GeekCon is the largest geek culture festival in the Urals, bringing together pop culture fans of all ages and interests in Yekaterinburg for one day. A large-scale live event places its own demands on communication: thousands of people move between dozens of locations at once, and the organizers need to keep track of both guests and festival partners.
The challenge
The team needed to solve three problems at once with a single tool:
coordinate tens of thousands of attendees on site
add interactivity at the intersection of offline and online
showcase festival partners so that interaction with their brands felt organic rather than forced
Classic offline navigation tools (banners, signs, booklets) can't handle this: they don't personalize the experience or provide feedback. So the team decided to rely on a channel where the festival's audience already is — the Telegram messenger.
What was done
A team of 3 built the bot and mini app in the puzzlebot Constructor with almost no code, plus information support from the festival's own team. The logic was first worked out in a mind map, and then the developer built it in the visual Constructor — this let a small team meet a tight deadline.
Inside the mini app, they included:
A schedule by location, with the option to build a personal schedule and get a notification 10 minutes before an event starts
Headliner cards with each headliner's location, schedule, and statistics for the partnerships team on how many slots attendees added to their calendars
Live streams from the festival's main stages right inside the app, for those who wanted to catch everything or couldn't make it
A feedback channel. Anonymous messages from guests went to the organizers' shared chat, and a designated staff member then contacted the person directly without revealing the team's personal contacts
A quest across partner locations with its own in-game currency, hidden storylines, and prizes for the top 10 players.
All the development fit into the two weeks before the festival, while the most accurate information (schedule, headliners, locations) arrived literally at the last minute, which is typical for events.
App demo
At the festival entrance, attendees were greeted by a banner inviting them to take part in the quest. From the very first minutes, guests had a clear plan of action. Inside the mini app, they could:
build a personal schedule of the events and locations they were interested in
find on the map where and when a particular headliner was performing
watch streams from the stages without running between locations
leave feedback for the organizers without having to look for personal contacts
complete a quest across 10 partner locations, earning in-game currency and unlocking hidden storylines
Results
67,000 attendees used the bot during the single day of the festival.
73% of users built their own personal schedule with reminders.
38% of attendees watched live streams inside the mini app.
66% of guests completed the quest, and with it all 10 of the festival's partner locations.
10 partner brands blended naturally into the game mechanics and became the "main characters" of the quest without a separate advertising budget
An event doesn't need to budget for a separate development team, an army of volunteer guides, or complex infrastructure to get a digital footprint of the festival with personalization, gamification, and analytics for partners. As the GeekCon case shows, a "bot + mini app" combo built with a no-code builder can coordinate 67,000 people, guide 66% of them through all the partner locations, and give 73% of users a personal schedule. And a special bonus, especially for an event, is that you can quickly make any adjustments to any block.
