The new-look Local Ruckus features a design that drew inspiration from Pinterest.
Nearly a year into working on Local Ruckus, Adam Arredondo decided that in order for the Kansas City startup to move forward, it would have to take a step back.
Make that several steps back.
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“We decided,” Arredondo said, “to start from scratch.”
Arredondo founded Local Ruckus in February 2011, and the web-based tool for discovering and sharing local events launched in October. But, come January 2012, Arredondo decided to scrap everything.
Now, nearly nine months removed from the hard restart, Local Ruckus has a revamped user interface, a mostly rebuilt back-end and a new mobile site to show for the team’s efforts.
“Initially when we launched, we were trying to do too much …” Arredondo (left) said. “We were trying to be good at too many things, so we ended up being bad at all of them.”
So Local Ruckus has narrowed its focus, zeroing in on what Arredondo calls “mainstream entertainment” associated with restaurants, venues and attractions. The Local Ruckus homepage, which was designed by Divshot‘s Jake Johnson and draws inspiration from the look and feel of Pinterest, features four high-level filters: entertainment, arts and culture, live music and food and drink. Users can also search events by category, cost, keyword, date and location. Individual venues have profiles that users can navigate to learn more about the venue and its upcoming events.
“Just everything is simpler and more intuitive,” Arredondo said.
Arredondo and software engineer Robert Fines both work on Local Ruckus full-time. The startup is on the verge of contracting additional help for front-end work and has one part-time employee in charge of curating events.
Currently, the Local Ruckus team enters and manages events itself. But Arredondo hopes event organizers will take a more active role in that process in the future — something the rebuilt back-end was designed to facilitate.
Increased participation from event organizers fits with Arredondo’s ultimate vision for the company: “To become this event-promotion platform — event-management and promotion for small, B-to-C businesses.”
Local Ruckus, which is self-funded to this point, is currently pre-revenue. But Arredondo sees a variety of potential revenue streams: promoted events; premium add-ons offered on a subscription basis; and API access to media outlets interested in tapping into Local Ruckus’ repository of events.
As Arredondo looks ahead, it’s apparent that founder and company have grown from the experience of going back to square one. “We’ve learned our lessons,” he said, “and we’ve come out with the new (Local Ruckus) that’s light years ahead of where that first one was.”
For a video walk-through of the changes to Local Ruckus, see the embed below.
Credits: Screenshot from localruckus.com. Photo of Arredondo from twitter.com. Video from LocalRuckus on YouTube.
Update (Aug. 29 at 11:45 a.m): Arredondo’s name was misspelled “Arrendondo” in a previous version of this post. The post has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of his name.
