What the trustees needed.
The Texas Association of Public Employee Retirement Systems (TEXPERS) runs an annual conference where roughly three hundred trustees and administrators of Texas public pension plans gather for education, networking, and policy discussion. The 2026 program was set for Galveston, April 25 to 29, at the San Luis Resort.
The conference uses Whova as the official mobile event app and inevent.com as the public-facing event microsite. Both work. Neither is built around the question that the trustees ask: what do I need to look up while I am at the conference? A trustee on a phone in a breakout-room hallway needs to find their fund’s actuarial number, the panel they wanted to attend, the sponsor they meant to visit, and the WiFi password they did not write down. The existing tools did not answer those questions cleanly.
The brief was simple. Build a public web companion that trustees could open on their phone, find their plan’s data, find a sponsor’s actual story, find the agenda without registering for an app, and walk away with something useful that lasted past the conference.
Two weeks from blank repo to live.
A Python static-site generator handled the content depth. Forty-two fund profiles with FY2024 financial and actuarial data sourced from the Texas Pension Review Board (PRB). Funded ratio, amortization period, discount rate, expense ratio, normal cost. Sortable on each column. A 26-entry acronym glossary for first-time trustees and the public officials who sit on pension boards as part of their elected duties.
A custom Open Graph image system generated 1,200-by-630 PNGs for each page so a link shared in iMessage or Slack landed as an editorial card, not a default favicon. An editorial design system tuned for trustees on phones in conference hallways. Vercel hosted the deploy with a 99.99 percent uptime promise.
The build window was 14 days. The work shipped on schedule and remained live for the conference and the weeks of search traffic that followed.
A day on a phone.
The first morning. A trustee opens the site over breakfast. Two taps to her fund profile, one tap to share the link with a colleague who could not attend. She walks into the keynote with the agenda already on her screen and the WiFi password collected from the demo push channel. Mid-morning the Investment Strategy panel mentions environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations without defining the acronym; the glossary on the site fills the gap, and she shares it in the panel chat.
Lunch. The lunch-line tracker shows the Spinnaker Ballroom at five minutes and Ballroom A at fifteen. She routes herself to the shorter line and finds two trustees from a sister fund she had been meaning to meet. The QR scan on her badge logs the connection without the awkward “do you want to connect” prompt.
Afternoon. A breakout-room change pushes silently to anyone who favorited the session. She does not miss the start. The post-session recap arrives on her phone within thirty minutes of the panel ending, five bullets and the moderator’s closing question. She forwards the recap to her board chair, who asks for the link to the companion site.
How the field guide became Simpli-FI Events.
TEXPERS leadership saw the TLFFRA Field Guide during the conference and asked whether the same build pattern could be deployed for their Summer Educational Forum, then for the 2027 Annual, then white-labeled to their members. That question is what turned a free conference companion into Simpli-FI Events the product. Multi-tenant infrastructure for the same pattern, repeatable across pension associations, fire-chief organizations, recruiting expos, and any conference where the people in the room are the reason people show up.
The patterns that traveled directly: companion-site-first (no app install gate), narrative sponsor profiles, member-directory publishing. The patterns we built next: the Engage live polling layer, the Web Push channels, the Simpli-FI ID networking layer, sponsor lead retrieval with Stripe Connect revenue share.
The shape of the conversation.
If you run a mid-market conference for an association, a fire-chief organization, a public-safety agency, or a professional society, the TLFFRA Field Guide is the proof of what we ship in two weeks at the Companion tier. The Bundle adds the engagement and push layers and the Simpli-FI ID networking. The White-Label tier adds your own custom domain and full org branding for the year.
The first organization in each vertical pays in references, not invoices. We trade money for proof while we build out the next set of case studies. Limited slots.