Concaly

Concaly is a website to help find conventions (like comic cons). It’s meant to help artists going to artist alleys find conventions to table at.

There’s a pretty deep pain point because there’s nothing like it right now. It directly helps artist alley artists make money. I know because it’s the tool I wish I had (which is why I built it)

The app is fully working and had good initial traction.

So why did I stop to move on to Mudboard?

The Constraints

My biggest problem when building ConCaly is: how do I keep the conventions up to date.

I discussed this issue more here:

ConCaly Writeup

But here’s a run down of the options (table copied from my writeup)

• risk bad data
• will probably need manual intervention anyways | | Community | - can be very reliable
• long term solution | - people are weird
• requires a critical mass
• moderation
• lots of forms…..lots of logic |

So you see, Scraping and Manual require a lot of continual and manual intervention.

And with something that requires a very high accuracy, it’s not worth the effort to manage this site for all eternity.

This is why we decided to ruthlessly build out the crowd source features:

• Even though it takes time to get to critical mass, and it’s tricky to get moderation and form flows right
• It has the best long term and self-healing solution.