The internet died. So we built the festival an offline guide overnight.
Six thousand founders in a field, one mobile mast, no chance. By 6am the next day Ideas Fest had an unofficial guide that loads once and lives on the phone: every talk, every speaker, the site map. Then people passed it on, phone to phone, with no signal at all.
One mast, six thousand phones, and an agenda that only lived online
Ideas Fest is two days in a field at Champneys Tring. On day one the network folded under the weight of everyone's phones. The programme, the map and the speaker list were all on a website, so nobody could see what was on, where, or who was speaking. The most common question all day was "what's happening now?", and nobody could answer it.
Day one
- No signal from mid-morning to close
- Agenda, map and speakers only on a website
- Five hundred sessions across thirty-five spaces, and no way to find them
- People asking anyone with a laptop to get them online
- A great programme, mostly missed
Day two
- An unofficial guide live before the gates opened
- Loads once with a bar of signal, then works with none
- Both days searchable, speakers with faces, both maps
- Shared by WhatsApp, QR, or AirDropped as a file phone to phone
- On 437 phones by four o'clock, from one message sent at six
The whole festival on your phone, signal or not
It looks and behaves like an app, saves to the Home Screen, and updates itself whenever the phone catches a bar. Try it: ideasfest.notluck.co.uk.
Four things that made it work
Read the public programme
Every session, speaker, space, FAQ and both maps, pulled from the festival's public site in an hour and turned into one compact bundle. Speaker photos shrunk to thumbnails so seven hundred faces cost one download, not seven hundred.
Make it live on the phone
Open it once with a bar of signal and the whole guide is stored on the device. From then on it needs nothing. When the phone catches signal again it quietly checks for a newer programme and swaps it in.
Make it spread without internet
WhatsApp and a QR code when there is signal. When there is none, the whole app is one file that AirDrops or Quick Shares to the person stood next to you, and it still reads as a plain guide if their phone only previews it.
Break it before the crowd did
An adversarial review by a second model overnight found twenty-three things to fix, and a test run that cuts the network and reloads every screen ran before anyone at the festival saw it. It kept running after every change through the day.
Counts from the guide's own anonymous counters at 4pm on day two: 486 opened, 437 saved offline, 57 added to a Home Screen, 33 shared from inside the app. No names, no tracking, one ping per phone.
Ideas Fest is the UK's business festival, six thousand founders in a field at Champneys Tring every September. The guide was unofficial, built from the public programme, and the organisers were good enough to let us tell the story with their name on it.
ideasfest.uk
We were at the festival with The HoLT, Lea Turner's community, running the tent's tech: the human treasure hunt, the live photo wall and the big screen. The guide pointed people to the tent, and the tent pointed people to the guide.
the-holt.comOther systems, other industries
A window-cleaning firm was losing jobs to missed calls. We gave them an AI agent that answers, prices the work and follows up on WhatsApp, day or night.
A fire-safety firm tracked compliance deadlines by memory. We built a CRM that watches every certificate and chases the renewal before it lapses.
An HR firm onboarded staff by hand across email and WhatsApp. We built a pipeline that issues contracts, gates ID uploads and gives managers oversight without access.
Got a problem that needs solving by the morning?
This went from a glass of red wine to hundreds of phones in one night. Most of what we build takes a Build Day. Tell us what is broken and we will show you what we would build.