During the first few months at my start-up, we built an early version of an event app platform to engage conference audiences. We sold our product to a few conference organizers. One of our ideas was that event organizers would love the ability to make changes to schedules on the fly and they would want to notify the attendees about these changes. We had two parts to our solution: an admin console that could be used only from a laptop and an end user-facing mobile app. The problem was that our customers (the event organizer) wanted only a well-designed, visually-appealing, and white-labeled app. They were willing to pay us only for the solution that would amplify the value they were providing to their customers. The event organizers rarely used the admin console. They sought our help whenever they needed to use any functionality in the admin console.
When we sat down as a team, we observed with dismay that the organizers never or rarely used real-time notifications...