Introducing tix.africa 2.0: online ticketing for live and virtual events
Late yesterday, we released version 2 of tix, a big and little bit overdue step towards our grand plan to build the simplest way to buy and sell event tickets in Africa and charge attendees in your own local currency, starting in Nigeria.
Overdue because internally we had planned to launch some aspects of this release back in September but we missed our internal deadline. It might have taken us longer than we initially planned (and a lot of things happened in the past 24 hours and we’ve learned from that experience) but this milestone means a lot to every single one of us on the team.
The most obvious being growth as this is our first major release since our MVP last year and I’m so proud of the team’s collective efforts in making this happen. The other two are adaptability and resilience considering the impact of COVID-19 on our business and the entire event and hospitality sectors. With this launch, we’re very clearly embracing virtual events which have accounted for 93% of all events created on tix in the last 6 months.
Previously, creating a virtual event on tix was a workaround. So certainly the major redesign in this launch focused on two things, the first of which was having virtual events as a core offering and our Zoom integration. The integration will offer Zoom pro features (unlimited meeting durations for up to 100 guests) to all tix users at no additional charge until December 2020 at the earliest. We do have intentions to include some other features in our tix premium plan that will be available in early 2021.
The second is reimagining the simplicity of our app so that as we increasingly add more features that simplicity never goes away. It still takes under than 5 minutes to create an event on tix.
Oh, and we also updated our website!
So, what’s new?
Our new identity.
We’ve fully embraced a lower case lifestyle. We’re convinced it underscores our commitment to simplicity and it looks great.
Our new website.
We finally have a website with more than one page, lol! Jokes aside, we’ve added more pages and content to our site to really tell our story and answer questions that our customers have about us and our product.
Your event dashboard.
We needed to have a way to differentiate between live events and online events. Live events are highlighted in tix orange and have a calendar icon, while online events are highlighted in tix green and have a video camera icon.
Creating events
Now, the first thing you will do when creating an event is selecting the type of event. And this logic will inform what options are available to you on the form.
Managing events
There isn’t a lot of difference between this page in the previous version. However, it is much tidier now and we have more space already laid out in the design where we will add new features without changing everything on you again.
Your event page
The changes in this page enable the event organizer’s content to be the main focus. It also helps us move the product in the direction of some exciting new features.
Our new help centre
Discover everything about using tix in our much better-organized help centre. We even have live chat.
Great, what’s next?
These features are not available yet but they are coming soon.
- Connecting an existing Zoom account and generating a Zoom event link
- tix mobile
- Recurring events
- Event waitlists
- Discount codes
- Analytics
- Event recommendations
- Integrations and partnerships!
Each person on the team is really excited about this update because it is a culmination of a lot of work.
It is my hope that everyone - users, event attendees, random passers-by on our website - who comes across this update love it as much as I do.
More important than your love though is your feedback, we read every single comment so please let us know here, Twitter, Instagram, email, live chat, (wherever you spend most of your time) what you think about it so that we can improve.
Create a free tix account here.
Thank you!
— Folayemi
