Vibio: Event Platform for Creatives
2025
Personal
Hackathon
Event Management
SaaS
B2C
While I was participating at a design-a-thon at Sandskriti, we were faced with a unique challenge: to create an event platform that wasn't just functional, but also felt like it truly belonged to the creative community it was meant to serve.
Generic platforms often miss the mark, so we set out to build Vibio: an event experience designed by creatives, for creatives, from the ground up.
My Role
Tools Used
Understanding our Target Audience
Our process began with our own personal research and findings, before sitting on a call to discuss our ideas.
I called my fellow creatives and asked, “what’s missing for you?”, then listened empathetically. Below are the key highlights of the conversation.
Interview Highlights
Product Designer
Vansh: Hey bro! So tell me, outside of work, what are you really craving these days?
Product Designer: Honestly? Just space. I mean, I love what I do, but lately work has become everything.
Vansh: Space for...?
Product Designer: Space to create without a deadline. Without a manager hovering. Without feedback meets. I just wanna hang out with other creatives. Sketch, build weird prototypes, maybe paint. It's been a long time since I painted. College assignments are burdensome.
Vansh: Sounds like you want more freedom.
Product Designer: Exactly. And less talk about work. I'm exhausted by it. I want to be in a room with people who get it, but we don't have to talk about design systems or clients. Just... chill, laugh, maybe jam on silly ideas.
XR Designer
Vansh: What's your ideal designer community like?
XR Designer: One where I don't have to prove anything. No one asking, "So what are you working on these days?"
Vansh: That's a big one.
XR Designer: Yeah. I want people who understand that sometimes I'm tired. I don't wanna network. I want to just hang out, maybe shoot a fun reel, do a silly animation, rant about clients... and feel seen.
Vansh: You sound burnt out, Sumesh. I am burnt out. I want joy back. Creativity without productivity. That's the dream.
UI Designer
Vansh: You're fresh out of college, what kind of space do you wish existed?
UI Designer: One where there's no pressure to be perfect. I feel like even meetups are performative now.
Vansh: So, something casual?
UI Designer: Yeah. Just a bunch of people sketching, maybe playing board games, or building a crazy game that makes no sense. Something freeing.
Vansh: What about Designathons?
UI Designer: Please, not about work! I'm already drowning in imposter syndrome and deadlines. I want to make ugly art, laugh, and maybe learn weird things from other creatives—without anyone grading it.
Design Student
Vansh: What kind of events or communities do you wish existed for designers?
Design Student: Ones where I don't have to perform. Like, no portfolios, no pressure, no juries. Just designers being real with each other.
Vansh: Sounds refreshing.
Design Student: Yeah, I'm drained. Pitching to clients all week, jumping between campaigns... I don't want another Zoom webinar. I want a bonfire night or a sketch battle. Something offbeat. I really liked being in IIT Roorkee, we had a lot of fun.
Vansh: Do you feel safe venting in your current circle?
Design Student: Not really. Everyone's either competing or hustling. I miss just having fun with design for design's sake.
I gained some insights over 30-40 minutes of telephonic calls each from the creatives we knew living at different demographics (Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities).
Big revelation was that many professionals and students are actually avoiding designathons and competitive events because they don't want to think about work during their downtime, they're craving artistic freedom instead. The very thing that brought them to the profession.
We realised how important travel experiences are for creative growth - people kept mentioning they wanted trips at artistic destinations to explore their inner artist, some even skipped their events to hang out with other participants and had a richer experience.
Understanding our Competitors
My team mate discovered that most event platforms are seriously missing the mark for creatives. Even those who are are making it too complex for users.
Also they tend to charge too much while catering to everybody, which means creatives often feel like nobody's actually listening to their specific needs.
We came across various event platforms that host events globally and in India to understand the services they provide, their features, how they go about hosting their events and their pricing model. The overview is below.
What the other platforms do right?
- Events air nails naming: "Auditorium," "Networking Lounge". Clear, real-world labels that help guests find their way fast.
- Remo adds a dash of 3-D magic. A clickable floorplan with little tables and avatars turns a flat webinar into something that feels like mingling IRL.
- Unstop keeps the buffet tidy. Hundreds of challenges, one clean board. Filters and tags mean you spot your next hackathon in seconds, not hours.
- EventsAir prices like a tailor, not a supermarket. They keep their pricing fluid, organisers hop on a call, size up their event, and pay only for what they actually need.
What the other platforms miss?
- Not community driven. You buy a ticket, watch a stream, log out. No place to belong or keep chatting afterwards.
- Majority of events for creatives cater to competitive events only. Most events are win-or-lose competitions, great for trophies, terrible for playful exploration.
- Online events feel boring. Webinars and Zoom links ≠ the buzz of a true gathering. They feel flat, not festival-like.
- There is no event relating to cultural and artistic explorations. Events which help creatives unwind from brutal professional environments and helps them connect with their inner artist.
Watching some documentaries
To gain more insights on crowd behaviour to platforms hosting events, I took a spinoff to understand our social media giants and what made them grow with respect to users. It's just my personal process to understand things better.
I watched a few documentaries and unravelled the secrets of community building, how powerful it can get and how to integrate it in our own product.
Brainstorming Time !
One key insight we circled from our research: Creatives want the freedom to switch gears, jam, wander, vent, repeat. Our platform should let them do exactly that without leaving the stage we created for them.
We hopped onto a blank Fig Jam board, call‑transcripts and reddit threads, competitor screenshots pinned in one corner, avatars zooming everywhere, and a lot of cursors going about while we discussed over calls. After 3 straight hours (and zero coffee breaks, believe it or not) the chaos crystallised into a plan.
Key Features
The Fig Jam soon looked like rainbow confetti. These were the key features we all agreed upon.
Laying up the Ground Work
I created the information architecture to keep the structure of the design intact while our teammates work on it at their own times.
I also created some paper prototypes to provide a heads up for my team mates who were designing the hi-fi wireframes for it.
Catering to Design
I created the logo, brand guidelines and the design system for Vibio for my team mates to follow. My role in creating wireframes was limited to creating the "creative spirit" and event hosting flow for the platform.
The idea behind it was the product to be holistic both in creation and approach.
My involvement in creating the wireframes was limited to "Creative Spirit" and event hosting flow and making fixes to the final prototype. The heavy lifting for rest of the UI was done by my team mates.
Creating the Business Model
Before creating the hosting and pricing flow, I worked with my team mate to create a business model for the platform. As I mentioned before, this was cruicial to create the holistic vision for the product.
Since our event management platform was niche specific. We dug around to find some stats online from potential revenue and business point of view.
Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy
Creator & Artist Outreach
- Identify and onboard early adopters: design studios, art collectives, open mic groups, student communities, gallery curators.
- Offering incentives like 3-month free Pro Tier for the first 100 events.
Social Media & Content
- Launch with short-form creative content (reels, artist interviews, event trailers).
- Build niche followings on Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Partner with Colleges, Design Schools & Design-related firms
- Offer a dedicated student/edu plan.
- Encourage institutions to host internal hackathons, designathons, and creative fests on our platform.
Build Local Ambassadors
- Forming city-based creative circles who can host regular meetups or micro-events under our brand umbrella.
SEO & Discovery
- Launch a content hub (blog, tutorials, event recaps) focused on art, design, heritage, and events.
- Optimize for long-tail keywords like "art events near me" or "how to organize a design hackathon".
We decided on the revenue streams and a Go-To-Market strategy for our platform.
Then I calculated and set some business KPIs to showcase our plan and key metrics to verify our performance and measure our progress.
For our users and event participants
For event hosts
Then we decided over the pricing for our event participants and event hosts. We took inspiration from other platforms and Discord Nitro.
We also considered the feedback on reddit for unfair pricing for big scale events. Hence we kept the flow for big events through a meeting (Based on event) keeping it fair and square.
Final Prototype
My team mates and I created a working prototype in just a day to showcase our vision better.
So I created an interactive framer website for our presentation. You can check it out at the link below.
Creating a Presentation that Stands Out
After everything was done and about to be finished/refined, I went ahead to create the presentation to pitch our idea.
I knew everyone would be creating a standard pitch deck. But for the insane effort our team pulled and that too in a week, the theme of our app led me to feel that our idea deserved something much better.
So I created an interactive framer website for our presentation. You can check it out at the link below.
Takeaways & Reflection
This project was far more than just a design exercise. It gave me essential lessons in leadership and the complexities of bringing a collaborative vision to life. My role naturally evolved into being the glue that held the project together, from creating the initial information architecture and branding to ensuring the design system was followed and developing the business model.
Navigating the team through personal challenges, like a teammate falling sick due to overwork, handling difference of opinions taught me invaluable lessons about empathy and resilience. Ultimately, Vibio was a powerful lesson in how to maintain consistency, cheerlead a team, and pull all the disparate threads of design, branding, and business strategy into a single, cohesive product.
