Announcing ti.to

After the $10 million milestone, it’s clear that many people trust Tito to provide stress-free software for their events. As our customer base grows, we want to be able to grow with it.

Today, we released a bunch of features that are part of that plan.

Last April I had the good fortune to spend some time with Anthony Eden from DNSimple. Anthony is a bootstrapping hero of mine, and DNSimple is fast becoming the domain host of choice for the savvy web user. Anthony helped us to secure the ti.to domain hack. Four-letter domain hacks are rare (even rarer since Bump was acquired), and in a world where mobile is dominating and every keystroke matters, less is certainly more.

We’ve also shipped a new homepage design to go with our new domain. Kudos to Doc for his tireless work on this.

All tito.io links still work, and should do the right thing, whether redirecting or serving up our JS embed. We’ll be using our .io domain for developer related features from here on.

Probably the most noticable change that we’ve shipped today is our new ticket purchase flow. We previewed this in December in partnership with Clearleft for UX London, and Doc wrote about our design motivation earlier this month. We think it’s a massive improvement, and it gives us room to experiment with new ways of selling tickets.

Under the hood is about 6 months of research, planning and implementation of a payment engine that builds on our existing platform, but redesigned with growth in mind. This work forms the basis of a platform that will allow us to ship new features quicker, offer more flexible payment options, and handle an ever increasing volume of transactions.

It’s amazing to look back over the last year and to see how far we’ve come. Tito last year was wet behind the ears, full of ideas, experiments and, well, hacks. There is always a certain pride involved with working on something you love, but today we’re feeling a very strong sense of ownership, a sense of vision, and a sense that we’re on the right track toward building something really great.

It’s with a somewhat heavy heart that I announce that with this release, we’ve moved off Engine Yard. I’ve had a long, beautiful relationship with the folks at Engine Yard, and some of my best friends work or have worked there.

The choice is not a technology one. My friend Jonathan Siegel, whose company Exceptional was acquired by Rackspace last year, recommended us for the RackSpace Startup Program. Part of the deal is an account on Rackspace Cloud. As one of the original founders of Exceptional, I feel like this is like time off for good behaviour. I’ve enjoyed learning Chef for server provisioning and automation.

Finally, for the first time in 6 months, we’re able to take a breath, a step back, and think deeply about our plans. We’ve built a solid platform. We’re growing at our own pace. We’re in control of our own destiny.

We’re going to carefully consider each feature we add, and any work we do from here will leave the app a little better, one thing at a time.

Software is a game of inches. We’ve already come a long mile, and we’re looking forward to the next one.