Splash Expands Into the $162B Large, Complex Event Market
Business Impact
Development Savings
Based on my work, Splash skipped building a native attendee app. Instead it prioritized features that customers were actually asking for that would also, incrementally, build our complex event capacity. This saved the company hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in development, marketing costs.
Secured Deals
A lightweight Guidebook integration was developed that secured deals. Now, with an attendee app integration in place, Splash could satisfy RFPs and put the market on notice about its future direction
Improved Retention
After the strategy was communicated with current customers, Splash saw higher customer retentions and renewals. Customers knew that we were on their side, building tools for their immediate and short-term needs. In doing so, we were making steps towards solving for mid complex and large events.
Splash is an event marketing platform that helps brands create, manage, launch, & measure event experiences
Small, repeatable programs drive pipeline into the sales funnel because they rapidly generate brand-compliant events at a lower cost.
Sales and marketing teams can then focus their resources on attendees who are most likely to convert.
Highly repeatable + low cost = consistent ROI.
Splash Strength
Splash dominates the low-complexity, low attendance, high volume market. For example: happy hours, dinners, product launches, field marketing events, webinars.
It knew the large event market existed but hadn’t yet felt the need to enter or explore that market.
Splash Weakness
Competition: Large, complex event solutions were creeping into Splash’s territory, enticing customers with the promise of a one-stop-shop.
Consolidation: Enterprise clients, pressured by CFOs to consolidate tools, were beginning to turn away from Splash, demanding a platform that could do it all.
Limited Growth: Small complex events, although high volume, had a ceiling. A clear route to growth was large complex.
Pain Emerges: Lost Deals & Churn
Closed-Lost deals and churn reports revealed a troubling pattern: Customers and prospects were now seeking all-in-one solutions. 22% of Closed Lost deals and 13% of Churn Reports cited lack of complex event features as a key reason for loss.
Confidence slipping: Splash risked losing not just net new deals but also its market position.
The team faced a critical decision: Adapt its product to do more complex events or risk irrelevance.
Problem
Splash is unable to, or faces great difficulty, growing revenue and maintaining customers because of its lack of complex event features.
Opportunity
Splash has the opportunity to make way towards the $162B Large Complex events market.
Success means being able to accommodate increasingly complex events, increased deal size, increased number of net-new deals closed, and increased number of renewals.
Research Question
How might Splash move towards entering the $162B large complex events market?
Leveraging Research to Move Towards the Large Complex Market
As the Senior UX Researcher, and an experienced product designer, I led the research effort to understand how Splash should move to make headway into the large complex market.
Research Methods
I collaborated with cross-functional teams to align priorities, build a research plan, generate evidence, and communicate recommendations. The research methods I leveraged to generate data were as follows:
Market & competitive analysis
Internal data review (Sales calls, support tickets, Salesforce reports, feedback forms)
Stakeholder interviews (Sales, Customer Success, Support, Product)
Survey design and analysis
User interviews
Constraints
Balancing Ambition with Practical Constraints
$0 research budget
Five weeks
Top-Down Solutioning CEO and executive leadership announced, during a company offsite, that Splash would build an attendee app by end of Q2. The reasoning: if Splash builds an attendee app, Splash will be able to close more deals, and compete, for complex events.
Methods & Findings
Market and Competitive Analysis
Analyzed analyst reports, G2 customer reviews, industry reviews, and competitor offerings.
Stakeholder Interviews
Spoke with sales, customer success, product, and support teams to align perspectives.
Sales saw an attendee app as a critical checkbox to win net new deals.
Customer success believed additional core features would drive long-term growth and improve retention.
Survey Design & Analysis
Sent a targeted in-app survey to 11,000 enterprise users, achieving a 6.1% response rate.
Found that 62% of customers did not use attendee apps, with cost and lack of need as top reasons.
38% did use them, and they cited issues with data integration and customization.
User Interviews
Conducted in-depth interviews with six different event organizers with experience managing large complex events and usage of attendee apps.
Discovered that session management, scheduling flexibility, and engagement tools were just as critical as the attendee app itself.
Attendee Apps were valuable to users when they were able to ingest complex event data. That way they avoided duplicative and manual work, not to mention a poor attendee UX.
Core Insights
A Strong Foundation Unlocks the Attendee App Opportunity
Focus: Product infrastructure and long-term enablement of the attendee app.
Behavioral Truth: Users don’t just want the app—they need it to be powered by good data.
Opportunity: Build core capabilities first to enable future innovation.
Unique Angle: Technical foundation as a strategic enabler.
Organizers see value in attendee apps when they’re powered by rich, real-time event data. By first building features like session management, segmentation, and engagement tools, Splash can create the infrastructure that elevates an attendee app.
Progress Builds Confidence
Focus: Customer psychology and trust-building over time.
Behavioral Truth: Customers want to see consistent forward motion before fully committing.
Opportunity: Communicate and deliver on a roadmap to increase trust and conversion.
Unique Angle: Perceived momentum is as important as feature delivery.
Enterprise customers look for signals of growth and long-term alignment. By delivering core complex capabilities in a phased, intentional way, Splash can show progress toward large-event readiness, increase trust with current customers, and win new business without overextending resources.
A Stepping-Stone Strategy Drives Sustainable Growth
Focus: Product strategy and internal execution.
Behavioral Truth: Small, well-sequenced wins build toward bigger outcomes.
Opportunity: Use modular feature releases to generate compound value.
Unique Angle: Strategic layering of product features over time.
Rather than jumping straight to an app, Splash has the opportunity to build momentum through smaller, high-impact features that ladder up to complex event readiness. T
This approach builds adoption of new capabilities and helps internal teams rally around clear milestones.
