estyesty
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Edited May 17, 2025

Q: Evergreen webinar features in HeySummit — what’s built-in?

First off — just wanted to say I really love HeySummit. The platform’s been super intuitive and flexible, and it’s made hosting events a lot more manageable. Huge kudos to the team!

I know HeySummit supports pre-recorded sessions, which is great — but I’m curious how far that goes when it comes to running evergreen webinars. Specifically, I’m wondering if these features are available natively within the platform:

- “Just-in-time” access (e.g. starts in 5 minutes from when someone registers)
- Simulated live chat or preset attendee interactions
- Timed CTAs, polls, or downloads during replay
- Time-zone aware scheduling for global audiences

Would love to hear if this is possible now, or something that’s being planned. Thanks so much! 😊

Founder Team
Ben_HeySummit

Ben_HeySummit

May 17, 2025

A: Hey, thanks for reaching out. It's so great to hear that you've enjoyed using HeySummit so far and that you've found the UX and interface intuitive. I really appreciate you taking the time to say that, as we spend a huge amount of time getting details like that right.

Okay, on to the question about evergreen webinars. As it currently stands, the way our auto-repeating or evergreen capabilities work is that you do it on the talk level. This allows you to repeat some talks, but not necessarily all of them, depending on what you're trying to achieve.

Any talk that you set up within your HeySummit event will have a title, a date, a time, and a description. You will also set up how it's going to be broadcast, whether that's live, pre-recorded, or live stream. You would go ahead and do that as you would for any other talk.

Then, if you want to make it evergreen, you would turn on the auto-repeat features. When you do that, you specify the frequency with which it repeats. Whether that's every day, every week, every month, or every second Tuesday, it's completely up to you. When it auto-repeats and reschedules the next one, it simply repeats whatever broadcast setting you set up initially. For example, if it's a Zoom meeting every week, a new Zoom meeting would be created. This can be great for regular live sessions with your members.

We use it for live office hours every week, with one session that auto-repeats every week. Similarly, you could add pre-recorded videos that repeat every couple of weeks. Now you've got your whole event on auto-repeat. You can see an example of this at https://bootcamp.heysummit.com, which repeats every week. Anyone arriving on that site will see that the event is either running as we speak or is about to start in the next few days.

Whether an event is auto-repeating or not, you still get the benefit of our live chat, polls, and Q&A sections. It's also worth noting that we do not provide any simulated live chat or anything like that. To be completely honest, I'm not entirely sure we ever will, as it feels a bit too fake to me. Though, never say never! In situations like this, it’s always helpful to hear about use cases in case we're missing a key detail.

Generally speaking, we strive to create meaningful online experiences for our customers, as opposed to contrived or overly fake ones. Appreciate though that there's a lot of middle ground and ways to do it right versus ways to do it wrong. We try to stay on the right side of the line to do the best for both the organizers and the attendees.

Probably the core limitation of our auto-repeating capabilities, based on what you've said above, is that we don't currently support just-in-time setups. I think this is more likely something that we will offer, but without the simulated chat.

Anyway, food for thought, and apologies for the very verbose response! If you've gotten this far, kudos :)

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Hi Ben, Wow, what an answer! All AppSumo sellers could learn a lot from your clear, no-nonsense replies. Found the Evergreen option under the Talk menu—was hoping for a top-level spot, but it works (I guess makes sense given it’s a summit platform).

Only slight hiccup: you have to create the Talk first, then use the three-dot menu to set Evergreen. A bit hidden, but it’s fine atm. Thanks again!

Thanks, esty. That's so kind of you to say so. And thank you for the feedback. I'll see if we can improve that workflow in a future update.

KarlDPLUS

Hi Ben, I'm glad to see others have requested just-in-time capability. This option would very likely appeal to many customers who want to strike while the iron is hot with first-time visitors. I've seen it work elsewhere. For us, it's a requirement.

Thanks Karl. It’s in the list for us to consider for a future update :)

it would be great to see the option to set up °just in time° evergreen webinars, for authentically pre-recorded webinars (ie. without faking that they are live).
Currently the shortest timeframe for a talk to become avaiable as Evergreen is 24 hours.
For a typical "on demand" evergreen webinar, it would be great to give the user multiple webinar start times, including something like "in 5 minute

Hey, thanks for the suggestion. This is something we are considering. Right now, as you say, the minimum repeat time frame is 24 hours. We'll continue listening to feedback to better understand use-cases and so see when it makes sense to go fully with a just-in-time style format.

I love that you won't offer the fake chat, I hate those. Howerver, a just in time option would be great for the audience, instead of forcing them to a specific time that might not work for them.