What Rolling Loud taught me about nine minutes

A man collapsed behind us at Rolling Loud 2024.

My friend and I had posted up at the main stage early, staking out a spot for the headliner. The crowd was packed tight. Behind us, two guys had been talking. Normal festival conversation, nothing off. Then one of them dropped.

We turned around and tried to signal for help. Waved our arms. Yelled. The crowd was too deep and too loud for anyone to notice. Staff sat on a cherry picker maybe fifty yards out. Local law enforcement, elevated above the crowd to spot this kind of thing. They didn't see us either.

My friend made the call to leave the crowd, push through thousands of people, find someone with a radio, and lead them back to the guy on the ground. That round trip took over nine minutes.

In those nine minutes, the man regained consciousness and collapsed again. He was on asphalt. If he'd hit his head on the way down either time, he could have bled out before anyone with training reached him.

He was lucky. The next person in that situation might not be.

Where RaveDaddy started

RaveDaddy started as a festival tool. Find your crew when the signal drops and your group scatters. A side project from someone who had been in enough crowds to know the frustration of losing your people in a sea of 40,000.

After Rolling Loud, the frustration framing felt small.

The product couldn't be about finding your friends. It had to work when someone needs help and the people around them can't get it fast enough. The crowd at Rolling Loud didn't scatter my group. It trapped a stranger on the ground and kept us from getting anyone to him for nine minutes.

The rebuild

We rebuilt it. Same team of two. Broader name, broader mission: BuddySOS.

It still finds your people in a crowd. But the reason it exists is the nine minutes between "someone needs help" and "help arrives." In a dense crowd with no cell signal and no line of sight to staff, nine minutes is what you get when a friend is willing to fight through the crowd on foot. Most people don't have that option.

We built the app so the next person does.

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Keep reading: The next essay digs into why safety apps get marketed to the wrong people and how that shaped the BuddySOS rebuild. If you want the product side, the BuddySOS landing page explains how it works in practice, or you can read more about the studio behind it.