July 2024 Product Updates
See what's new at Stanza!
ICYMI:
What’s New
Stanza exists to let creators keep their biggest fans in the know about their upcoming events, in the simplest way possible—through their calendars.
The theme for July was constraints—adapting to limitations in our ecosystem to continue to deliver on our vision. In situations like this, we use these principles to guide our product decisions:
Simplicity: Finding solutions that are easy for both you and your fans to understand and act on.
Save time: Building features that clearly give back time to you and your fans
Long-term thinking: Seeing limitations as opportunities for creative problem solving, which can lead to new product features beyond just a short-term fix.
⇨ Enabled by default: Unless noted otherwise, the features and fixes below are enabled by default for all creators on the platform.
Calendar App Constraints
Events not appearing in subscribers’ calendars
Calendars often aren't updating because subscribers haven't resubscribed since the relaunch. Previously, subscribers had to delete a calendar on the website in order to add it again.
Every creator’s Stanza page now has a “Resubscribe” link for existing subscribers to easily resubscribe with one click.
Too many calendar subscriptions
Calendar app sidebars weren't built for subscribing to dozens of calendars from various creators. They can quickly become cluttered and hard to navigate, discouraging users from adding more calendars.
To solve this, we launched Groups—a feature that lets power users combine multiple calendars into one subscription. Any changes made to the group will automatically update in their calendar app.
Learn more about groups here.
Subscriber count: Creators' subscriber counts now include users who have added their calendar to a group.
API Constraints
For sports teams on automated plans, schedule release day has always had a gap between when team websites update and when APIs refresh with the latest games. This delay, ranging from minutes to hours, is out of our control and causes confusion among teams and fans.
To help with this, we’re adding a message to creators' Stanza Pages on release day to let fans know that games are being added to the system. They can still subscribe now, and their calendar will update as soon as the data is available.
Coming soon: This inspired us to create a feature for creators to add custom notes similar to the one above to their Stanza page. Highlight anything from ticket sales, merch drops, AMAs and more.
Editorial Calendar Constraints
There’s been a big jump in editorial creators on the platform since we redesigned manually importing calendars earlier this year. The Olympics being a great example of how our platform’s limits were pushed.
For the first time in Stanza history, the Olympics calendar was built by a creator (@NicholasCarr)—with thousands of events across 30+ calendars. We were delighted to see that it took just 15 minutes to import all the calendars into Stanza, and overnight, thousands of subscribers found and subscribed to the Olympics calendars.
Nicholas could spend his time on updating the schedule vs on navigating our system, which is exactly what we intended.
Too Many Event Images
With thousands of events, manually uploading images was impossibly time-consuming. To address this, we launched a feature where, if an event image isn't uploaded, it defaults to a color gradient based on the avatar.
Troubleshoot: If you’re not seeing the gradient image on your Stanza Page, try re-uploading your avatar image.
Social Browser Constraints
In the latest saga around phasing out 3rd party cookies, Google authentication unexpectedly broke across major social browsers. This issue didn’t just affect us; it impacted any company using Google sign-in when users tried to log in through social browsers like X, Facebook, or Instagram.
We’ve added a modal that guides users to open the sign-in page in an external browser where they can successfully log in.
That’s it for this month! Keep an eye out for more product emails.
On Stanza, anyone can create, discover and share event calendars. Getting started is easy. Set up your calendar in just a few minutes.