River Case Study — Olivine — A Product Marketing Agency

River is a platform that enables podcasters/creators to empower their superfans to organize meetups.

Event Management Software • Founded 2023 • $100K seed funding

We partnered for 7 weeks as part of the PMM Launch Accelerator Program

The Challenge

Faced with three user types – event creators, hosts, and fans – and a crowded event management tool marketplace, River needed to refine its focus and properly differentiate itself.

River is an event platform born out of an endeavor to launch volunteer-hosted meetups at scale for podcasters. Finding current tools lacking, River’s founders built their own event management app. River’s unique feature set makes it distinctive among event management tools, so it was essential to nail down the strategic foundations of product marketing – personas, positioning and messaging, and market analysis – to close in on product-market fit.

Through workshopping messaging with River’s co-founder, we determined that focusing solely on podcasters makes the most sense for River right now, versus also addressing host and attendee users.

With this groundwork in place, go-to-market strategies will be more likely to resonate with the target buyer: top podcasters with engaged audiences that can be transformed into thriving communities via in-person events. Moreover, collateral creation becomes easier, helping to convey the value to early adopters.

Our competitive analysis revealed a competitor with a slightly different market but features that could enhance River’s product roadmap. A deep dive into another established competitor revealed a weakness in their SEO strategy, representing an opportunity for River’s inbound marketing efforts. In addition to suggestions for SEO-focused articles and direct-response landing pages on River’s website, we created copy for a “versus” landing page.

“The PMM team helped me get closer to product-market fit in three ways: Market: Researched market landscape, especially in podcasting. Competition: Identified a new competitor I wasn’t aware of and helped me see how one of my known competitors is very weak on SEO, likely an opening we can pounce on. Positioning & Messaging: Their thoughtful questions made it obvious that users are never coming to our website, just buyers — so we're redoing our website to speak to buyers only.”

Raechel Lambert
CEO and Co-Founder, River

The Deliverables

River’s compelling origin story and unique features are what set it apart. We amplified these aspects through a customer story and feature announcement blog posts.

Stories sell, and River has a killer story. Co-founder Rae built a community around the massively popular All-In podcast through in-person events, creating River to solve her logistical problems. We created a customer story asset for River to share with prospects to sell the vision of what’s possible for podcasters launching events for their audiences.

We also created blogs and social announcements for two major features: batch events and host vetting. Showcasing these features is key for demonstrating product velocity, or how quickly you can release new features. We want target buyers and investors to see that River isn’t just about great meetups but is a robust event management platform ready to support communities at scale.