Deciding whether to attend an event or listen to a speaker often feels like rolling the dice. People waste time and money on poorly organized events or lackluster speakers, while high-quality ones struggle to attract attention. Existing platforms like Eventbrite or Meetup help users discover events but don’t offer reliable ways to evaluate their quality. Similarly, platforms like TED rate speakers but only for their own curated content. There’s a clear need for an unbiased, crowd-sourced system that ranks events and speakers across categories to help people make informed choices.

How It Could Work

A potential solution involves creating a platform that aggregates and ranks events and speakers based on attendee feedback, expert reviews, and engagement metrics. Here's one way it might function:

• Profiles: Detailed pages for events and speakers, including descriptions, past ratings, and user reviews.
• Ranking System: Scores generated from attendee surveys (e.g., "Was this event worth your time?"), expert evaluations, and engagement data (like audience retention for online events).
• Recommendations: Personalized suggestions based on interests, budget, and location, with metrics like "time well spent" to prioritize options.

Users could contribute reviews, while event organizers and speakers could claim profiles to update information, creating a feedback loop that improves accuracy over time. The platform might partner with early adopters to seed initial content and validate rankings through pilot tests in specific communities, such as university clubs or tech conferences.

Benefits and Incentives

Such a platform could serve several groups:

• Attendees: Professionals, students, or hobbyists could avoid bad experiences and discover high-value events.
• Organizers/Speakers: Feedback would help them improve, while high ratings could attract more attendees.
• The Platform: Revenue could come from featured listings, premium analytics for organizers, or affiliate fees for ticket sales.

Key to its success would be ensuring review authenticity—for example, by requiring ticket purchase verification—and differentiating from competitors by focusing on quality metrics rather than just event discovery.

Execution Path

A stepwise approach might include:

1. MVP: Start with a basic website aggregating public event data and allowing user reviews, targeting a niche like tech conferences.
2. Expand Features: Add speaker profiles, expert reviews, and personalized recommendations.
3. Scale and Monetize: Broaden to other event types and introduce revenue streams like promoted listings.

By prioritizing transparency and utility, such a platform could fill the gap between discovery and decision-making in the event space.