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Setting the stage for Eventbrite’s next act

Context

I joined the Eventbrite business unit working on a new Creator product that was fresh out of beta. The team was looking to identify its path to product-market fit and scale revenue by 500% in 2024. The team was focused on two major metrics: monthly active users, and average spend per user.

To de-risk the 2024 roadmap, the team needed more confidence in their answers to the following questions:

Who is our target customer?
What does our target customer need in order to use our product more?

Approach

As the research lead, I decided to scope my project into two phases:

In the Discovery phase, I would interview a diverse set of Eventbrite creators, including those who had and hadn’t used the new product. These interviews would help uncover the attitudes, motivations, and experiences of creators related to marketing events.
The Prioritization phase was an exercise in contextualizing the insights gathered from the Discovery phase. With a well-designed survey, we would quantify the distribution of various findings – who was experiencing which issues, and how much? Mapping the survey results to internal analytics would allow us to create a data-driven segmentation framework for the team, to chart revenue goals against the product roadmap.

Phase	Goal	Activities
Discovery	Uncover breadth of attitudes, motivations, and experiences	Interviews with Eventbrite creators
Prioritization	Contextualize interview insights by quantifying findings	Large-scale survey of Eventbrite creators

1. Discovery

To interview a diverse set of Eventbrite creators, I worked with the product analytics team to pull a list of emails that fit our “active creator” criteria. I then created and sent a custom recruitment screener (a tool Eventbrite hadn’t been using) to this list, which allowed me to handpick participants to optimize for relevant diversity – such as event size and experience with certain marketing tools.
Although I successfully completed 12 interviews, I had trouble recruiting “larger” creators with high revenue and event attendance – even after inviting more emails from the list. (It turns out December is a busy time for event planners!) To solve this, I worked with the Product Operations team to access Gong, which allowed me to watch recorded sales calls with some of these target creators. While this wasn’t a perfect substitute for leading interviews, it was important to do some learning about this segment of creators.
After analyzing the calls, I shared major findings in a presentation and as a user journey map in Figjam. This allowed me to align creator experiences with our two major goals (increasing adoption & increasing spend). I encouraged the Product team to leave follow-up questions and comments on the board, so I could add more detail and generate additional questions for the second phase of the project.

A blurred version of my interview findings, along with colleague questions, in a Figjam board.

2. Prioritization

To quantify the learnings in the Discovery phase, I designed a 10-15 minute Qualtrics survey that would let us segment our audience. The survey was crafted specifically to answer the following three questions:

“Who are the creators that promote events?”
“What are the major behaviors, challenges, and preferences of event promoters?”
“How does Eventbrite’s new marketing product compare against existing competitors?”

I worked with Product Analytics to append internal identifiers for a more comprehensive data analysis.

Bonus: This also allowed me to shorten the survey, by not asking respondents for data we already had!

Using the company’s historical response rates and estimated statistical significance, we launched the survey to 30,000 Eventbrite creators (filtering out those who had been contacted in the past 90 days for research). We received more than 500 responses, which was our target for the survey.

As I wrapped up the project, I presented some summary statistics from the survey and highlighted some key opportunities for the Product team to tackle.

I focused on gathering data that wasn’t captured in our existing frameworks yet seemed categorically important from the Discovery phase.

Conclusions & Reflections

Based on my mixed-method research, the business unit was able to reprioritize their 2024 roadmap with a clear vision of who they were building for and what they needed.

🙊

I can’t say much more than this due to an NDA and the ongoing nature of the work.

My largest obstacle during this project was reaching potential participants. If I could do this project again – with hindsight to guide me – I would have focused much earlier on building relationships with customer-facing teams. Although I could theoretically reach larger creators via email, it would have made sense to pursue them through Eventbrite account executives to ensure their participation in the research.

When I did eventually reach out to the Sales team about watching Gong calls (in lieu of doing interviews), they were super collaborative and helpful!