As in-person events continue to be held online amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, many events are finding new ways to connect with their audiences and deliver more personal, engaging experiences. It’s no different at Antler — we used to run physical Demo Day events to exhibit our portfolio companies, and now, we need to adapt the format for a decentralised, virtual audience.

I’ve previously written about our first virtual event while explaining  why we chose Gatsby over Next.js to achieve excellent performance. Now we wanted to build on top of this foundation to deliver an even better live experience.

We launched this new platform for our virtual  Demo Day Rewired event in Sydney. For the first time, viewers could have their questions answered live, we actively surfaced useful information about each startup as they presented, and we made it even easier to get in touch with each startup’s founders.

But Antler is present in 12 locations, each of which runs its own Demo Day, and we wanted to enable each site to deliver the same live experience we had in Sydney in one easy-to-use and customisable platform.

Here’s how we did it.

#events #react #javascript #covid19 #firebase