How we built a webinar listing platform in just 3 days, remotely
The TapChief experience of designing, building and launching a side-project, a Webinars Listing Platform, all from scratch, in a timeline of 3 days, working remotely.
Let’s travel a few months back in time. Remember those meet-ups and events before the COVID-19 era?
Some of the joys of attending them were spontaneous conversations, corridor chats, and drinks with like-minded people. This was all but gone with the onset of the pandemic. Events were called off, and gatherings were limited to only a handful of people. As a result, organisations and individuals started turning to online platforms to collaborate, network, and share ideas.
Soon enough, organisations began to realise the power of online discussions, webinars, social media live-sessions and more. In fact, we saw a lot of our team members attending such sessions to keep themselves updated, learn from experts, and keep their mind off the pandemic.
A few weeks into the lockdown, we found the sudden surge in online events impossible to keep up with. There were so many insightful sessions happening every day, but no way to track what’s happening and where.
We also noticed that many companies and individuals with smaller social media following were also coming up with excellent content. However, they were not getting the attention they deserve.
How did it all start?
That’s when it struck us, why not build a one-stop repository for webinars, podcasts, live-sessions, and other online events happening all over the world across categories.
Our entire team had already gone fully remote by then. So, Shashank, Komal, Karthika, and I got on a Zoom call, brainstormed and came up with a basic draft of the product flow and distributed tasks.
Step 1, Research
Our preliminary research on web-based tools and platforms in the domain made us realise that we were solving a relatively newer problem. Many of the existing solutions were primarily built for handling physical or offline meetup sessions and were not optimised for online or virtual events.
Drilled-down discovery of online events based on categories, figuring out speaker/organiser details, registering for the event, subscribing to notifications for upcoming or ongoing sessions were some of the major user pain-points with the existing solutions.
This gave us a pretty solid base to start designing our own solution to the problem — TapChief Webinars.
Next, Make it Pretty
We were quite clear on what the basic user flow should be. Also, we had made it a point to make sure that our users could find everything they need with very minimal effort. After figuring out the information architecture and a few low-fid sketches later, we were on Figma, crafting high-fid mockups for the user-flows.
Twelve hours and a dozen screens, countless iterations and a Marvel Prototype later, we finalised the UI — all in a single day (perks of working remotely).
Time to Build the App
We at TapChief have been part of the no-code ecosystem for a while. Since then, we’ve made Webflow an integral part of our design workflow, using it to build most of our statically hosted pages (Check out Kaushik’s post on how we created a fully functional early access campaign for Workspace using Webflow).
In addition to that, Webflow has really helped us bridge the design-development gap, making collaboration a lot easier. Nothing ever got lost in translation, as far as Webflow was concerned.
Moreover, the solution we were trying to build had a basic listing structure, and we knew Webflow CMS would be helpful here in reducing the design-content gap. So we used it to set up a basic database model linking all data-attributes and then invited our marketing team to collaborate on this.
The best part? Our marketing team could manage the content on their own, without any dependencies from the design team.
Curating the Webinars
From the get-go, we wanted to make sure our listings were accurate, well maintained, and periodically updated. We scanned online communities, (namely in domains like technology lifestyle, finance, startup) and selected the best of the lot to be showcased on the site.
Komal and Karthika, our content strategists, were in charge of compiling the listings. They explored several event-curation websites for listings and made it a point to check portals like YourStory, Inc42, Airmeet, Hello Meets and Product Folks and their social media channels for updates on webinars.
Automating regular Keyword and Hashtag search on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter) and closely following industry stalwarts like Trello, Atlassian, GitHub, Todoist made sure we had enough legit listings in place. We had around 200 webinar details across diverse domains uploaded on the platform before the launch. In addition to these, we made sure it is easy enough for visitors to suggest new webinars to be added to the list.
Keep calm, it’s Launch Day!
After three days of conceptualisation, ideation and execution, we launched the platform on 16th April 2020.
We were genuinely surprised by the overwhelming response from the community — low bounce rates and long session durations made us confident and gave us the energy to keep going and build better.
For us at the TapChief Design Team, it was truly a moment of glory — being part of the no-code ecosystem, we’ll now be able to break the code barrier and empower our product, growth, and design teams with the ability to wireframe, build, and iterate faster.
Here’s to the No Code Revolution and Future of Work! 🍻
The Way Forward
In addition to having partnerships with more organisations and facilitating better listings on the platform, we’re planning to collaborate with influencers to host live training and workshop sessions. We already have some of this live on our Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Parallelly, we’re in constant touch with our users, evaluating their experience and gaining insights on how to make things better.
Immensely proud of what we’ve built — something that started as a small side project idea is now helping thousands to learn from experts, stay up-to-date, and keep their mind off the pandemic.
P.S: Check out the site live here. Also, please do let us know of any webinar/online event you think should be on the list.
