Product
Consumer App & API
A consumer app (iOS & Android) backed by an automated pipeline aggregating events, alongside a B2B API powering clients' websites and listings.
Case study · Event Platform
Flyerz
Event discovery platform for France & Switzerland. Scaled from idea to 10M+ event views, 97% coverage, and 90% WAU/MAU. Built pre-launch hype securing 300K opt-ins in 48h.
Co-Founder
& Head of Product
2014
– 2020
Overview
A unified B2C app & B2B engine
Team & context
Bootstrapped Startup
Small, bootstrapped team with no external funding, aiming to become the source of truth in an under-digitalised local event ecosystem.
My Role
Co-Founder & Head of Product
Led UX/UI design, iOS development, built scraping scripts, and owned growth strategies & B2B sales.
The opportunity
Organising a highly fragmented event ecosystem
The friction
A scattered mess
Events were buried across regional press, Facebook, city websites and flyers. Existing solutions were cluttered with spam and fake events. No one owned "what's happening around me?" reliably.
The starting point
Strong early signal
We started with an MVP in Grenoble. It proved two things fast: people felt lost without a central source of events, and the right framing could trigger very strong organic word-of-mouth.
The challenge
Exhaustive data & effortless UX
We had to turn messy data into a clean database, serve answers to "what should I do?" in one swipe for lazy users, and find a B2B business model to avoid the local-ads trap.
How it worked
One loop for users, one loop for clients
A frictionless consumer app powered by an aggregation engine that also served as an infrastructure API for major media clients.
User Onboarding
Set your hobbies
Quick onboarding: pick a city and a few hobbies. That's enough to start pushing relevant events from day one.
Discovery
Scroll "Elvis"
"Elvis", our personalised feed, blended hobbies, behaviour and city context to answer "what should I know about this week?" directly.
Retention
Follow venues
Users followed their favourite venues and received notifications when new or highly relevant events popped up, creating a weekly habit.
For B2B Clients
The Event Infrastructure Layer
Underneath, the same structured database powered widgets, APIs and exports for media and transport companies. They integrated Flyerz data into their apps, websites and weekly print pages.
Execution
Scraping data, simplifying UX, designing for growth
Data Infrastructure
Build the event engine
I wrote scripts to scrape events from local websites and social platforms, while my co-founders built the intelligence layer. Impact: We surfaced 2× more events than competitors, powering our B2B strategy.
UX Redesign
Kill the map, ship the feed
User tests showed people didn't want to explore a map, they wanted a shortlist. We built "Elvis", a personalised feed. Impact: This simplification drove exceptional stickiness, with WAU/MAU peaking at 90%.
Growth
Design for distribution
With no budget, we focused on how people talk about events in city groups. Impact: We turned simple localized Facebook pages into 300K pre-launch opt-ins before the app was even live.
Audience Validation
300K pre-launch opt-ins in 48 hours
Before launching the app, I tested the idea with simple Facebook pages like "Événements à Lyon - été 2015". No product, no code, just the promise of a single place for local events.
What happened
I created pages for massive French cities. People poured in, posted their events, tagged friends. In 48 hours, these pages generated around 300,000 opt-ins across ~30 cities, entirely organically.
Why it mattered
The speed and scale confirmed the need instantly. It gave us a live lab to watch what people posted and gave us a built-in playbook for distribution when the app finally launched.
Strategic Shift
From app to infrastructure: pivoting to B2B
Why we pivoted
A pure B2C events app was a tough bet: local ads only work at massive density. Meanwhile, regional media groups and transport operators asked for our data to power their own local discovery experiences.
What I drove
I led pilots with regional media groups, defining data formats and API flows. Flyerz became an "event infrastructure layer" powering client sites and weekly print sections.
Result
What traction actually looked like
10M+
Event views
Delivered over 10M event views, with around 97% regional coverage, roughly 2× the events of our closest competitors. WAU/MAU peaked around 90%.
300K
Pre-launch opt-ins
The organic Facebook experiment generated 300K pre-launch opt-ins across ~30 cities, driving our massive launchpad with €0 ad spend.
B2B Layer
Media integrations
We signed B2B contracts with major regional media groups and public transport operators, powering both digital experiences and weekly print sections.
UX Award
Recognition
Featured heavily in outlets such as 20 Minutes (overloading our servers), and won the Rhonexpress Innovative UX award.
Retrospective
The endgame & what I learned
Why we stopped
COVID-19 market freeze
By early 2020, we were gaining B2B traction and about to sign larger integrations with major French media groups. Then COVID-19 hit. Within weeks, physical events disappeared completely. For an event-centric bootstrapped startup, waiting it out wasn't an option. We made the call to shut down Flyerz.
Monetisation can't be an afterthought
Engagement is not a business model. The earlier you test who pays and why, the easier it is to pivot before you're locked into the wrong motion.
Simple beats clever, every time
A beautiful map is nice; a one-swipe feed people open every week is better. Reducing effort almost always wins.
Virality is a signal, not the finish line
Hitting 300K opt-ins in 48 hours was a strong validation, not proof of product-market fit. You still need to do the hard work on UX and business model.
Sometimes the asset is the infrastructure
What people valued most wasn't our UI, it was our event graph. Thinking "what infrastructure are we quietly building?" shapes how I approach products today.