The story behind 1pm.app

For 11 years I shot weddings and corporate events around Brisbane, Australia. About a thousand of them, give or take. Ballrooms, beach ceremonies, more ballrooms because Brisbane in summer is humid and outdoor weddings are brave, conference rooms, vineyard barns, the occasional warehouse, more than one rooftop. If it had a guest list and a timeline, I was probably there with two cameras and aching feet.

In all of that I have held, squinted at, folded, lost, found, and occasionally sat on more than 800 run sheets.

You probably call it a run of show. In Australia we call it a run sheet. Same thing. The minute by minute master plan of who is doing what, where, and when on the day. The document that, if it goes sideways, the whole day wobbles with it.

I have seen the good ones. Clean, well thought out, color coded, readable on a phone, the kind that quietly made the day flow like a piece of music.

I have also seen the others.

The good, the bad, and the printed five times

I genuinely lost count of how many times I watched a planner sprint off to the venue's front office five minutes before doors opened, just to print one more copy of the run of show. Toner running out, wrong tray, hotel printer demanding a password the duty manager set in 2014 and never told anyone. Meanwhile the wedding party is rolling in and I am standing there pretending I do not need a copy while quietly hoping someone will hand me one.

Plenty of times I watched a vendor ask politely for a run sheet and get told, sorry, that was the last one.

I have watched run sheets have coffee spilled on them in the first hour. One went through a washing machine in somebody's back pocket. Another one ended up as a coaster through an entire cocktail hour, then got handed back to the florist who actually needed it.

And then there is the worst version of all. Three different copies of the same document, in three different hands, on the same day, and nobody is quite sure which one is the real one. There is a very particular flavor of panic when the MC is reading from v3, the DJ printed v2 the night before, and the planner's laptop has v5 open but the venue Wi-Fi has decided it is taking the afternoon off.

About the design of these things

Something I have wanted to say for eleven years. A lot of run sheets are designed... not great.

Eight point font. Single line spacing. Tiny columns holding three lines of wrapped text. A color scheme that looked fine in Microsoft Word's print preview and then turned into surface of the sun gray on white once it was photocopied and brought into a dim reception room.

My eyesight is not amazing. A lot of vendors are in the same boat. Try reading 8pt Calibri in mood lighting while a band is doing their soundcheck and a florist is asking you where the bride is. I would end up pulling out my phone, taking a photo of my own crumpled copy, and zooming in on it like I was decoding a treasure map.

There has to be a better way to do this than printing a spreadsheet and praying.

Why I actually built it

It was not one event. It was the slow accumulation of all of them. The same problems, year after year, at every kind of event, with every level of planner, in every city.

Brilliant organised people doing extraordinary work, and the tool they had for the single most important document of the day was a spreadsheet they emailed around, printed in bulk, and updated by hand if there was time.

After a thousand of these, you stop being able to unsee it.

So I built 1pm.app. It is the run of show app I wish someone had handed me a thousand times.

What it does

You build one live run of show online. You edit it. Everyone with the link sees the latest version straight away. No reprinting, no "wait, are we on v4 or v5", no paper.

Each vendor gets their own filtered view. The DJ sees DJ things, the florist sees florist things, and the photographer sees photographer things and can read them on a phone in a dark venue without pinching to zoom like a maniac.

The type is big. Readable. Designed for one hand, a phone screen, and the actual lighting conditions of a real event, not the lighting conditions in your house at lunchtime when you were laying it out.

The shareable live link does not require anyone to log in. Vendors do not love making accounts. Couples planning a wedding really do not love asking their florist to sign up for yet another thing. So nobody has to.

It is built to keep working on venue Wi-Fi, which is to say, even when the venue Wi-Fi is staging a small protest against you.

Who it is for

Wedding planners. Obviously.

Couples planning their own wedding because you are a control enthusiast and proud of it. Especially you. You will have a dozen vendors on the day and you should not be the one printing eleven copies of a Google Doc at 4pm the day before.

Anyone running corporate events, conferences, product launches, galas, fundraisers, association meetings, any room of people who all have to do the right thing at the right minute.

Venues. Especially the ones sick of being the people whose printer gets blamed when the run sheet does not happen.

A quick note about words

I have flipped between "run of show" and "run sheet" through this post. They mean the same thing. Run of show is what most people in the US say. Run sheet is the Australian and UK term. 1pm.app uses run of show inside the product itself, but if you grew up calling it a run sheet, you are not in the wrong place.

Anyway

If any of that sounded familiar, you already know who I built it for. Eleven years of squinting at paper is enough for anyone.