Web Design
DanceOn Club
An MVP that attracted 1,000+ visitors in three months through word of mouth alone, with a 20% return rate.
Category
Web Design
Client
Personal Project
Year
2024
Project overview
Latin dance socials are one of the most accessible entry points into a city's dance community. No performance pressure, no fixed partner, no prior relationship required. Just a space, some music, and whoever shows up.
In Medellin alone, over 22 recurring socials took place throughout the week across studios, bars, parks, and outdoor venues. The problem was finding them.
Information lived across WhatsApp groups, Instagram stories, Facebook posts, and word of mouth. Each channel required prior access or insider knowledge to be useful. For anyone new to the city or new to the scene, the door into the community was hard to locate without knowing someone.
I co-created DanceOn Club with Catalina Von Wichmann, a passionate dancer and professional translator, to fix that. I led product design, research, branding, and CMS management. We launched the platform's first iteration using Webflow, using it as a MVP before committing to a full rebuild.
Where Can I Dance Tonight?
The idea came from personal experience. Every time I landed somewhere new while travelling through Latin America and Europe, finding the local dance social scene was a project in itself. I assumed it was a me problem until we started asking around.
We surveyed 100 dancers from multiple countries and spoke to eight organizers in Medellin. The patterns were consistent across both groups. Seasoned dancers new to a city and locals new to the scene described the same friction: scattered information, outdated listings, and no reliable way to know whether a social was still running or what to expect when they got there.
Organizers were not withholding information intentionally. Dance is for everyone and most organizers actively wanted their socials to be open and discoverable. The problem is that they are not marketers. They used whatever free channels were available, and social media's discoverability problem became the community's discoverability problem.
Michael
Nueva Guardia
"There is competition among the community. It needs an agnostic place to come together. [There are other] social calendars but they fall short because not everything is advertised. There are socials in all parts of Medellin that aren’t given visibility and no one knows they’re there."
The data also pointed to a gap on the organizer side. Feedback about their socials came through word of mouth at best. There was no structured channel for dancers to tell an organizer the music wasn't landing or the class level wasn't right, which meant organizers were improving their events largely by instinct.
Deiber
Barcelona Dance
"Music is the hardest part. Listening to everyone’s preferences and trying to match 80% of the crowd’s needs is tough. People contact us on instagram for music recommendations and requests.”
Social media platforms made finding socials difficult due to fragmented information, problems entering chat groups, and outdated information.
Two Problems, One Platform
A directory was the obvious solution. Underneath it was another problem. Organizers and dancers were technically in touch, but across fragmented channels that made it difficult to separate the signal from the noise.
Existing solutions that attempted to list socials provided aggregated, unfiltered results in no meaningful order, or carried outdated information that made them unreliable. They solved for visibility without solving for trust or relevance.
The question we kept coming back to was not just how do dancers find socials, but how do we help them find the right one, and how do we keep that information accurate over time without creating an unsustainable manual process for ourselves.
How might we bring together the Latin dance community by helping social dancers find venues matching their preferences while providing organizers feedback to continuously improve their offerings?
Find Your Vibe
The directory was structured around two things researchers consistently told us mattered before committing to a social. The vibe and the dance style.
A social under a bridge on a Sunday afternoon attracts a different crowd than a Friday night studio event. Both are valid, but showing up to the wrong one for your mood is a fast way to have a bad time. We built a vibe filter category to capture this: Outdoor, PracticePLUS, Party, and Tango as distinct options that set expectations before a dancer walked through the door.
Dance style filters let dancers browse by what they actually wanted to dance. Combined with day of week, a dancer could find exactly what they were looking for in two or three taps.
Individual listing pages included class timing, cover cost, location, and a description of the social. We also embedded an attendance interest feature using likebtn.com to give dancers a rough read on whether a social would be worth the trip, and a feedback survey so organizers could receive quantifiable input on music and atmosphere rather than relying on whatever someone said on the way out.
A location request feature let dancers outside Medellin signal where they wanted DanceOn Club to expand next, which doubled as early demand validation for future markets.
The site was fully bilingual from day one. The Medellin dance community included both locals and expats in roughly equal measure, and a Spanish-only or English-only platform would have excluded half the audience it was trying to serve. Catalina handled all translation and the language selector was front and center throughout.
Building It in Public
We launched the MVP quickly using Webflow, Finsweet's no-code attributes, and the Relume component library. The goal was to test the concept with real users before investing in a custom build, and to let the community's actual behavior tell us what to prioritise next.
Google Analytics showed 51% of traffic started and ended on the directory page. That was expected but also a signal. We iterated by introducing quick actions directly on directory cards and clearer calls to action on listing pages to engage dancers earlier in their session rather than losing them after they found what they came for.
We created QR codes and distributed them to studio owners, organizers, and anyone we met with even a passing interest in dancing, including our Uber drivers.
The community response validated the need quickly. DanceOn Club was being shared in Medellin Dance WhatsApp groups, recommended in Instagram captions, and mentioned in posts by dancers visiting from other countries who said it was the resource they had been looking for everywhere they travelled.
With the concept proven, we began a full rebuild from scratch with a software engineer, Mauricio, from the dance community to support dancer profiles and give us more control over new features. The next phase was focused on crowdsourcing social listings to reduce our dependence on manually tracking down information, and building more direct interaction between dancers and organizers.
Outcome
Over 1,000 visitors in three months through word of mouth, with a 20% return rate. A bilingual directory covering 20 plus recurring socials, built in partnership with local organizers and validated by survey data from 100 dancers across multiple countries.
The MVP did what it set out to do. It gave the dance community a front door, and people walked through it. Every week we met someone new who had found a social on DanceOn Club and decided to show up.
When I left Latin America to travel, Mauricio, our software developer, developed the concept further and launched Rumbero in his hometown of Mexico City.
