Dancing Shenanigans
A practical Google Sheet helped friends answer a recurring question and keep the next dance within reach.
Digital Product · Community Platform · Ongoing Case Study
One More Dance
What began as a shared list of places to dance became a growing platform designed to help dancers find events, organizers build lasting visibility, and a scattered community see itself more clearly.
The Beginning
Before it was an app, it was “Dancing Shenanigans.”
More than four years ago, I started a Google Sheet and shared it with friends. We were a lesson group that became known as The Misfits, and the question was always the same: “Where are we dancing after this?” The sheet—called Dancing Shenanigans—helped us keep track of socials, classes, road trips, festivals, and the places where new friendships and memories were taking shape.
The community already existed. The information did not exist in one place. Events were spread across studio websites, Facebook pages, Instagram posts, group chats, text messages, and word of mouth. The spreadsheet solved a small problem for a few friends. One More Dance grew from the realization that the same problem affected dancers and organizers across the region.
From list to system
The scattered-event problem became a larger design challenge: discovery, accuracy, community, and organizer participation.
Build, test, rebuild
Early prototypes developed into a live web product with searchable events, profiles, accounts, calendars, and operational tools.
Evidence and reach
The work now includes organizer onboarding, public-listing research, measured engagement, and a stronger regional event network.
The Challenge
Make a fragmented dance landscape easier to navigate without pretending any single source can be complete or replacing the organizers who create the community.
The Insight
Finding a dance is not only a search problem. It is a trust, context, and connection problem. People want to know where they belong, what to expect, and who is behind the event.
My Role
Founder, product strategist, creative director, UX and content designer, researcher, builder, tester, moderator, and the person translating feedback into the next release.
Two Connected Audiences
Designed for discovery and participation
For dancers
One place to discover socials, classes, workshops, festivals, competitions, practice parties, and the communities that make them happen—across styles, experience levels, and locations.
For organizers
A year-round presence beyond a single event post: community profiles, event publishing, discovery tools, featured opportunities, and evidence of how listings are being seen and used.
Campaign & Visual Language
Dance is more than the next event.
A flexible campaign system uses bold color, movement, and direct prompts to express the joy, confidence, connection, and community that bring people back to the dance floor.
Campaign in Motion
Stories from the dance community
Selected social and promotional videos extend the platform’s voice beyond the product and into the community it serves.
The Product System
More than an event calendar
Event discovery
Searchable public listings across more than 20 dance styles, with list, map, month, and week views designed for different planning habits.
Useful event detail
Dates, recurrence, location, style, organizer context, save-to-calendar actions, and links that help a dancer move from browsing to deciding.
Organizer presence
Role-aware accounts, public profiles, directory visibility, services, badges, images, and event ownership create continuity beyond one promotion.
Community operations
Approvals, moderation, duplicate checks, recurring-event rules, expiration windows, and admin tools support accuracy as the catalog grows.
Access and payments
Authentication, organizer activation, trial controls, single-event publishing, and subscription paths connect the experience to a sustainable model.
Measured engagement
Views, unique visitors, calendar saves, organizer-profile interest, and outbound actions are being shaped into evidence organizers can actually use.
Research as Service
The 60-day public-listing model
Start with what is publicly available
Selected listings can be added from public sources, clearly identified and dated, so dancers gain useful discovery while organizers see the value of a richer profile.
Protect accuracy
Events are reviewed for duplicates, recurrence, source quality, and expiration. The goal is a useful snapshot—not an unsupported claim that every event is represented.
Report meaningful behavior
The reporting framework prioritizes reach and action: event views, unique viewers, saves, save rate, reliable shares, outbound clicks, referral data, and trends over the listing period.
Invite ownership
Organizers can claim their presence, expand their profile, correct details, and become active participants in building the network rather than passive entries in a directory.
Building in Public
Feedback became part of the product architecture
Prototype quickly
The earliest product work tested whether the spreadsheet idea could become a usable public experience. Rapid prototyping made the concept tangible before every system was fully defined.
Learn from failure
Organizer onboarding and profile updates exposed real errors, including a reset problem during setup. Fixing those issues clarified the need for stronger validation, state handling, and recovery.
Protect the working system
As the product matured, changes had to preserve authentication, roles, moderation, recurring events, payments, and analytics—not simply improve how one screen looked.
Platform Evolution
From no-code exploration to a connected product
The product moved through early app and website experiments, including Base44, before growing into a live Vercel and Supabase system. That evolution required design decisions at several levels at once: the public experience, the data model, role-aware access, organizer workflows, payment logic, moderation, and the operational work required to keep information trustworthy.
Learning Through Building
The project became its own continuing education
Product thinking
Turning individual requests into reusable systems, defining what belongs in a release, and separating urgent repairs from longer-term product direction.
Technical fluency
Learning how authentication, databases, payments, analytics, deployment, and interface behavior connect—even when the work crosses traditional role boundaries.
Operational design
Building checklists, decision records, testing habits, event-review rules, and reporting definitions so growth does not depend on memory alone.
This chapter is designed to keep growing. Future additions can include the specific learning tools developed along the way, annotated product screens, release comparisons, organizer feedback, and verified 60-day results without changing the structure of the case study.
Where it stands
A live product still becoming itself
One More Dance is in active development. The foundation now connects public discovery, organizer identity, event operations, and early business-model testing in one system.
The larger goal
Find your people. Find one more dance.
The measure of success is not simply more listings. It is making it easier for dancers to participate, organizers to be found, and the community to see how much is already happening.