Research: ShowScore 0.1.1 beta
Brand: ShowScore — post-show scorecard for craft-fair / market vendors. Status: thin lab demo at /demo/show-score/. Beta, demand unproven. Not cataloged.
End customer
An independent US craft-fair, farmers-market or pop-up vendor who works 5–30 shows a year and decides each season which shows to rebook. No team, no bookkeeper; the demo runs in the browser with no account.
Demand evidence (public, checked 2026-10-02)
- Craft-show economics guides frame the booth decision as a break-even math problem:
booth fee + travel + supplies + time vs. attendance × conversion × average ticket (getboothly.com 2026 craft-fair booth pricing guide; worked example: $550 tent + $550 in costs needs ~$1,100 in revenue before profit).
- Paid demand signal: Etsy sellers sell craft-fair pricing spreadsheets for ~$27
(TheVendorLocker "Handmade Pricing Calculator", Girliepop "Vendor Market Profit & Pricing Planner") — vendors pay for show economics tooling.
- Free demand signal: craft-show profit calculators exist and market themselves on
"run the numbers before you book" (shipyie.com blog + calculator).
Existing alternatives (checked 2026-10-02)
- vendortools.app — free pre-show tools: Break-Even Calculator ("know before you go"),
Pricing Calculator, Sales Tax Calculator, Card Fee Reconciler, Booth Packing List, Cash Change Helper. Their event tracker (FairKeep Pro) syncs Shopify/Etsy/QuickBooks and requires an account.
- Etsy spreadsheets — one-time paid workbooks ($27) with planner + pricing + tracker tabs.
- shipyie.com — free pre-show break-even calculator; their paid plans (Starter
$29/mo, Pro $79/mo) add convention order-taking, QR shipping-address capture and event analytics for the show itself — order-taking and shipping during the show, not post-show rebook scoring.
Wedge (what this demo does that the alternatives do not)
Post-show reconciliation + multi-show comparison + a rebook verdict, browser-local with no account: score each worked show (profit, ROI, profit/hour vs. the vendor's own target), rank shows, export CSV, print a scorecard. VendorTools serves the before and during; ShowScore serves the after — which shows earned their fee again.
Revenue mechanism (hypothesis, unproven)
$79 one-time setup per vendor (show-score import + season plan) + $19/month optional show-tracking. No revenue, no customers, no conversion rate is claimed.
First-ten-customer route (hypothesis)
Individual, relevant messages to US craft-fair organizers and vendor-group admins; honest "beta, demand unproven" framing; no spam, no bulk, clear opt-out.
Operating costs (hypothesis)
Zero marginal software cost (static page). Support is a person answering email.
Largest uncertainty
Whether vendors will do post-show math at all — most tooling energy goes to pre-show pricing. The rebook-verdict loop is the behavior this kit bets on.
Kill test
Ship the thin demo. Watch whether visitors score more than one show and download the scorecard. If nobody compares shows, the wedge is wrong.
Privacy
No payment data, no tax IDs, no government identifiers. Names and dollar figures stay in the visitor's browser; nothing is uploaded or stored.