, assets, and banners. This reduced back-and-forth and made ownership clearer.
Target lists and CRM sync
We made it easy to upload prospect lists or pull them from past events, then sync that data with HubSpot. This helped teams follow up faster and with more context.
Reusable registration forms
Creating compliant forms for each event used to be a long process. We introduced reusable, pre-approved templates that could be used across events with embedded fields and custom properties.
Pre-approved registration links
For guests, speakers, or partners, we enabled auto-approval via special share links, removing the confusion around pending status emails.
Check-in notifications
When a high-value attendee or speaker checks in, organisers and sponsors receive real-time alerts, which allows them to connect in person without missing the moment.
Most of these started as internal needs and gradually evolved into product features. We focused on keeping things reusable, modular, and self-serve.
User flow diagram
Before getting into detailed designs, I mapped out the primary flows for each user type: organisers, attendees, speakers, and sponsors. These diagrams helped clarify where users dropped off, where actions overlapped, and where we could reduce steps.
Some of the first flows I worked on included event creation, face-based photo discovery, guest approvals, and session planning. Keeping these simple was a constant goal, especially since many users interacted with the product only a few times per event.
Conceptualisation and sketching
Most of the early ideas started as rough sketches on paper or quick whiteboard drawings. This helped me experiment with layout and flow without committing too early to a direction. It was also useful during team discussions where everyone could react to a simple visual instead of long explanations.
Sketching gave me space to think through edge cases and compare alternate interaction models before jumping into Figma. It also helped prioritise information hierarchy, especially for complex views like the event agenda or sponsor portals.
Low-fi prototypes
Once we aligned on a basic direction, I created low-fidelity wireframes to test key workflows. These prototypes focused on clarity rather than visuals. We used them internally to validate how organisers might create an event, approve a guest, or publish an agenda.
The goal here wasn’t perfection. It was about catching friction early, keeping the interface lightweight, and ensuring the logic made sense before moving to visual polish.
These wireframes also helped developers get a quick sense of scope and logic, especially useful in a lean setup where everyone was moving fast.
Design System
I built the design system from scratch to keep it lean, reusable, and accessible. It wasn’t exhaustive by any means, but it gave us enough structure to maintain consistency as we scaled new features.
The system included a basic set of components, tokens, colour usage, and layout patterns. Components were designed to be flexible across use cases, whether for data-heavy tables or card-based minimal views.
Accessibility was a part of the process from the beginning. I followed WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines for contrast and made sure components supported keyboard interactions and responsive layouts. It was just the right amount of structure for an early-stage product run by a small team.
Final product
By the time we reached stability, the product had grown into a complete platform with everything needed to run and analyse an event. Each feature was designed with real usage in mind, and many were first tested through our conferences before becoming part of the product.
Validation: Evaluating interfaces and usability
Most of our validation came from internal usage and live testing during conferences. Because we were our first users, we were able to spot gaps early and make quick changes between events.
I also ran smaller usability sessions with first-time organisers to see how they navigated things like guest approvals or agenda planning without guidance. Whenever something felt confusing or too nested, I worked on simplifying it.
Over time, this helped the product feel more intuitive, especially for users who didn’t use it every day.
Reflection and takeaway
EventHQ was the kind of project where I had space to go wide and deep, designing across product, brand, and internal workflows. It taught me how to simplify layered systems, work closely with engineering, and ship under real-world constraints.
Working with an early-stage team also meant learning when to move fast, when to push back, and how to make small decisions that scale well.
The final redesign played a key role in helping EventHQ reach cashflow positivity.
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