Today is the day for me and my colleagues Tobias and Holger. Today we launched Colloq, a new event platform for organizers, speakers and attendees. We’ve worked for over one year on it and are proud to finally have launched our service to the public.

If you want the official news, you can head over and read the announcement post on the Colloq blog. Here I’m going to share a more personal view.

Colloq is not just a Lanyrd replacement. In our heads it’s way beyond it, has a different goal, and different aims. We don’t want to provide a social network, an event platform by itself. We want to create a space where event makers and attendees, where people who can’t attend events get a value from. We want to connect these people and make them learn from others. We want to build a library of events with its contents, with its coverage—including countless hours of videos, audios, transcriptions, blog articles and other sources other people can learn from.

Of course we also want to make it convenient for people to make events (create schedules, announce news, attract attendees) and to attendees to travel there, attend events and meet old and new people, eventually getting friends. We ourselves met at a conference and this very idea wouldn’t exist if we wouldn’t have sat in a bar talking about our dreams right after we first met a day before that. It actually took us years to start working on the project, but it’s happening now and I hope this works out.

Another reason I hope this works out is that I’m struggling with working for clients over the past years. It’s not that I couldn’t find new clients, but rather my ethical requirements, my interest in purposeful projects, the realization what I’ve spent a lot of time with in the past that makes me decline a lot of work nowadays. But of course I need to make a living and it’s not coming for free. But creating a platform without taking any external investment, creating it with privacy in mind and with all the technical convictions I have is something that feels purposeful. Building a platform that actually provides value to many people, where demand is there, seems useful. I’m not disconnecting with all my clients, I’m still serving a couple and will continue that. But I imagine being able to work on Colloq to earn most of my money at some point in the future.

If you like this, do me the favour and join Colloq and spread the word about it. Thank you ❤️