'ello from London.
About a year ago we decided that the first ever marketing strategy for Makeshift would be 'do interesting events'. So we hired CBM, one of the best events people in startup land and got to work. 

But as soon as we started, we came cross a big gap in the market - there didn't seem to be any nice apps out there genuinely aimed at people like us putting on small, free events that were kind of about marketing, but also just for fun.   

Like we always do at Makeshift, we decided to solve this problem the only way we know how, by hacking our own tool together, and the result was Attending, our tiny events app. But a hack can only survive so long under sustained use, and after 500 events and 5000 attendances we figured it was time for us to start taking our little side project a little more seriously.

So today we're really excited to introduce a re-designed, re-focused, and, frankly, gorgeous looking new version of Attending to you today. Over to Stef to tell you more...
 
A word from Stef, founder of Makeshift, on why we built Attending. 
The perfect tool for your free event.

I love going to events. I love meeting new people and having great conversations. We’ve built Attending for people who feel the same way. We want to help people organise and attend great events that do that. Meet-ups, lectures, mixers: free events that are all about meeting people and having conversations.

At Makeshift we’ve been doing this a lot - we host our own events that we think would be useful, and by doing that we've built a mailing list of people who are interested in what we're doing. We think other businesses should do the same.

The tools we found to organise free events seemed to be different to what we needed. Some don't let you get the email addresses of the people who are attending, so you're locked into their service; others have so many features that they're overkill for organising something really simple; most want to up-sell you into becoming a paid-for event so they can make money; some have great features but look really ugly; most require a login and password and for attendees to “make a profile”… so we went back to first principles and made the tiniest, simplest, most pragmatic, easiest-to-get-going-with, easiest-to-say-I'm-attending event page app we could think of.

Attending helps you as a business owner or startup to build a network of people around what you're doing. Everyone knows that gaining those first thousand fans, customers or users is crucial for an early stage company, and because Attending plays well with others (Twitter, Facebook, Mailchimp, Intercom, Google Apps) you're building your audience in your own way.

Attending is a really stripped-down service. It doesn't have all the features, and that's on purpose. We've kept everything simple. You probably couldn't run a big thousand-person conference using this, but there are plenty of apps for that kind of thing already. We want to help you to organise a regular after work meetup series, or a free seminar, or a meal out with peers, or indeed put on any kind of small, free, useful event.

So, here's Attending. Have a go, I think you'll like it.
Do you put on free events or do you know someone who does? Head over to Attending.io now and have a play with our beautiful new app ...
 
Try making your first Attending.io event page right now

Bonus job section! We're looking for a Tech Lead for Wrangler...
Over the last year we've made huge progress on our database analytics service Wrangler. We've recently released some significant new features, not least multi-data sources, allowing you to write single SQL queries across tables from any database.

Going into 2014 we will continue investing heavily in Wrangler, and the first item on the agenda is that we're looking for a dedicated Tech Lead to come and take over all technical aspects of the project.

This is a big role, and we're hoping to find someone very special to fill it - if you have over five years technical experience working in a data heavy environment we'd love to hear from you. Head over to our job description to find out more. 
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