Hundreds and Thousands

There’s something about a first full year in business that feels like standing still, despite things marching on. 2014 felt a bit like that, but as I look back at the progress we’ve made, I feel like it was everything but standing still.

We started billing in September of last year, and mostly sat around waiting for customers. In January, we shipped a new checkout, and things began to take off.

We reached the signficant €100k in total revenue mark around September, a milestone that almost passed us by as we were kept busy keeping servers up to date, dealing with day to day issues, and working on various updates.

We shipped our Embeddable JavaScript Widget as we crossed $30m worth of tickets sold, and we’re ending the year having sold about that much worth of tickets in all of 2014. That’s over three times what we processed last year.

This year we also crossed 1000 paid events and over 100k tickets issued. It’s all hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands.

It hasn’t been a year without problems though. We’ve learned that event software needs to be very highly available, and there are quite some challenges in achieving the level of availability that should be considered acceptable to our customers. We spent a lot of time in November dealing with alleged bugs (and real bugs) and I was very pleased to move to a new fully-redudant, highly scalable stack on AWS. After a rough week mid-November, we saw off two of our biggest ever sales, processing thousands of orders in minutes for ng-conf and then the Web Summit with a well load-tested setup.

Finally, 2014 was an identity-forming time for us. We poked some fun at the end of January, but we took the rest of the year very seriously, and it’s starting to show. We were all a bit burned out before Christmas, but our heads are up, and we’re very excited about 2015. We have some really great work about to ship. We have some of the best customers in the world.

Looking back at our post from this day last year, it took us the whole year to get there, but we have achieved all of the goals that we set for ourselves last year. Our platform is far more resiliant and scalable, and we’re ready to handle much more growth in terms of customers and sales. Our checkout process is even more refined, and many consider it the best in the ticket-purchasing world. Despite the increase in volume, our customer support is still our most oft-praised “feature”. Most importantly, the business is sustainable in and of itself. We’d certainly like it to be bigger and for things to grow faster, but we’ve built our platform to grow from.

Mostly, I’m impressed that our overall vision from last year ‘to make the most compelling, simple-to-use, attractive platform for hosting events, managing attendees, and selling tickets’ hasn’t changed one bit. And we’re a year closer. Watch this space.

See you in 2015.