Rivalation’s goal was to follow ARCHmedium’s model and organize architecture competitions in a variety of categories such as fashion, business, graphic design and others.
With a small team of unpaid founders, the help of a wonderful intern and a budget of $3000 for development and advertisement we managed to build the site and organize 5 different competitions in under 6 months.
From a UI point of view the website needed to be easy to understand as well as flexible enough not to look “empty” when running only a few competitions and not look a “mess” when running several dozens.
Unfortunately after just under a year Rivalation ceased operating for a number of reasons.
Failure analysis
Seeing things from a distance now it seems like there were two main reasons why Rivalation didn’t take off:
- As opposed to architecture, competitions are not common at a professional level on many other fields, therefore students don’t immediately see the benefits of participating in these kind of events.
- Trying to launch the concept on multiple categories at a time requires a large budget and a larger team with experts in each particular field who can bring in their expertise and connections. Rivalation didn’t had either.