In this episode, we interview special guest Karl Groves about his new, fully accessible event ticketing platform Eventably. Learn about what led to the creation of Eventably, why accessibility in the events space is broken, and how this new platform aims to shake up the conversation around accessibility as a viable avenue for investment.
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Transcript
Chris: Welcome to the Accessibility Craft Podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company, and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin. And now onto the show.
Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Chris.
Chris: Hey everybody.
Amber: And we have a special guest, our friend Karl Groves here.
Introducing Special Guest Karl Groves
Amber: Hi Karl.
Karl: Hello. How are you?
Amber: Doing well. We are so excited to have you join us on the podcast and share what you are working on. But I’m wondering if you want to start by just giving a brief introduction to yourself for anyone who hasn’t met you before.
Karl: Sure. So I’m Karl Groves accessibility consultant, web developer, serial entrepreneur for whatever that’s worth. And founder of multiple software companies.
Amber: Awesome. Well, we are so excited to have you here today. For everyone who is tuning in, this is episode number 146, and if you are interested in show notes or a full transcript, you can find that if you go to AccessibilityCraft.com/146.
Of course, we start every episode with a beverage.
Today’s Beverage
Amber: What are we drinking today, Chris?
Chris: So, Karl you said you like European, German beers. I’m gonna try not to butcher this. It’s got a, it’s got a fun name, but according to my research, and this is coming from someone who took German in high school and college, and I’m still struggling with this.
It’s called Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier. It’s from a super old brewery is my understanding. And it’s from Bavaria and apparently they use this really old school malting process that it makes the beer taste kind of smoky. So I’ve never had this before, personally. Have you had it before? It’s okay if you have, but…
Karl: Yes. This is gonna be really fun. I don’t wanna spoil anything, but yes, this is, I have had this before.
Amber: I have never had this one before, and I will admit when I saw that smoke beer, I was a little bit like, huh, I don’t if I’m gonna this or not.
Karl: Yeah.
Amber: Is it gonna taste like barbecue, Karl?
Karl: So here’s the thing. When we were talking, I did mention that I like Maerzen, right? And so Maerzen in German, it means it’s brewed in March. That’s where that comes from that. But the smoke beer part is actually not one of my favorites. So it’s been a long time.
Chris: Oh no.
Amber: Oh, sorry.
Karl: I have a backup. I have a backup, but I figured, you know what, I’m wanna be open-minded. It’s been a long time since I’ve had it. And I don’t wanna spoil anything for you guys. So let’s dive in, I guess.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Let’s dive in. So, I’m gonna crack this open. I’ve got a glass for it and everything.
Karl: Same here.
Chris: I’ll try to get a pour.
Amber: These are not twist off, huh?
Karl: No.
Amber: It is always fun to watch the pours. This is darker than I thought it was going to be. It’s hard to tell because it’s in a really dark brown glass bottle, so you can’t really see the color of the beer, and it’s got a very kind of old school German looking label that looks like it’s, I don’t know, parchment paper with a seal on it. Maybe would be how I would describe that for people lisTenong.
Karl: Now what’s interesting too is, you know, the writing at the top of the label is pretty difficult to read anyway. But I can…
Amber: Do you speak German Karl? Can you read that?
Karl: Nicht gut? Yeah, not very well. I don’t speak. So it says Dem Bayerischern so it’s from Bavaria and it says, the next word is Reinheitsgebot. Reinheitsgebot is a German old German beer purity law that basically said that the only thing that you could have in your beer is water, hops and barley. Water, hops, yeast, and barley. Right? So you couldn’t have any additives in your beer. And so it has to have water, hops, yeast, and barley, which makes it interesting.
I don’t know how they get the smoke flavor in it. I mean, I guess they don’t count smoke as a flavor.
Chris: According to what I read about this, they apparently take the barley malt and they kiln it over a fire with Beechwood logs.
Karl: Oh.
Chris: And that’s where the flavor comes from. I haven’t tasted this yet, but it smells old. Like it’s from an old brewery. Like it’s got that molassesy kind of…
Amber: I don’t know if that’s a compliment.
Chris: I’m not sure if it’s a compliment either to be clear.
Amber: I was just gonna say to me it smells like molasses. Like I don’t get s smokey. Like I’ve had smoky things where it kind of smells like barbecue. Right, right. It smells like molasses to me. Okay.
Chris: I’m gonna let you taste it before I say anything. I don’t wanna ruin that initial experience for you.
Amber: Oh my God, it really does!
Chris: It tastes like a campfire, y’all.
Amber: Are you trolling us with this beer, Chris?
Chris: No, I honestly not. It’s the place that I typically buy from. It has a reasonable selection, but once you start to stray into international territory, the selection gets narrower and narrower.
And so I only had a couple to choose from and I was like, well, this says Maerzen on it, but it also, it has this weird smoke beer thing. And I’ve never heard of that before. And I was like, oh, let’s have an experience. And boy is it an experience. But
Amber: Yeah, exactly what you remembered, Karl?
Karl: It is exactly what I remembered. My, my impression is a little bit more positive now than it was the first time. What’s interesting is you get the very initial time it touches your tongue, you get that multi molasses flavor that Amber was talking about, the smell. And then the aftertaste is pure smoke, man. It’s yeah,
Chris: It really is.
Amber: I’ve never in my life, smoked a cigarette. Somehow I missed that in college. Not that I’m sad about it, but…
Karl: Yeah.
Amber: This is what I imagine a cigarette tastes like.
Karl: You know what? It’s not wrong. I smoked for 20 years. I quit when my youngest daughter was born a little bit after she was born, mostly because it we had decided we were not gonna smoke in the house anymore. She was born in June. I’m telling you, by December we were done. We were like, because we’d go out outside and the…
Amber: Outside in the snow?
Karl: Freezing and be like, I’m, I don’t need this. I quit.
Chris: Nice.
Amber: Oh man.
Karl: Would I be breaking the rules if I brought out a backup beer?
Amber: No. You can bring out a backup here.
Chris: Our co-host who’s not here today, he always has a Diet Coke on his desk. He just uses that to chase the things that are not very good.
Karl: So here’s the, here’s kind of more along the lines. This is a Hawker of Shore, and it’s Oktoberfest. I should have just said Oktoberfest to you guys.
Chris: I’m pretty sure I saw that exact label on the shelf when I was looking.
Karl: Because it says Oktoberfest Maerzen on the label. And that’s where the, that’s what the style, that’s an Oktoberfest. So they’re kind of synonymous. They brew Oktoberfests in March.
Chris: Yeah.
Karl: Yeah.
Chris: That was quite an experience. I’m a thumbs down. I’m trying to think of like a food that would redeem this or something, if you had it with something, but I can’t think of anything, so I’m also a thumbs down.
Karl’s Background in Live Events, Technology, and Accessibility
Amber: Alright, well we are really excited. Of course, you know, we talk beverages and it’s fun and this is like our Friday happy hour. But of course we have you here to talk about accessibility and I’ve been especially interested in hearing more about your new events platform, Eventably. So we’re gonna be talking about how you’re re-imagining event ticketing.
From an accessibility and maybe other perspectives as well. So I’m wondering, Karl, could you maybe start a little bit by sharing what your personal journey is that has brought you to Eventably? And how you got here.
Karl: So, I’ve all, I’ve I’ve told this story a couple of times like conferences and stuff like that, but for some context, you know, on my background, like the web didn’t exist when I graduated high school.
It didn’t it didn’t even, it exist until I was, you know, almost outta college and stuff like that. So I came at this, after the fact. You know, I grew up in a generation where everybody was like, you should learn about computers, you should learn about computers. And I played with a computer one winter when I was like 13 and then I was done with the computers.
Man, it was, that was it. I was more into skateboarding and cars and stuff like that. So fast forward to you know, the mid nineties and I was working in the music industry and I worked as a talent agent, a talent buyer, which is the person who books shows at clubs and a manager. And I managed a couple punk rock bands.
I also did, I was a talent agent for bands and I booked well over a dozen, almost two dozen US tours for metal hardcore punk stuff. And and that was at a time. If you guys remember, in the mid nineties nationwide, long distance calling didn’t exist. Like you had to pay by the minute.
And you were charged. I mean, you got a really good deal, you were paying 5 cents a minute. Well, my job as a booking agent was dialing the phone. I was banging on the phone like 40 hours a week, calling clubs and stuff like that. And that was, you know, that was kind of an expensive kind of thing.
And I started using email. I had my own talent agency. I worked in New York for a little bit and then I left and worked for myself and I and I had a kid, a college kid that I paid to be web guy and he made website stuff. And eventually I was like, I think I can do that stuff myself.
So I started doing website updates and stuff like that, and I learned I learned ASP Classic, you know, like classic ASP with Visual Basic. Or I learned JSP and PHP and all that sort of stuff. One of the things I used to do is I used to require payments of 50% upfront. So let’s say a band was guaranteed to get paid five grand for the night, I’d require a 50% deposit.
So I learned that the Authorize.net Gateway API and all, you know, that’s how I got into all this stuff was was mostly that. And I was young. I was in my twenties at the time. And the thing about working in the music industry was really cool because I’d make a thousand dollars a day, right?
I mean, this was back in, like I said in the nineties, a thousand dollars a day is pretty awesome. And then I would make nothing like in the wintertime, right? Because your bands want to be, you know, your bands wanna be on tour in the summer and not on the winter, and you know, you got holidays and all that sort of stuff.
Well, here I am, an immature kid, not knowing how to manage my money. It was like, you know, lots of money, no money, you know, all that sort of stuff. And and I was looking, I was like, I should do something more consistent. Man, this web thing is pretty interesting. Now I’m in the DC area. And so now for the trivia folks who were interested in accessibility, what happened in 1998 was Section 508 got passed, right?
What happened in 2000, Section 508 became enforced. You know, there was that two year period from section 508 coming out to section 508 actually being quote unquote enforced, and so similar to GDPR and similar to European Accessibility Act and all that. Nobody cared about any of it until the enforcement period started, right?
Amber: Unfortunately, very true.
Karl: So, fast forward out, it’s 2000 and I’m looking for a full-time job as a web developer in the DC area, and I’m applying at places like Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and what we call beltway bandits here in DC which are government contractors. And I’m applying for jobs and they’re like they would run my stuff through Bobby. Which was the WAVE at the time, right?
Bobby was a free online testing tool and they’d be like, oh, we can’t hire you. Your stuff’s not accessible. We can’t hire you . And after getting rejected a couple times like that, I was like, F this. I’m just, I don’t learn it there. Is it the accessibility, whatever this accessibility thing is, you know, like I had no idea what it was.
I was pretty active on Usenet news groups back then and read up on it. Lots of awesome people were there who were still in accessibility these days Jez Lemon and Patrick Laka over at Tetra Logic. They were active on Usenet at the time, and so I was reading the stuff that they said and I joined the the WebAIM mailing list and all that, and really got exposed to it and I was like.
Man, this actually does make sense. Like this stuff is, the accessibility stuff matters. You know what I mean? And for me, it became a kind of thing where it was like, okay, the quality of my work, how good of a job I do on this accessibility stuff impacts real people on the other side of the screen. And I thought that was really cool.
And so that’s how I really, you know, really got into accessibility was because of that stuff. You know, it was really a cool idea and really , I turned this thing that was keeping me from getting a job into a passion. ‘Cause I thought it was really just, yeah, this makes sense.
What is Eventably, and What Inspired Karl to Build It
Chris: And what, kind of led you to Eventably once you got into accessibility, and then maybe making this a two part question: Can you segue into what Eventably is at a high level?
Karl: Yeah. Well, I’ll answer that really high level first. Eventably is an events management and ticketing platform.
So to continue the story, you know, I’ve worked as a accessibility consultant, for a really long time. In 2014 I started working on Tenon. And Tenon was a testing tool that I felt was really badly needed in the space because at that time, all the accessibility testing tools were tools that you had to use after the fact.
In other words, you had to have a live server, have had to have a live website, et cetera. And so you’re testing post-production code and at that point, you know, the train has left the station on 1,001 different accessibility impacting decisions. And so I wanted a tool that could work for developers as the developers were working.
So Tenon was an API based accessibility testing tool. Came out before acts before anything like that. And it was the first with the command line interface, the first with a. Grunt and Gulp plugin. The first to work with Selenium. The first to the first to have a WordPress plugin, first to have a Drupal plugin, et cetera.
And it really sort of changed the game on how accessibility testing was done. I sold that company to Level Access in 2021. Stayed around for a little while and really, you know, really basically from the time that transaction was done, I was sort of thinking about, well, what else could I do?
What could I do to disrupt things and make it more accessible? And I’ve always had ideas in my head around things that people can’t do, you know, that they wanna do in everyday life, the mainstream existence in the world. Because, and you think about online meetings, you know what I mean?
Online meetings for a very long time were terribly inaccessible. GoToMeeting and WebEx and all that stuff, they were horrible. Market pressures have improved them. Zoom came out, Zoom’s been pretty good, you know, that sort of thing. It’s not perfect, but it was pretty darn good. I knew that wasn’t a space that I could compete in.
Banking, obviously you can’t, I couldn’t compete in shopping, you know, all that sort of stuff. There’s all these things that you, I couldn’t penetrate as a solo founder. But one thing that’s always been stuck in the back of my mind is tickets to conferences. You know, I speak at conferences well over a dozen times a year, on the average year. A lot of ’em are accessibility conferences, and at every one of ’em, somebody’s complaining about what a pain in the butt it’s been to buy tickets. And I thought, okay, I’m gonna look into that, you know? And the other thing with Tenon was a passion project that sort of stumbled into success.
I mean, as soon as Tenon was publicly available and the world knew about it, I was having conversations with Microsoft about, you know, about them using it. And it was just an accident, you know what I mean? I just built this thing I thought was cool, and the next thing you know, it’s getting all this attention.
But I didn’t wanna play my next startup by chance, you know? So I did a whole bunch of market research and looked into it and I was like, oh yeah, this is a viable business thing. People…
Amber: What were you looking at when you were looking at market research to determine that? Something that it was viable. And were you specifically saying you wanted to have another accessibility focused startup?
Karl: Yes, it was definitely 100% from the very beginning. I wanted to disrupt something. From the accessibility perspective, because there’s a couple of other things that I have aspirations for in terms of, I want to prove to all the naysayers, including accessibility naysayers, that complex software can be accessible.
Lots of times you hear people say, well, it’s a very complex thing. We can’t make it really accessible. You know, they sort of throw in the towel before the conversation even begins. And then the other part is, to prove that there’s actual ROI to accessibility, that accessibility as a differentiator will make a business successful.
So there’s that sort of stuff. And of course, again, just, you know, just proving that it can be done is a really big deal to me. And I don’t want this to be a niche product. I want it to be a mainstream product that’s accessible. And that’s something that people tend to misunderstand when I talk to them about Eventably, is it’s an accessible events ticketing platform, I should say, probably that the other way around.
And it’s an events management and ticketing platform that is accessible. So in terms of the market research thing, we were looking at the number of events, the number of attendees, the average ticket price, et cetera, et cetera, for mainstream stuff not accessibility stuff.
That being said, we do have some, I would say, talking points around accessibility. And what I mean by that is we know that 80% of all people in the United States, all working adults in the United States have attended at least one ticketed event in the last 12 months. At least, at least one.
Amber: Oh wow.
Karl: Combine that with the fact that 20% of the population is disabled.
If you do the math, 80% of 20% is 16%. And so, you know, if you think about could you grow your business by 16%, could you penetrate 16% more than you’ve already penetrated by being accessible? That’s been the big question. And what we found is that it’s true. So more numbers. There was a survey done by a nonprofit in England that said 70% of disabled theater goers would not go to an event if they didn’t know what to expect when they got there. In other words, even if I could buy the ticket, if I don’t know what to expect because I have certain accessibility challenges, I’m not gonna go.
You know, is there accessible signage? You know, they have elevators, they have escalators. Like some of these things you would normally think are obvious because they have to be there ’cause of the ADA but that’s not entirely true, right? There’s lots…
Amber: Communicated on their website or something, then
Karl: Yeah. Like, where’s the entrance?
Amber: …ADA compliant.
Karl: Yeah, and ADA compliance isn’t always guaranteed for obvious reasons, but one of those reasons is, if it’s in an old building, right? An old building might not have a lot of needed accessibility stuff because it’s old and, its construction predates the ADA and those requirements and stuff like that.
And if it hasn’t been modified since then the ADA stuff doesn’t apply to them and et cetera, et cetera. So you think about that in major cities where, you know, the theater districts are in older parts of town, or, you know, whatever the case may be. That’s that part we’re talking about, which is, I don’t know what to expect when I get there, you know?
What’s the situation with assistance? Can I bring an assistant? Now, according to the ADA, that answer should always be yes, but that’s not always the case, right? There’s business owners that get salty about that sort of stuff. Again, where’s the entrance? Where’s the elevators? Where’s the escalators? Where’s, you know, the accessible bathrooms the accessible seats? Do you have accessible seats? Again, the ADA says you’re supposed to have a certain amount based upon the number of seats in the area, right?
Are those sold out or they, you know, how do I get to them? Who do I talk to? All of these sorts of things. And so we’re attacking accessibility sort of two ways. One is of course the platform itself. I won’t name any names ’cause I don’t like badmouthing competitors, but there are multiple competitors in the event space who have been sued.
One of which only earlier this spring had just settled with the ACB or AFB one of those for inaccessibility and multiple ones have also been sued in the past for that sort of stuff. And so the ticket buying experience, of course, is the first part. There’s another part which we called the disclosures and that is that disclosure of that information. And so there’s accessibility information for the event and accessibility information for the venue. And we provide the ability for people to disclose that too. And so that’s kind of how we’re tackling it.
We obviously can’t hold a gun to event organizers heads and tell them they have to supply these things or any of that sort of stuff. Just providing that capability to the organizer to make that stuff known for the event attendee.
Chris: Yeah. If you give them the platform, right? That makes it a lot easier for them to….
Karl: Yep.
Chris: … comply with these requirements. So you mentioned two already, which was ticketing and disclosures. Are there other ways that Eventably is tackling the accessible event experience or anything else beyond those two things you can share?
Karl: We’ve had people ask us about consulting to help do the events themselves. And so we don’t do that, but we have a small network of people that we trust, who, if an organizer comes to us and says, Hey, I want to do this stuff. I believe in this stuff, can you help me? We say, no, but tell us a little bit about your event and then we’ll put you in touch with the right people to help you out with that sort of stuff.
Chris: That’s awesome.
Amber: That’s great.
Karl: Yeah.
Amber: I wanna dive a little bit more into some of the common problems that maybe exist on event websites. But first we’re gonna take a quick commercial break and we’ll be right back.
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How Accessibility is Broken in the Events Space
Amber: So, of course our podcast is all about digital accessibility, and I’m sort of curious, are there common problems that you see on ticket selling websites that Eventably is solving, but also that you’re like, man, how are they still making these mistakes in 2025?
Karl: You know, one of the things that a lot of people who might not know about accessibility miss out on is really how sometimes abysmal things can be from an accessibility perspective for people. It’s job security for people like us, but , it’s not really a great experience sometimes for people, which is sort of the whole thing. Like finding events, right? Getting access to the information about the events. Determining if tickets are available, if they are available, knowing which ones are applicable for you, what they cost, adding those to your cart and the whole checkout process, all that sort of stuff. All of it is generally pretty bad. It gets even worse when you start diving into seating charts.
And and virtual things like virtual experience things. Now in disclosure, sorry, go ahead.
Amber: Oh, I was just, I was gonna ask you that. I was wondering that, are you able to do in Eventably ticket or like seat picking off of a map?
Karl: Not yet. Those, both of those two things that the seat picking and the virtual event side of things we’re not able to do just yet.
Um, I have done all the UI work and now there’s a bunch of backend stuff that I have to deal with for the purchasing and inventory management and all that sort of stuff. That’s that’s a little bit heavy lift. But but yeah, I mean, all that sort of stuff is really difficult for people to do.
And it seems one of the hardest things we have to describing this to potential investors and things like that is that it’s so hard to convey how inaccessible competing platforms are and how different and better we are when sort of things look the same.
And look like it works. I can check out, I can purchase the ticket. Like they, they don’t really understand how a lot of those things that you all and I’m sure your audience is well aware of. Things like the labeling of controls and whether the controls work with a keyboard or not, and where focus goes as you’re interacting with stuff and all those sorts of things that require detailed forethought in the design and development process that don’t, that just don’t make it in to those products.
You know, and the more as anybody who listens to this can probably attest that they’ve got experience using stuff is the more complex those interactions are, the more likely it is that there’s gonna be problems.
Chris: 100%.
Karl: Yeah.
Crowdfunding and Attracting Investors
Chris: And you mentioned like investor conversations and kind of, promoting Eventably to people before it was a fully fleshed out product.
And I think that leads me, or I wanna segue into the crowdfunding campaign that you all did. If you wanna take us through like target, timeline, how things changed over the campaign, if anything changed, and if there’s anything you wanna share with our audience that you learned from that process.
Karl: Yeah. So in the very, very early days we did an Indiegogo campaign and the Indiegogo campaign was similar to those that you would see for games and things like that. It was just an Indiegogo, you know, give us money ’cause you think we’re awesome and we’ll give you some kickbacks and stuff like that.
And that didn’t go as well as I had hoped it would. I think there’s two reasons for that. I think the part of it is just the accessibility community is smaller than the general tech community out there, and that’s to be expected. One of the other ones was, one of the feedbacks that we got was a lot of people going, well, what do I get out of it?
You know, like a T-shirt or, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, the other, the perks that we were offering. They weren’t the same as you would get, like with a game. If you’re gonna, if you’re gonna contribute to a game, then that’s gonna give you discounts for your game or whatever. And for me personally I’ve done, I’ve personally contributed to the campaigns for physical hardware tech devices and things like that.
And, you know, you get, again, you get a discount on what, whatever the thing was. So I think our Indiegogo campaign was a little bit on the weak side. Anyway. So we only got about $6,500 outta that one. It was well spent for sure. ’cause we funded development. But now we’re also doing, we’re doing a We Funder campaign now.
And the difference is equity crowdfunding. Like it’s it’s equity funding. There, it’s actual investment. And I won’t get into the geeky details, but this is covered under SEC regulations and all that sort of stuff, and it is actual equity in the company and that’s been a much more powerful much more powerful message for a lot of for a lot of people who, you know, believe in what we’re doing and believe in the importance of it and stuff like that. But they also, you know, they want to get something out of it and they’re actually getting part of the company, right? They’re getting actual equity. And so that’s been pretty successful. It’s a little bit slower, of course, than I want it to be, but we’re at 65,000 now.
Chris: Hey.
Karl: Great, and again, it’s and what people get out of it, of course, like I said, is they get early equity, access to the company, actual ownership. And they get a discount on future purchases of equity later on down the road when we, if we do another investment round, they get a discount on those shares as well.
And so that’s been really cool. And I’m a big fan of what we’re doing with that because I want the community to be part of it, right? Like I could go to angel investors and pitch meetings and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like I could totally do that. I have one of my co-founders is a CRO. He went to Wharton Business School in Yale. This guy’s got an MBA. He is, he’s great at that sort of stuff. But my thing is I really do want people, especially people in the disability community and the accessibility field to actually have ownership in this. That’s a big passion for me is that, you know, there’s always that saying in the disability world, nothing about us without us.
Bang. Here you go. Be. Yeah buy in own part of my company.
Chris: Be an owner. Yeah.
Karl: Yeah.
Amber: That is really interesting. You’ll have to give us the link and we can put it in the show notes for people who wanna check that out. We did a lot of fundraising conversations. And then we did bring in an angel investor for Equalize Digital a couple of years ago, and I explored some of the like equity crowdfunding platforms.
But I was always like just because I was trying to think, you know, how much effort am I gonna have to put into building this? That’s the weird thing about crowdfunding is you really have to get people excited about what the product is, and you have to do a lot of social pushes and you have to like all these videos and all of that kind of stuff.
And I’m curious, I don’t know, like maybe it’s a little bit more positive when people are able to do more of the equity investment than just like the regular crowdfunding, but I’m, do you feel like there’s enough public interest and accessibility to actually support that? That’s what I was nervous about. And then I ended up being like, I feel like I’m gonna put so much effort in, it’s not gonna do anything. So we decided not to do it.
Karl: Yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely a harder slog too, right? Because the, you know, with an angel investor, they’re writing a hundred thousand dollars check and you’re done, you know, you got like a hundred grand in your pocket.
Whereas with us a lot of our investors are…
Amber: Ten dollars, fifty dollars…
Karl: Yeah. I mean, thankfully I don’t think we’ve got anything less than a hundred, and most of them are at five grand. A large portion of ’em are about five grand a piece, which is great, but it’s still a harder slog. Getting there at five grand a piece to something big is pretty hard.
And so that’s, you know, it is a concern, like you said, is the community. Is the accessibility community big enough for that? And I don’t know I really don’t know. I guess we’re gonna find out maybe the hard way, but I think about the potential return for this sort of thing and how much money is in the ticketing events platform space.
If you look at so there’s a number that a lot of investors look for, which is called a TAM. You guys probably know what that is. But a TAM for anybody doesn’t know is the total addressable market. That’s the total number of people multiplied by the amount average spent for whatever the thing is.
So if it’s let’s say it’s an iPhone. What’s the TAM on an iPhone? It’s how many people pay a thousand dollars for a phone across the planet. So for us, the TAM for just conferences, conventions, and trade shows we’re leaving sports and live music out, just all just conferences, conventions, and trade shows. It’s $20 billion. If we start counting live music and we gotta, you gotta dial it in a little bit. ’cause it’s not like I’m gonna compete with Ticketmaster and stadiums or anything like that, but like rock clubs, you know, like rock clubs that don’t have seating. Comedy clubs, things like that. If you start throwing that in there, now that TAM gets huge, you know, we’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
And so that’s what I hope is gonna resonate to people who, again, want to prove that there’s ROI and accessibility is that yes, the market is there, the market is huge. There’s a lot of competition out there, but that just the existence of competition also means there’s a market. You know what I mean? It’s proving product market fit by the fact that there’s so many other companies that do exactly what we’re doing in a less accessible way, and we’re hoping that we can grow the market, by 16%. I mean, our thesis is that we’re bringing 492 million people into this market worldwide.
Chris: Who were previously locked out of it because of a lack of features and information.
Karl: Yes.
Chris: That makes perfect sense.
Karl: Yeah.
Why Eventably Chose WordPress for its Marketing Site
Chris: So it did not escape our notice that Eventably is built on WordPress CMS. And as our audience knows, and as you might know, we’re pretty big fans of WordPress. So I’m curious if you considered other content management systems and what ultimately made you go with WordPress if you considered multiple.
Karl: You know, I mean. For me, the options were WordPress or WordPress. Because and the number one reason for it is the accessibility aspect to it. And then the second one was the fact that there would be non-technical people updating content. Those are the two really big factors. Because , if it was just gonna, let’s say it was just gonna be me or something like that, then I could have used some, you know, headless CMS or or I could have used some static web builders and things like that based on, you know, templating engines or whatever, and just maintain the content out of markdown files and be done with, you know what I mean?
But that’s a really geeky approach to doing that sort of stuff. And it wasn’t really a worthwhile exploration for me because I know somebody else is gonna have to manage the content on the site. And that means you need a robust content management system. And the reason why we didn’t do anything else was WordPress gives us the ability to have full control over the UI.
You know, subject of course to intelligently choosing whatever plugins we use. The theme is entirely ours. The block editor provides us everything we need to do to customize different pieces of information that we need, that sort of stuff. And so it was really kind of a no brainer at that point is to use WordPress for that stuff.
My personal website is WordPress, so yeah.
Amber: Yeah. If that’s what, you know, it really makes sense. Like I have a hard time envisioning if I would ever build a website that was not a WordPress website. I’m curious, are there any accessibility considerations that you’re putting in specifically for the website itself and those content creators and like any sort of training that you’re doing with them? Or did you hire a whole team that already knew accessibility?
Karl: So the design itself, because I’m not a good designer and nobody, none of the other people on the founding team are good designers either. The design itself was more of a collaborative effort of us on the founding team sort of outlining what we wanted.
And then coming in through there with myself and John, which is, he’s one of the, one of the co-founders. And John has worked with me at Tenon and works with me at Afixt as well. Sort out sort of outlined some of the accessibility parameters for the design. And then we got, we hired somebody to do the UI design in Figma.
We dial that in with the colors and the font choices and all that sort of stuff. And then we did the implementation. So it was a lot of, I guess something I alluded to a moment ago, which is like just forethought about what is the, what is an accessible outcome look like on this design and what are the things we need to worry about with respect to the colors?
The control types when we are implementing this, what, you know, if something looks like a button, does let it operate like a button, all that sort of stuff. And then of course, responsive design, what the reflow looks like and all that sort of stuff. But these were all things that we, again, we gave forethought to before the implementation.
So for instance, we didn’t just have our designer work on the UI design for the desktop layout, but also, hey, what does this look like when it reflows to mobile? And so our Figma designs have the mobile, the the desktop, the tablet and the mobile views and the break points to find and all that sort of stuff.
And I find that when you put the forethought into what you’re doing, it makes it go way more smoothly when you’re actually doing the implementation.
Amber: Definitely.
Closing Thoughts, Trying Out Eventably
Chris: So I’ve got a, I’ve got a two-parter to kind of wrap us up. So this is kind of your invitation, I guess, to share anything else you want our audience to know about Eventably or anyone who’s listening to or watching this. And also work in there, please, where people can go to learn more about the project?
Karl: Yeah, so the project right now we’re in a good space with the project. Being able to handle all of the all of the, I would say, bulk of the base functionality that you want out of an events management and ticketing platform. Defining your schedule, managing your presenters, managing your venues, having multiple venues, multiple ticket types, ticket discounts, free tickets, donation tickets, donations that are separate from a ticket.
Extra activities, all that sort of stuff. These are all things that are there and baked in. And if you’re used to using something like an Eventbrite or something like that, give us a try and see. We are obviously a new product and we’re growing, so there are things like we mentioned before that are like assigned seating and virtual events and all that sort of stuff that we’re not really doing yet.
But but we’d like to see people give us a try. The product is free for all free events. So if you have a Meetup, if you have a, if you have a bar camp or anything like that, you just use it for free now. And then for paid events, our pricing is pretty darn good. It’s it’s about the same as what you’ll expect us elsewhere.
It’s a dollar per ticket plus 3%. And plus the processing fees. So we think it’s an economical thing. And the other thing we have to offer that is really, I think a game changer is white glove support. Meaning we will actually manage the events for you online. Obviously the goal is for people to be self-sufficient in managing it themselves, but we’re not gonna sit there and expect you to be an expert user and all that sort of stuff.
You know, so it’s not like an Eventbrite or any of these others that are out there and they’re like, here you go, sign up and get started. We will walk you through the entire process from beginning to end to make sure it’s successful. The other part about that, as you guys know, as people who make products, is it gives us massively valuable information about where we can improve.
Amber: Oh yeah. We have these onboarding calls that we include with our Small Business and above tier of Accessibility Checker, and it’s a call with either me or Chris and it is the best use of my 30 minutes.
Karl: Yes, absolutely.
Amber: Anytime I do that, I’m always like it’s so, especially WordPress land, which, you know, like every WordPress website looks so different and there’s no way we could ever test our software on every possible theme and plug in combination. And so this allows us to literally see what it looks like in all these different combinations.
Karl: And I don’t think, yeah, I think people have a hard time believing me when I say this, but my favorite customers are complainers. Right? Because
Amber: Oh, really?
Karl: Because if somebody complains, it means they care enough to tell you how they feel and they’re probably, they’re gonna probably tell you about something that 10 other people thought about and didn’t say. So, because that’s the worst part is hearing later on down the road, oh, I couldn’t use the Accessibility Checker because whatever. And then it’s like a legitimate concern and you’re like, man, I should have fixed that. You know what I mean? And that’s…
Amber: I would’ve fixed it if I’d known. Right?
Karl: If I would’ve fixed it, if I had known. Yeah. So I love it when people complain, man. I mean, obviously I want them to do it nicely, but frankly speaking. As long as it gives me an opportunity to improve, that’s all I care about. And people think you’re crazy when you say that, but I’m like, no. Complain. Like we have a little, the little chat guy on the bottom right corner.
Click that thing and yell at us. You know what I mean? Because that gives us an opportunity to know something’s wrong and figure out something that, that we need to fix. So, so to that end, people can just come to the site, sign up at Eventably.com and that gives you the ability to start organizing an event.
And yeah, anytime anybody has any questions. Just fire up the chat or send us an email or whatever. Email me. I’m super easy to find, for sure. And we want to help people, you know, become successful on it.
Chris: Well, you heard it here, everybody. Karl wants your complaints about Eventably.
Karl: Yeah.
Chris: Go use it. Go try it out. It’s a super interesting project and we’re glad to support it in some small way by getting it out to people. And it’s super important that there are more sectors and industries that have accessible disruptors in them. So, kudos to you and your team for…
Karl: Thank you.
Chris: … for doing the hard work.
Karl: Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Amber: Yeah we really appreciate you coming on. I am sorry about this beer. I tried later on to take one sip. People who are watching will have seen me try to give it another sip. And I still, I was trying, it was when you were talking about how awesome WordPress was and I was trying not to make a gross face, but I was like, maybe it’ll have you know, gotten better as it breathed a little bit.
Karl: No, now it’s warmer even. And now you’re like. The smoke is even worse when it’s warm.
Amber: Yep. Well, we’ll have you back on again in the future to have a tastier beer and give us an update on this. So thanks so much, Karl.
Karl: Thank you.
Chris: Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in your podcast app to get notified when future episodes release. You can find Accessibility Craft on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. And if building accessibility awareness is important to you, please consider rating Accessibility Craft five stars on Apple podcasts.
Accessibility Craft is produced by Equalize Digital and hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds and Steve Jones. Steve Jones composed our theme music. Learn how we help make thousands of WordPress websites more accessible at EqualizeDigital.Com.