Why I Built EventBrief

Every morning, for about two years, I did the same thing while I was having my coffee.

I'd open my laptop or phone and work through a list of websites. Skift Meetings. BizBash. Exhibition News. TSNN. Conference News. One by one, scanning headlines, trying to piece together what had happened in the events industry overnight. On a thorough morning that was fifteen tabs. By the time I'd got through them all, I'd lost half an hour and retained maybe a third of it.

I worked in events — two and a half years at EMAP in London, on conferences and awards for Nursing Times and Construction News. Keeping up with industry news was something that made me feel confident and I knew what was going on in the industry I work in. Keeping myself updated, honestly, was one of the most tedious parts of it.

For a long time I assumed this was just how it was. Then I started asking people. Conference producers, venue sales managers, marketing leads. The answer was almost always some version of "I try and keep up." "I have an inbox full of newsletters to go through." It was not because they didn't care or didn't want to keep up. But because fifteen tabs or reading all newsletters every morning isn't a sustainable system for anyone with an actual job to do, and at some point most people quietly give up and hope they don't miss anything important.

The first attempt was wrong

My first instinct was to build an AI agent that would go and read everything for me, fully autonomous, figure it out, send me a summary. I built it. It sort of worked. It also burned through API credits at a rate that made my eyes water, and I spent more time debugging the agent than I would have spent just reading the articles myself.

In hindsight the problem was obvious. I'd built something far more complicated than what I actually needed. I didn't need an agent that did things. I needed something that read fifteen sources every morning, worked out what actually mattered, and told me in five points. That's it. That's the whole idea, when you strip away everything I'd over-engineered onto it.

Learning to build it

Here's the part that still feels slightly unreal to me: I have no coding background. None. My degrees are in event management. So building this meant spending two months — evenings and weekends — learning how the pieces actually fit together. Frontend, backend, databases, APIs, deployment. A genuinely embarrassing number of YouTube videos. A lot of things breaking in ways I didn't understand, followed by slowly understanding why.

What made this possible at all is that the tools for building software have changed enormously in a very short time. Five years ago, what I built would have needed a small team and real funding. Today it's one person, some weekends, and a willingness to be bad at something for a while. I think that shift — what an individual can now build alone — is honestly a more interesting story than the newsletter itself.

The launch

EventBrief went live on the 2nd of June. It was a soft launch in the truest sense — I posted it in a couple of LinkedIn groups with something close to "here's a thing I built, tell me honestly if it's useful or if I've solved a problem nobody actually has."

The response told me I wasn't the only one who'd quietly given up on the fifteen tabs. People started signing up — Heads of Events, Senior Events Managers, venue sales people, a few students still finishing their degrees, freelancers, people at hotel groups and agencies. Different roles, different companies.

What it actually does

In case you're new here: every morning at 7am, EventBrief reads through fifteen event industry publications, works out the five stories that actually mattered overnight, and sends them straight to your inbox. Three minutes to read. Free — properly free, not a trial, not "free for now while we figure out pricing."

What still strikes me, looking back, is less the product and more what it took to get here. A few years ago, something like this would have needed a small team and a development budget to match. Today it runs on the same kind of reliable, mainstream infrastructure that much larger companies use — just at a scale one person learning as they go can manage. That shift in what's possible, more than the newsletter itself, is the part I keep coming back to.

Where things stand

I'm writing this from Mumbai, where I'm now working on EventBrief full time. It's early days. The list of things still to build is longer than the list of things that are done — there's a lot of rough edges, and I'm finding most of them by using the product myself every morning.

But the core of it works. Every morning at 7am, whether I'm awake for it or not, fifteen sources get read and five things that matter land in inboxes across the UK, the US, the UAE, and a few other places. That part doesn't need me.

If you're in events and you've ever opened eight tabs before 9am just to feel like you're not already behind — that's exactly who this is for.

event-brief.com — if you want to see what this morning's briefing looked like.