Redesigning Hive for the events industry
Turning a generic email platform into an event-centric workspace that helps promoters sell out shows.
- When
- 2023–2024
- Where
- Hive
- What I did
- Product design, Product strategy, User research, Prototyping
Outcomes
- 60% of organizers who opened Event Hub created a campaign from a guided template.
- Campaigns started in Event Hub were completed 15% faster than in the legacy campaign builder.
- 10% of all platform campaigns ran through Event Hub within its first four months.
- Cut design-to-code turnaround by 40% with a shared Figma library mapped to MUI.
Context
When I joined Hive as the first product hire, the platform had capable email and segmentation tools but no clear direction. Most customers were venue and festival teams of 1 to 5 people trying to sell out shows, and the product left them building every email and SMS campaign from scratch.
The problem
We defined Hive Attributed Revenue (HAR %), the share of a venue's ticket revenue that came from Hive campaigns, by joining PostHog behavioral events with CRM and ticketing order data.
Top performers followed a playbook
Our top 4% of promoters drove over 40% of their ticket sales through Hive. They sent targeted campaigns at four event milestones: Presale Signup, Tour Announce, General On-Sale, and Know Before You Go.
Everyone else started from scratch
36% of accounts sat below 10% HAR %. Interviews with venue promoters explained why. With dozens of shows on the calendar, small marketing teams didn't have time to plan and build multi-step email and SMS campaigns for each one.
Process and scope
We sketched an event-first workspace with promoters and used product data to keep engineering on what moved ticket sales.
Cutting a 6-week query builder to 2 days
An engineering pod was about to spend six weeks on a nested boolean query builder for segmentation. I audited 10,000+ historical segments in PostHog and found that 92% of promoters only used flat filters, and under 3% ever needed nested logic. A 2-day flat filter covered the real need and freed those six weeks for Event Hub.
What we shipped
Campaign templates based on top performers
Instead of building each campaign from scratch, marketers could start from milestone templates modeled on our top 4% of venues. 60% of organizers who opened Event Hub created a campaign from one.
Event Hub as the main workspace
Event Hub put live ticket inventory, revenue attribution, and campaign creation in one timeline view, and campaigns were completed 15% faster than in the legacy builder. We also made Events the default page in place of the old overview dashboard. Within four months, 10% of all platform campaigns ran through Event Hub.
Final notes
Building the habits of top performers into guided workflows worked better than expecting busy promoters to plan every campaign themselves. On the team side, a Figma design system mapped 1:1 to our MUI components in Storybook, plus low-fi mockups that let engineering start while visual polish happened in parallel, cut our design-to-code turnaround by 40%.
"Nick's been at the heart of it, being an excellent leader. His calm and collaborative approach to challenges has really inspired me, and I'm sure it's the same for the rest of the team." — Product Designer at Hive