Fyre Festival - Turning a dream into a dumpster fire

Wasn’t Ja Rule drunkenly admitting that the festival was his idea to begin with in the Hulu doc?

— Alan

The app doesn’t sound obviously ridiculous to me. It’s basically taking a market that has traditionally been over-the-counter and trying to turn it into a digital exchange. That’s worked in lots of other contexts. Of course, it also hasn’t worked in some others, and it’s entirely possible talent booking would turn out to be one of those. But it’s not obvious to me that it’s more like, say, bond trading than it is like renting a room.

The question about the Fyre app (and the current successor Iconn) is how they planned to scale it. Is this a purely B2B marketplace for industry professionals booking $10k+ gigs? Or is this eventually going to be a consumer product that I could someday use to book, like, a magician for my kid’s birthday party?

The latter might have merited a publicity- generating festival to get the name out. The former could have been served by having a well managed festival showcasing talent that’s available on the app as like and industry flex. But neither of those were the goal behind the actual Fyre festival. The actual goal was “hang out with models in the Bahamas and feel like the kind of guy that organizes music festivals.”

Oh, sure, I’m not talking about whether the festival was ever an appropriate marketing idea. Just that the app concept itself isn’t an obvious boondoggle (unlike the festival, ironically).

It’s wasnt so much the idea of the app I found humorous. I mean simple shit gets turned into billions all the time. It’s more that the guys working on the app are guys working on a thing that exists. It’s a pretty basic hybrid of a meeting making app and a sales app. Hell, I can schedule a time for a cable guy to come out or a plumber all online. Same thing. The logistics behind the scenes are what would make/break it. Now maybe that’s what the app guys were doing, but he way it was presented came across as these guys all excited to have invented Google Calendar and all ttheir work was pasting clip art onto a template. Tight!

There’s a difference between being able to do that with a plumber and being able to do that with all plumbers, with requests automatically matched with offers. Unless you mean there is already a tradesman marketplace out there in an AirBnB sense, as opposed to Craigslist etc. There certainly isn’t in the UK.

Ya. That’s what I meant about the logistics. Getting contracts and whatnot with the various artists to have in the database to pull from. That’s the hard/savvy part. The app itself, not so much. It’s just the way I took it was all these guys slaving away to create an app that exists. But maybe they were doing all the legwork to get the creative folk lined up. That would actually make sense but based on Billy’s other shenanigans I wouldn’t bet on it.

The hidden hard part of the platform is getting the agency part of the system working seamlessly. Agencies representing talent are already trying to schedule out their talent and negotiate that talent out through all different technical and non-technical means already, and the Fyre app would have to hook into those existing systems in a non-intrusive way.

Those agencies also have to be able to manage listings and schedules for a lot of different talent. A modelling agency for example would have to be able to easily manage profile pages and schedules for hundreds of different models, same for agencies representing DJs.

They essentially either have to have build a mini-CRM (especially to handle the negotiating phases) or have a perfect hook into existing ones (and almost every company has customized Salesforce and other CRMs so integrating with a company’s SF system isn’t simple).

That’s where the complexity lies I believe.

For sure. Which is also why I can’t see this thing working across the entire spectrum of artists. Maybe, maaaaybe, for a single agency. But each artist would have such varying degrees of high (always high) maintenance that I can’t see a single portal working.

You guys are putting way more thought into this app than they did.

Move Fast and Break Things™

Looking at Iconn, which is apparently the successor to the Fyre app, it looks…not super impressive. It appears to be more of a marketplace front-end than any kind of automated system.

Maybe the logged-in user experience is more interesting though.

Finished up the Netflix doc last night. All those shows about competency-porn, both drama and reality? Well, this was like the opposite of that. I’d love more incompetency-porn.

Anyway, so Billy screwed over his employees directly (used some of their credit to pay for shit) and indirectly (wouldn’t fire them or let them go, just stopped paying them so they’d leave on their own). Then tried that insane NYCVIP thing using a frontman and the festival mailing list? Dude is totally sociopathic.

And how did the older white haired dude who was brought in to be the ‘Billy Whisperer’ not get in more trouble? He’s worked with him before on the Magnisis stuff (and any other cons Billy had I’m guessing) so he knows Billy is at best a pathological liar. And while all the other folks mostly seemed to be kept in their own little portion of the disaster so as to keep them from getting a real feel of how bad it was going to be, I can’t see where this guy has any sort of plausible deniability.

And screw Ja “It’s not Fraud, it’s Just False Advertising” Rule too.

Talk about tone deaf…wow.

Well, on the upside, it’s a pretty well known brand now!