Why We Don't See More Innovation in Event Tech

Innovation requires experimentation. Launch fast, fail fast, rethink, regroup, try again.

In startup parlance, that's called building an MVP, a Minimum Viable Product. It's the foundational playbook of modern software. Ship something small, learn from real users, iterate.

But here's the thing: MVPs don't really work in event tech.

And I don't mean building a feature, or putting together a cool demo. I'm talking about a real, viable product that you can deploy at a live event. Not in the margins. As a core part of the experience.

The Problem With "Minimum" When the Stakes Are Live

I've now built two event tech companies from scratch. Attendify in 2011 (gosh, am I that old?) and Highbar in 2026. And both times, I've arrived at the same conclusion: the minimum amount of work required to be viable in this space is enormous.

A live event is not a sandbox. There are no second chances on event day. If your badge scanning doesn't work, your agenda is wrong, or your app crashes during a keynote, you don't get to call it a "learning." You just failed, publicly, in front of your client's most important stakeholders.

That's a fundamentally different risk profile than most software categories. In SaaS, you can ship a rough v1, get feedback, and improve over time. In event tech, your v1 needs to perform flawlessly in a high-pressure, time-bound, live environment. The gap between "minimum" and "viable" is massive.

The Configurability Moat

This is exactly why the incumbents have such durable advantages. Cvent was founded in 1999. Stova dates back to 1998. Bizzabo launched in 2011. Over decades, these platforms have accumulated layers of configurability. Every edge case a planner ever surfaced became a toggle, a setting, a custom field.

And that configurability is their moat.

It's not that these platforms deliver exceptional experiences. It's not that they provide groundbreaking measurement or attribution. It's that they've built a fortress of feature checkboxes that satisfies the RFP process. Too many purchasing decisions are made on spreadsheets that prioritize every feature request that came up in the past five years. If you don't check the box, you don't make the shortlist.

For a startup, that's a brutal dynamic. You're not just competing on vision or product quality. You're competing against decades of accumulated configurability. And the more features the incumbents pile on, the harder it is for anyone new to clear the bar.

Configurability Is Not Innovation

But here's what gets lost in that dynamic: configurability is not experience. It's not measurability. And it's certainly not what most people would call innovation.

The events industry has been running on roughly the same playbook for over a decade. Yes, the platforms have gotten more polished. The dashboards are slicker. But the fundamental question that every CMO and event leader is asking, "What is the ROI of this event?", remains largely unanswered by the tools we have today.

Event apps collect data, but they don't connect it to pipeline. Registration platforms manage logistics, but they don't tell you which conversations led to closed deals. We've been optimizing for operational efficiency while ignoring the measurement gap that keeps events perpetually under-resourced and under-valued in the marketing mix.

So Will Anything Change?

Will we vibe code our way to the event tech promised land?

My bet is yes. But not the way most people think.

The real shift isn't that AI lets you build a demo faster. It's that AI is collapsing the complexity around event logistics. The table-stakes functionality that used to take years to build is now taking weeks. Session management, agenda builders, notification systems, attendee communication flows. The stuff that consumed 80% of an event tech team's engineering bandwidth is getting dramatically cheaper and faster to ship.

That changes the math for startups in a fundamental way.

At Highbar, I say "yes" to custom requests in demos that I wouldn't have dreamed of committing to in years past. Not because I'm being reckless, but because I know we can handle it without creating the kind of tech debt that used to sink small teams. AI doesn't just accelerate the building. It makes the building more sustainable.

The Formula for Change

Here's what I think the formula actually looks like:

Small teams with good product taste and deep domain expertise, working at AI pace.

That's a different way of working and building. It's not about replacing humans with AI. It's about a small number of people who deeply understand the problem space using AI to operate at a scale that was previously impossible.

The vibe coding wave will accelerate demand for better event tech. More people will see what's possible and expect more from their tools. But the companies that actually win won't be the ones who generated the most code the fastest. They'll be the ones who paired speed with taste, who understood what event professionals actually need, and who built products that finally close the measurement gap.

There's no overnight success, even in the AI age. But 2026 won't be like 2011. And it certainly won't be like 1999.

Michael Balyasny is the founder and CEO of Highbar.ai, an AI-native event app platform. He previously founded Attendify, which powered 20,000+ events and 10M+ attendees before being acquired by Hopin in 2021.