The story behind 1pm.app

For 11 years I shot weddings and corporate events for a living. About a thousand of them, give or take. Ballrooms, beach ceremonies, 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. 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, 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 guests are 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 supplier 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 spent an entire cocktail hour serving as a coaster, then got handed back to the florist who actually needed it.

And then there is the worst version. Three copies of the same document, in three different hands, on the same day, and nobody quite sure which one is real. There is a 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 a print preview and then turned into surface-of-the-sun gray on white once it was photocopied and carried into a dim reception room.

My eyesight is not amazing. A lot of suppliers 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 couple is. I would end up 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 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, organized 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. The first version was exactly one thing: a live run of show that everyone could read on a phone.

And then people started asking for the rest

Here is the part I did not plan.

The live run of show worked. It did what I wanted it to do, and the people using it were happy with it. And then, almost immediately, they started asking me for the things on either side of it.

Could the timeline pull the guest count from somewhere, so it did not have to be typed twice. Could the same system that chased suppliers for their arrival times also chase them for their insurance certificates. Where did the quote live. Where did the invoice live. Why was the BEO still a separate document in a separate application when every fact on it was already in here. Could the client see a version of this. Could the kitchen.

Every one of those requests was really the same request. The run of show was not the problem. It was the most visible symptom of the problem, which is that an event lives in eight different tools and every gap between them is a place where a detail quietly stops being true.

So the product grew, and it kept growing, and it turned out that the run of show was the wedge rather than the whole thing.

What it is now

1pm runs the operation end to end.

An event starts as an enquiry, on a form you embed on your own site, landing in a Leads inbox rather than an email account. You reply from inside 1pm with saved templates, log the calls and site visits against the lead, and watch the conversion rate by capture form.

You price it from a reusable catalog of items and packages, send a quote as a link rather than an attachment, or wrap it in a branded proposal that fills itself in with the real event details. When the client accepts, they accept the current version of your terms, and 1pm records who agreed, to what, and when.

Then the money. Deposits and balances, card payments online through Stripe, service charges, gratuities, credit notes, a running statement per event, and a one-way sync to Xero.

Then the planning. Spaces for your venues and rooms, with a hard block on double-booking the same space. A BEO built from the event record rather than retyped, with service style, setup style, pax, dietary summary, bar package, AV notes, access from and vacate by. Menus from a library that flow through to the BEO, the confirmation, and the printed card on the table, with plate costing behind them for anyone running F&B. Tasks with reusable workflows. Automations that send the things you always mean to send. Requests, for every document and answer you need from other people, each on their own no-login link, with expiry dates chased automatically.

Then the day, which is where I started. One live run of show. Every supplier with their own link, filtered to their items, big readable type, one-tap start and finish, working offline when the venue Wi-Fi stages its small protest.

Then the invoice, and the reports that tell you what the year actually looked like.

The design brief has not changed since the first version. Type big enough to read in a dark room. No logins for the people who just need to know what happens next. Everything current everywhere, because there is one record and several views of it rather than several documents and a hope.

Who it is for

Event professionals first. Planners, in-house and independent. Caterers. Photographers, who I have a certain amount of sympathy for. AV teams, celebrants, and everyone else who runs their own client jobs rather than working from a fixed venue.

Venues second, and not by much. Hotels, restaurants with function rooms, and dedicated event spaces, where the BEO, the pax count, and the access and vacate windows are the native language and always have been.

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.

And still, obviously, weddings. That is where I came from, and it is where a lot of this was learned.

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 uses run of show inside the product, and you can rename it in your account settings if your team says something else, along with Events, Crew and Spaces. If you grew up calling it a run sheet, you are not in the wrong place.

Anyway

I built this to fix a document. It turned into something that runs the whole event, which is not what I set out to do and is obviously the right answer in hindsight.

The original problem is still the one I care most about. Somebody is going to walk into a room this Saturday holding a piece of paper that is two versions out of date, and nobody in that room is going to know. Eleven years of squinting at paper is enough for anyone.

Chris Founder, 1pm.app