Born and raised in a small town in New Hampshire, Max Friedman is currently in the process of revolutionizing event discovery. Max, a junior enrolled at The George Washington University, took his steady interest in entrepreneurship and created an application that virtually everyone can benefit from. If you’re looking for an event to go to near you, see what’s Happening!
Happening is a free mobile application, available on the App Store on your iPhone and will soon be available for Android users. Happening, as Max puts it, “is the easiest way to find fun things to do nearby.” It shows you thousands of great events in your area, such as Washington, D.C. and Boston, ranging from major concerts and music festivals, to happy hour specials with live music at that hole-in-the-wall bar you always walk past.
You can sign into the app through Facebook and automatically connect with all of your Facebook friends. Happening sorts out all of the events by what’s going on in your personal network, and what you’re interested in doing, which can be filtered to your preference. You can buy tickets for events and even call an Uber for transportation- all through the application.
Planning outings with groups of friends can get complicated; people often miss out on information and sometimes don’t follow through with plans. With Happening, you can make group chats with your friends and buy tickets for events, making the process of event planning with friends pain-free.
With help from a few books checked out at our very own Gelman Library, Max taught himself everything he needs to know about starting a company- from coding to marketing. I had the opportunity to sit down with Max and ask him a few questions about Happening and how it came about.
What made you want to create an app like this?
It was a combination of two things: First, as a user, I noticed that I was typically doing the same things on a weekly basis. I’m so fortunate to be in the center of D.C., yet I was barely taking advantage of it. There are so many things going on, and if you wanted to find out about them, there wasn’t really a solid source to do that and get information from. As a user, I felt the need for a product to change that. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, I noticed there was just a void in the market.
When you were in high school, what did you see yourself doing in college?
Depending on the day, I probably would have told you a different answer. I had so many different interests. I still do. That’s sort of why I’m able to do this. I like doing everything from coding, to designing, to marketing, to managing. I love all of it, so being part of a start-up gives me that opportunity to do all of that, which is why I like it so much. Depending on the day, I would have probably told you either government and politics or finance. I wanted to work on Wall Street. However, a consistent theme was my interest in entrepreneurship. Totally different experience than would I have thought, but I love it. Where I am today is where I should and would be.
Did you come into college with this idea in mind and see starting your own company while in college coming?
Oh no way, it caught me off guard. I never thought I’d be starting a company in college. If you told me in high school that I’d be starting my own company in college, I probably would have laughed. Looking back though, it all makes sense. A lot of things just came together. I have a lot of different interests, which led me to where I am right now.
Max Friedman demoting at the DC Tech Meet Up: College Edition April 2015
Did this app and its purpose come out to be exactly what you had in mind when you first thought of it? If not, how has it changed?
The app did not start out as “Tinder for events.” I very much saw a need for this and I thought, what is the best solution to solve this pain point? There are a lot of events going on that are hard to find out about, it’s hard to organize your friends and it’s hard to buy tickets and organize the process. I noticed that there isn’t an existing event discovery platform that could do all of this. Turns out, there’s this huge market for something like this. I had an idea that was really valuable for a user, then I looked at the business side of things, and it’s arguably more valuable for a business to reach their audience through technology, rather than through ads and print media.
The format that I stumbled upon was a natural progression of a lot of different prototypes, mockups and feedback and it turned out to be so easy. I didn’t start off with an interface. I didn’t start off with an exact format. I didn’t even draw a mockup for like 2 months when I thought of the idea.
How do you plan on spreading the word and getting people on the west coast and even people in different parts of the world to use Happening?
It’s definitely a challenge. I adamantly believe that if you build a great product that people love, they’re going to tell their friends and spread the word for you. The most powerful way you can advertise is by just building a great product. You can spread the word initially by telling people, getting brand ambassadors and putting more money into marketing, but we’ve gotten where we are today with zero advertising dollars. People aren’t just downloading it to do me a favor anymore, our downloads are increasing every week because there’s a need for the product. I’ve gotten a ton of emails from people all over the world, people I don’t even know, in places like India, asking me to bring Happening to their countries because they see a need for it.
It’s impossible to keep running on favors and our personal network going forward. You’re never going to sustain growth unless you build a product that people love. People don’t just use Snapchat because their friends are on it; it’s a product that people actually like and see a need for.
What are some challenges, both personal and technological, that you’ve had while creating this app?
My biggest challenge is with time management. I do everything from coding, to designing, to marketing, to fundraising, to product development, to managing. I have to figure out how can I spend my time and optimize it best. There are so many short-term needs and long term needs, and you have to have a balance. Short term, we just need to do updates on the app. People come to me with bugs and I need to get hands-on and actually code it myself. We need to market and we need to do PR. There are so many things that need to be done on a day to day basis, and my time just gets pulled in a hundred different directions and its just easily my biggest challenge. How am I currently spending my time? How could I be spending it better? I’m always revisiting that and making sure that I’m making the most of my time. The key is prioritizing and discipline.
There are two big challenges with the actual app. One is, the scale of what we’re doing. Aggregating events is a really intense technical activity. It’s expensive, in terms of the amount of requests we have to make on servers and the data that we’re pulling and have to store. It’s very challenging, technologically, to scrape events. You have to make sure all of the servers are working flawlessly and you’re getting quality events. The second challenge is engagement. We’re seeing really high retention rates and the average user spends a long time on the app – but this could always be better. For an app, engagement is key.
Where do you see this app in 5 years?
In five years I hope to see Happening on your phone next to Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter. I think someone is going to solve the problem for event discovery in the next two years and Happening has a lot of potential to be that company. We’ve already made a lot of headway in the area, and I’m excited to see this thing through.
Do you see it being successful and popular among college campuses and even among the “young professionals” population?
There are a lot of different use cases for the app. College students might use it to find out about things going on in and around their university, while young professionals might want to know where the best happy hour with live music is. My parents actually love using it because they can find out about Broadway shows and festivals in Boston, since we live only 45 minutes away. Even my grandparents found a Bette Midler concert in the city though Happening. The idea of finding out about events through technology was so new to them. What’s so exciting is that there’s a use case for Happening for everyone. As a college student, it’s easiest to market to other college students, but I’m really excited for the next several years to expand the range of events, the duration of events based on the type of user you are, and make it all more relevant for everybody.
Is Happening available in New York?
The reason why we haven’t brought it to New York yet is because I feel like a lot of event apps start in New York and work their way down. I want to start by building a product that is really well-adopted and loved by the users that we do have before going to a place like New York because we already know we have something that is where it needs to be to scale in a city like that. I would love to bring it to New York, but I need to make sure that the product is perfect and is something that people are going to want to use and that it’s going to succeed. The interest is there, I think, but I want to build up to that. I want to make sure we are solid in the cities that we are in.
As Max puts it, if you have a really great idea for a product and see a need for it, you will do everything you can to make it a reality. For Max, it was spending months on end and sleepless nights teaching himself how to code in his dorm room, and learning the ins and outs of running a start-up. Max is excited for the future and has big plans for Happening- he’s just getting started! Look out for what’s Happening in a city near you!
*Disclaimer: Happening is currently available for users in and near Washington, D.C., Boston, Nashville, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
