Today we’d like to introduce you to Vidal Ekechukwu.
Vidal, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
While I was a student at Harvard College, I found it difficult to discover relevant, fun events on campus and in the Boston area. I wondered why there wasn’t a clean, centralized website to help me do this and figured, I would just build one myself. Within a couple years, I launched Hottspot’s first iteration. Though it was rudimentary in form and function, it solved the fundamental problem that inspired me to create it.
At its current release, Hottspot is a full-featured, modern web app that is available across all platforms. It geo-locates its users and displays events near their current location, not just the Boston/Cambridge region. It now calls Chicago its home, and it has matured into a platform on which creatives promote themselves and their events through high-quality images.
As a musician, I use it as way to promote upcoming releases and events, and I’m constantly fine-tuning it to work better for other artists and performers. I feel that I’ve grown in as many ways as Hottspot over the years, and I have a much larger vision for how it will continue to evolve.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Hottspot’s biggest challenge has been vying for the attention of users amidst a crowded social media and events landscape. There are so many alternatives to the value that we offer, so our top priority has been to present our users with the greatest experience and most captivating content.
Please tell us about Hottspot.
Hottspot is a media platform that uses high quality images to promote creatives and their events. These creatives are musicians, models, athletes, writers, or just average people with cameras. Our goal is not, however, to be yet another way for people to distract themselves. Rather it is to be a utility through which our users become more aware of events around them and of the people who inspire them.
We achieve this by offering an experience that is unlike any other media platform. Every image on Hottspot features a single item. This item is either an event, the creator herself, or another user. As a result, each piece of art is meant to do more than capture one’s attention for five seconds. It can ultimately be the means by which a user discovers his new favorite rapper, or attends the street festival of a lifetime.
We understand that social media platforms come and go, but by concentrating on being a fun, yet useful tool for our users, we hope that Hottspot will stand the test of time and change the way people interface with their surroundings.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Like many young entrepreneurs, once I was committed to Hottspot, I dived headfirst into building it. I didn’t do too much market research nor did I query customers about how Hottspot could best serve their needs. As a result, I spent a great deal of time building something that wasn’t targeting a specific need, had a clunky user interface, and wasn’t profitable. It would have behooved me to ask more questions and code less earlier on. If I were to rebuild Hottspot, that’s the most fundamental change I would make to my approach.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://hottspot.co
- Email: hottspot.webmaster@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/hottspot
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hottspot/
Getting in touch: VoyageChicago is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
