How we built it — tix pro, our premium toolbox for event organizers.
A few months ago, we started building tix pro, and now it’s here. We worked on this because we wanted to provide better event management tools and services to our different customer segments.
Context
- We realized that our most valuable users (in terms of revenue per user — RPU) hosted events on some schedule; weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. There was always a repeating frequency to how they planned their events.
- We also saw that not all these users that had these repeating events sold paid tickets. Quite a number of them collected registrations for huge free events and didn’t pay to us with our previous pricing model.
- That was not and is still not a problem because, more times than not, there’s organic marketing from these free events.
- We also realized that some free users had special requests for features and customizations that they were willing to pay for and have paid for. And so we are here.
We identified what these users needed the most in terms of event management tools, and we built for them.
Who is tix pro for?
tix pro is our premium toolbox for event organizers. If you organize frequent events, tix pro is the plan for you. Not only because you get cheaper payment processing fees, but you’ll also get access to the tools you need to pull off successful events at scale repeatedly.
Our goals were simple in starting this.
- Support for recurring billing
- Support for assigning users to different plans
- Support for giving features to users based on their plan
- Support for different processing charges depending on user plan
Honestly, these parts of the architecture were relatively painless; the hard stuff was actually some of the new features in this release.
New features in the tix pro release
- Recurring events.
- Connecting your Zoom account.
- Ability to send a ticket to multiple recipients (i.e., one person buys tickets for a group of friends, and each person receives their own ticket).
- Multiple custom fields on the checkout form.
Recurring Events
I’ll talk about recurring events because the work on this significantly changed our app’s architecture. The way we started is definitely not how we finished. Initially, we assumed recurring events would exist separately from single-date events.
Our initial approach went like this because we wanted to minimize changes to our existing codebase and, at the same time, isolate significant changes. However, we ran into compatibility issues immediately after we started building, so we needed to think about that some more.
Here’s what we decided to do:
- Each event now has a schedule.
- A recurring event is a 1:1 event with multiple schedules.
- A single event is a 1:1 event with 1 schedule.
- Orders also mirror that, and orders belong to a schedule, and we track the ticket ID concerning that.
This actually worked out a whole lot better than our initial approach. Now, our architecture for events is a lot more flexible than if we took our initial approach. We can support a whole load of configurations for events, including 1:1 events coming very soon. With 1:1 events, you as a creator/service provider can create a schedule for people to book time with you — free or paid.
We also improved our payments.
Our transaction success rates were not anywhere close to where we needed to be, so we had to improve our processes to reduce timeouts and downtime.
We previously relied on callbacks, but we’ve moved everything to webhooks now. This is possibly my second favorite update in this release after tix pro itself, and I will most likely write another article about this.
Internally, we were pretty anxious about this release because this is the first time we’ve ever released anything that affects every user equally.
How did we prep for the release?
- We tested, and this includes everybody on the team — manual testing and automated testing. We had 63 rows of feedback in our bug tracking sheet.
- We manually backed up (this is in addition to our regularly scheduled automatic backups).
- We released locally first.
- We ran checks on specific user accounts.
- We launched tix pro to our entire user base.
Like we always say, we love events. This is why we exist, and this is why we are constantly building for event organizers. We want to make it easier for anyone who’s trying to organize an event to do so — whether it’s your first time or your 90th time.
Get tix pro at N4000 monthly or get one month free when you pay annually at N44,000.
Existing tix users can upgrade to tix pro and if you’re not a tix user yet, create an account here. All you need is an email address to get started.
