Why Freeman Chose to Buy vs. Build Virtual Event Chat

The global events company Freeman had a problem: When in-person events were paused in 2020 due to the pandemic, Freeman needed to build a virtual events platform — and fast.

Freeman’s Director of Digital Product Elissa Ewers only had a few weeks to evaluate chat API providers to add in-app messaging functionality. After exploring chat options such as a custom javascript build, and several third-party providers, it was clear to Ewers that Stream Chat was optimal for Freeman’s unique needs. Here’s why.

Transcript

"What did we as a company want to be proficient in? I think one thing that Freeman is really good at is keeping focused on what do we want to be leaders in versus partnering with a best-in-class service?

For example, we use Tint for our social media aggregation because we learned the lesson that doing social media aggregation is a pain and not highly profitable. So let’s just go find a company that does it well. And that was sort of the same thing with chat.

We wanted to find a company that did it well because that was not something we had current proficiency in nor did we want to become a leader in. Partnering with a platform that could support our scale made the most sense because our bread and butter is custom websites and the design of websites for events, and supporting the livestream component of that."
–Elissa Ewers, Director of Digital Product, Freeman