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Real organizers, real events.
Black Is Tech, one of the country's leading conferences for Black professionals in tech, ran their 2026 conference on Gythr. A few weeks later, they re-signed for 2027.
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One platform instead of five.
For years, Black Is Tech ran the way most community conferences do, on a stack of tools that were never designed to work together: Eventbrite, a dedicated registration platform, a separate event app, badge-printing software, form tools, and a web of spreadsheets. That added up to more than $35,000 a year in software. The two most labor-intensive jobs, speaker coordination and volunteer management, still lived in spreadsheets.
- April 20–23, 2026
- The Ion, Houston, TX
- 50+ speakers
- 20+ workshops · pitch competition
- 5+ tools → 1
- one connected platform
- $35,000+/yr
- in software, replaced
Before Gythr, we were spending so much time and resources trying to create a proper unified planning process. Now we have something that connects our processes, saves us a lot of time, saves us a lot of money, and makes the experience better for the planning team, attendees, speakers, and sponsors.
Why they chose one platform
Gythr is modular, so organizers pick the pieces they need. That let Black Is Tech run registration, the attendee app, speaker management, volunteer scheduling, sponsor delivery, and post-event feedback as one connected system instead of five disconnected ones. “The event app alone was costing us five figures a year,” founder Tosan Arueyingho says. “Now that it's all interconnected, it helps the entire process. I'd recommend it to any event organizer.”
Setup was one walkthrough, then self-serve
Getting live didn't need an implementation team. “You did one quick walkthrough, and after that I just started playing with things. It was very quick,” Tosan says. The speaker portal was the standout. Speakers could see their schedule, call times, and expectations in one place, with no confirmations to chase across email threads. “Every single speaker said, ‘You guys are so organized with the speaker process.’ I love speaker relations now.”
Four days at The Ion
BITCON 2026 put Gythr into production across a multi-track, multi-format event: keynotes, panels, 20+ workshops, a pitch competition, and recruiter office hours. The part Tosan remembers most is what didn't go wrong. “I'd seen the system work, and I had confidence things were moving,” he says. “I didn't hear anybody say ‘my stuff is broken.’” At past events he'd spent conference days troubleshooting the event app. In 2026 he spent them with his community.
The fix that shipped mid-event
One real issue surfaced. Some attendees had registered with one email and signed into Gythr with another, so their registrations didn't connect. Gythr's team spotted it in real time and shipped an add-email function, letting attendees link multiple addresses to one account, while the conference was still running. At a big enterprise platform, that's a support ticket and a wait for the next quarterly release. Gythr fixed it during the event.
Modules used
The renewal
Renewals are the real review.
The honest verdict on an event platform shows up after the event. Black Is Tech's took weeks. BITCON 2026 wrapped in late April, and shortly after, they committed the 2027 conference to Gythr on expanded terms and grew the scope. 2027 adds a Global Virtual Summit in January ahead of the in-person conference in April, a hybrid year that once would have meant re-assembling the old tool stack. Instead, both run on Gythr, and the virtual summit's call for speakers is already live on the platform.
What I tested was the MVP, and the MVP was already a super powerful product. If we could get all this accomplished as a design partner, imagine what happens down the line with more resources, more customers, more data.
What's next for 2027
The design-partner relationship didn't end with the contract. Tosan's top ask for 2027 is a native mobile app experience, the thing he hears other organizers ask about most, and it's helping shape what Gythr builds next.
“Gythr: making event organizers' lives easier, one feature at a time.”
Tosan Arueyingho, Founder, Black Is Tech
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