A New Development for Live Events
Hi all! First post here. :)
Before talking about the SaaS project (https://venuo.co.uk) i'll briefly explain what preceded it.
Around one year ago i was abruptly ripped away from the live events industry in London as i was made redundant from the sound engineering job i had held for 8 years. So after a short and anxiety filled 'break' i decided, with little other options, i was going to start building my own thing. Perfect timing.
Having no background in software engineering and not knowing how to code, I started a service called Bandstream.tv. Looking to fill the void that was created in the live music space last year, Bandstream.tv ran ticketed music livestreams. We had a little early success, mostly focusing on working with music studios and production spaces, from a production background myself this is where my network was. I built live streaming 'platforms' for these events using a combination of services like Carrd, Vimeo and inPlayer. This was all pretty manual and tedious and really didn't scale well.
So I was running this completely no code until just three months ago i started to learn JavaScript and with a little help from a software developer friend and co-founder guiding me on my journey i started building this new SaaS oriented project in Node.js. The aim for this project was to build a tool that will help anyone do what i had been doing with Bandstream.tv, stream and ticket live events globally.
I first started by building a basic chat app, honestly this took the longest but what felt like an up hill struggle started to flatten out as i begun to grasp the basics. Next was building a video player, integrating a CDN for live streaming, user accounts, password hashing, a dynamically generated dashboard, image api, stripe integration, secure ticketing, emails and text alerts. Its funny going back and refactoring the the older bits of code, it's amazing to me how far this has come since March. Lots of refactoring still to do mind. Times and dates are still a mess but it's now at a stage i would be comfortable inviting testers.
We called this new thing Venuo and I'm now hoping to help music venues, theatres, festivals, production companies, etc monetise and run hybrid ticketed high quality livestream events. I hope this journey continues and i really want people find some utility in what i have made.
So it's time for the next step in this journey, actually getting this project in front of people...
Anyway, thats the backstory out the way. Link attached. Let me know what you think! I would love for you to critique the landing page if you don't feel like signing up and checking out the dashboard.
wait...in ONE YEAR you went from having never coded at all to building THAT - dude? WOW. please elaborate....
Tom coded like, all day every day for the whole 3 months (and had done a little coding over the last year customizing carrd sites).
a little 1-1 instruction goes a long way*.
*hi, i’m Jasper, Toms co-founder and the provider of the 1-1 instruction haha.
100%. No way this would have been possible without Jasper. He built the foundations that i had no idea how to do on day 1. Introing me to github, setting up psql, tailwind, heroku etc. That gave me a sandbox to play around in.
After that it was just a case of learning a bunch of different APIs and database stuff. And styling... styling sucked.
Building a video player, a couple of hours - Making a box show up on the right hand side of the screen, ∞.
Jasper and i would meet every couple days to buddy code, talk strategy and work through any bits i had come stuck on.
Three years later into my development journey I have rebuilt Venuo in react :) check it out! https://venuo.co.uk/
Hey Tom, first of all a very big congratulations on moving from your redundancy, overcoming the anxiety period and creating Venuo. Mental health is more important than anything else.
And second of all, what you've done is super impressive in terms of learning to code and build up the software.
The website landing page can certainly be improved, you could take inspirations from Webflow templates or lapa.ninja.
@tomturner so happy reading this because its what i need to kick start my start up ,Do you mind if i can contact you out of here maybe on twitter ? working on a mobile app that i think i need your input on it . Thank
hey! yea id be happy to chat. whats the project?
I like !
Amazing work!!