March 2024 Product Updates
See what's new at Stanza!
👆Watch the video first for a live demo of the latest features and what’s next.
ICYMI:
New Features
We’ve finally hit the milestone of being at feature parity with the old product! Here’s what we launched in the past month:
New Newsletter: Welcome to our new platform! We’ll be sending out (mostly) monthly email updates going forward. You can always directly respond to these emails with your feedback.
There’s also a version of the newsletter for fans subscribing here.
Microsoft and Email Login: Both are now supported for signing in and subscribing to calendars. We redesigned Email login to require a valid email to avoid the issue of an inflated subscriber count due to fake emails.
Improved UX for Adding a Calendar: Fan are now asked to choose their calendar vs signing in. We’ve also fixed the issue of the calendar link not automatically opening up in the calendar app on certain devices. It should now be a seamless click-to-subscribe.
Discover tab was overhauled: Pills and logos are back. Any event images uploaded will still supersede any logos or default images.
➡️ Ask: Please update your profile image if the incorrect logo is appearing on the website.
Ongoing events now include a ‘Live’ tag: Live events stay within the Upcoming Tab until they end, at which point they move to the Past tab. Fans can continue to click on ticketing or watch links while an event is ongoing.
Coming very soon…
Collect fan contacts: Keep an eye out for a separate post about this feature as it’s a meaty one.
Support hub: Much requested support hub is in the works with articles on FAQs, onboarding docs and more.
Database cleanup: We’re removing duplicate calendars and consolidating subscribers. Keep an eye out an email from us informing you if your account was impacted.
What we’re building next and why?
We sunset the original product to have a stable platform to iterate upon. Now that we’re at feature parity with the old product, we’re back to adding new features.
Two north stars guiding our product development:
⭐️ Improved Accuracy
We’re a *tiny* team with over 60,000 calendars on the platform. Today the problem is a game of telephone.
We’re likely the last to hear about changes in any given calendar. Either fans or creators ping us about issues and more likely than not, we ping someone else to fix the issue. This isn’t optimal for either:
Manual creators: While they can independently manage their calendar, there’s still a delay between a fan reporting the issue, us emailing the creator and then the creator making the change.
Automated creators: These creators are far more hamstrung as there are code changes required in the feed or integration for event changes to reflect.
Fans can’t trust the calendar they subscribed to. After all, they may miss an event as a result of inaccurate information.
What’s live and in the works:
Feedback link on all calendar pages (Live): Fans can now directly report issues. There’s a live updating view of calendars that are actively being worked on.
➡️ Ask: Check to see if your calendar is on the list and fix any issues.
Creators will be automatically emailed as issues come in (Q2/Q3 2024): Soon you will be sent an email as fans leave feedback, shortening the turnaround time to fix them.
Automated creators will be able to edit events (Q2/Q3 2024): You’ll have the ability to edit all event fields to override the data coming in from the automated feeds. All changes will automatically appear in subscribers’ calendars. No more code changes required to edit your calendar.
Trust & reliability score (Q2/3 2024): As we introduce these new features and let creators take more charge of their calendars, we’ll ask subscribers to rate how trustworthy they find these calendars. This rating will be shown on your calendar pages, much like a review.
⭐️ Improved Discovery
With the 60,000 calendars on the platform growing at a nice clip with new creators joining daily, discovery is a growing (but good!) problem to have. As the diversity of calendars grows, this problem is becoming both far more interesting and worthwhile.
What’s live and in the works:
Search & Discover tab (Live): Both are powered by AI and are currently in beta mode. We are getting better at queries like “Other TV shows like the Gilded Age” and already excel at queries like “Teams in Tennessee”.
Recommendations (Q2 2024): These are generated based on calendars fan have already added. For ex: fans who have added a NHL calendar would be recommended the NHL Playoffs calendar. The goal here is to give creators even more opportunities to stay top-of-mind with fans.
Event pages (Q2/3 2024): Launching event pages opens up discovery queries like “Upcoming shows like Bruce Springsteen in SF”, which would then return events rather than just calendars.
That’s it for this month’s update. If you have any feedback or ideas for other features to build, please email us at founders@stanza.co 🙌