How an experienced event producer built his own software in a weekend

Last week, I sat down for an hour with Pedro van Tol, a senior producer at TENCUE.

TENCUE has been producing live corporate experiences for 40 years. Their clients include ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Cisco, the kind of keynote stages you've seen if you've worked in tech long enough.

Pedro's been doing it for 20 of those years.

A few months back, he was running a large event and built a custom Google Sheet to manage the production logistics. He hit the wall every spreadsheet eventually hits — the data was there, but the system couldn't think with him.

So one weekend, he sat down and rebuilt the whole thing in Claude. Vibe-coded the entire weekend, in his words. By Monday, he had something that wasn't a spreadsheet anymore; it was software.

He called it Show Ops. Today, it uses 30 agents that work across 5 modules — production, rehearsal, logistics, budget, and staffing. What makes it interesting is that the tool sits atop the spreadsheets your PMs already use with bi-directional sync. Your team keeps working the way they work, and leadership finally gets the centralized data they've been asking for.

This week, he's closing his first pilot with an enterprise AV firm.

I expect some of the most interesting event tools that come out of this AI cycle to be built by producers and event professionals who’ve lived a pain point and now have the tools to fix it.

Pedro told me a line I've been replaying since: "It's never been this easy to start a business, never been this hard to scale a business."

The second half of that sentence is what most people who post about AI on social media miss.

While AI makes it possible to build an MVP for a use case in a weekend, scaling it beyond the first weekend you built it is the harder work, and it isn’t the walk in the park most people think it is. Pedro's bet is that staying close to producers' daily workflow, consulting with classically trained developers, and talking to customers is the path through it.

If you're an event producer who's been thinking about building something, Pedro's is a great example of someone who just got started. With experience and an idea, he was able to imagine it, ship it, and get paid for it inside a single calendar quarter. If you have vision, dedication, and the willingness to sacrifice some sleep, it’s possible.

You can find Pedro's work at https://showops.ai/ and follow him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedrovantol.

Till next time,

Noah Cheyer

Do More With Less Using AI

PS: If you've quietly been building your own thing on top of your event workflow, let me know. I’d love to feature you.