A marketplace that matches events with venues and vendors
Avenue Mine is a two-sided marketplace where event planners post one request and get proposals from venues and AV vendors. We built the full platform.
Overview
Avenue Mine connects people planning weddings, corporate events, concerts and private parties with the venues and audio-visual companies that can host them. Venues and vendors list for free. Paying subscribers get new requests right away instead of 72 hours later.
We designed and built the whole platform: search, listings, requests for proposals, messaging, bookings, reviews and Stripe subscriptions. Learn more about our web design and custom software development work.
How a request becomes a booking
- Step 01
Planner posts a request
One request with the date, city, headcount and what the event needs.
- Step 02
Matched to vendors
It goes to venues and vendors in that city and state. Subscribers see it first.
- Step 03
Proposals come in
Vendors reply with proposals, and both sides message in the app.
- Step 04
Booked
The planner books, and can leave a review after the event.
What it does
- Search by city and date. Venues that marked a date as unavailable are left out of the results.
- About 5,800 listings kept fresh with Google Places photos and details from each business's own website.
- Requests for proposals sent automatically to matching vendors in the same city and state.
- Paid early access. Subscribers get new requests immediately; everyone else after a 72-hour delay.
- Proposals, messages, bookings and reviews for both sides.
- A blog with scheduled publishing for local event-planning content.
Problems we hit, and how we solved them
A marketplace lives or dies on its listings and its leads. These are real problems we found and fixed.
01Venue photos disappeared
Problem
Every venue and vendor card quietly lost its photo, because Google's photo links stop working after a while.
Our fix
A weekly job fetches fresh photo links from Google. If a lookup fails, the old link is kept instead of being wiped.
02Photo refresh never finished
Problem
Refreshing 5,800 listings takes over ten minutes. Server restarts kept cutting it off, so the same first listings were redone every time and most photos stayed broken.
Our fix
Each listing is stamped when refreshed and the oldest go first, so an interrupted run picks up where the last one stopped.
03New vendors got no leads
Problem
Vendors who signed up on their own were saved as "unclaimed", so they were never sent any requests.
Our fix
Profiles with an owner are now marked as claimed automatically, and a one-time fix corrected the existing ones.
04City search returned the whole state
Problem
Location data was inconsistent, so a search for "Los Angeles, CA" could show every venue in California.
Our fix
Every search must match both the city and the state, and states are matched on their exact spellings, short and long.
05Bots copying the directory
Problem
Scripts could collect the whole venue directory one page at a time.
Our fix
Visitors are limited in searches per minute, a hidden form field traps bots and page depth is capped, while search engines can still index the site.
06Missed payment confirmations
Problem
If the confirmation step after checkout didn't run, a vendor could pay without their subscription being turned on.
Our fix
Stripe's own notification creates the subscription as a fallback, so every paid vendor gets access.
What we did
- Marketplace platform
- Search and listings
- Lead distribution
- Stripe subscriptions
- Google Places integration