Company
Hivey
Business Model
B2B SaaS
Industry
Hospitality
Venues Struggled with Vendor Coordination
Breweries, farmers markets, and similar venues were bogged down by time-consuming vendor management tasks. Their biggest challenges included:
Inefficient Communication: Endless emails and texts to confirm or cancel vendors.
High No-Show Rates: Cancellations without notice led to lost revenue.
Manual Scheduling Processes: Keeping track of vendors and events required too much manual effort, leading to errors and delays.
Misunderstanding of Hivey’s Core Value
Early users mistook Hivey for a vendor locator app instead of a vendor management platform—a positioning mismatch that led to slower adoption and confusion about its true benefits.
User Research & Persona Refinement:
Conducted in-depth interviews with target customers in the hospitality industry, gathering insights into the operational challenges of scheduling and vendor management. This research informed updates to the platform’s user personas, tailoring them more accurately to venues’ operational pain points.
Feature Enhancements:
Automated Scheduling and Notifications: Enabled venues to confirm or cancel vendor bookings automatically. Cancellations would trigger notifications to approved vendors, allowing easy replacement options, significantly reducing the administrative burden for venues.
Vendor Management Profiles: Developed comprehensive profiles with contact information, permits, menus, and documents, providing venues with a single source of truth for vendor information.
Integrated Calendar Updates: Integrated a dynamic calendar feature that updates automatically based on event confirmations or cancellations, reducing manual entry time and ensuring that event schedules were always accurate.
Feature Enhancements:
Clearer Messaging for Target Customers: Updated the early access sign-up page to emphasize Hivey’s value as a venue-focused tool for streamlining vendor coordination, replacing previous language that might have led venues to believe it was solely a food truck finder.
Incentives and Community Engagement: Partnered with local Facebook groups and influencers in the Denver area, offering a two-month free trial to encourage adoption by venues hesitant about cost.
Feature Enhancements:
Created an interactive ROI calculator on the website, allowing venues to estimate time and cost savings when using Hivey for vendor management and scheduling. This tool addressed cost concerns by demonstrating Hivey’s tangible value in dollar terms.
Usability Testing and Iterative Improvements:
Conducted usability testing sessions to gather feedback on the new features and UI flow, making iterative adjustments based on user feedback to optimize the experience further.
Displaying event drafts and upcoming events.
As a free user, vendors only have access to this vendor dashboard.
Revenue Impact: Within the first quarter after launch, venues adopting Hivey reported a 12% reduction in administrative time spent on vendor management, translating to increased efficiency and savings.
Market Penetration: In the initial Denver rollout, Hivey captured over 40% of the vendor market within one week.
Customer Satisfaction: NPS scores increased by 18% as venues found Hivey valuable for simplifying operations, reducing cancellations, and maintaining event schedules.
Hivey’s proactive response to user pain points, combined with targeted feature development and effective repositioning, established the platform as a valuable tool for the hospitality industry. By addressing the real-time challenges of event and vendor management, Hivey not only optimized operational efficiency but also built a solid foundation for further expansion into the national market.