What's new in IO?

It’s funny; we’ve got years of experience under our belts with Tito, yet launching IO has us feeling like a start-up again.

It’s both scary and energising! 

Scary because you never know for sure if you’re going to be able to find product market fit (though our early customers give us a lot of confidence we will). Energising because you can afford to be a bit more scrappy and experimental while working with early design partners who understand your vision and are motivated to help you improve the product. 

And you can do it quickly.

We’ve released more than 300 features, improvements and fixes on IO in just the past 6 months — all while continuing to improve and support Tito, which remains core to what we do. 

Check out the IO changelog for a curated list, or read on for a closer look at three of the most noteworthy changes.

Customisable templates

Every screen and email in every user flow has always been fully customisable in IO, but getting there used to require a fair bit of hand-holding. Our earliest customers hired us to do that part for them. At the start of this year, we took on a project to make it easier for anyone to take the reins.

First, we audited and standardised how we’re using Liquid, the popular open-source templating language created by the folks at Shopify to power their themes. We’ve made it easier to add variables, conditional logic, and loop through event and attendee data. This alone gives organisers a ton of power to personalise emails and pages for each guest.

Our default theme also got a complete overhaul to make it more beautiful and modern straight out of the box, and super easy to customise by dropping in your own images and colours. 

For a lot of users, this might be as much customisation as you need. For those who want more flexibility, each template can be edited at the HTML level and you can add your own CSS and even JavaScript if needed for advanced interactivity.

Finally, as there’s so much you can customise, we introduced a new section to house all these templates with live thumbnail previews, letting organisers more easily visualise each user flow.

This all paid off recently when we onboarded a major music and events company to send special gig invites to users directly in-app. Aside from a few questions and minor bug reports, their contractor was able to independently build a completely bespoke (and gorgeous!) invitation flow. We loved to see it!

Roles and permissions

In January, we introduced the ability for account owners to invite users in a read-only role, providing a way to share access to your account without allowing those users to make any changes to event or attendee data.

Last month we enhanced our permissions system to make it even easier to manage who can see and do what within specific events.

There’s not a whole lot more to say about these features, but it’s further evidence of how we’re aiming to give organisers granular control over every aspect of the experience, and how privacy and security are always top of our mind.

Public registration and Stripe payments

In February, we added the ability to generate public registration pages for events. Organisers can choose to either issue an immediate space to anyone who registers, or else have folks request an invite and go through an approval flow. You can also specify how many guests people are allowed to bring.

In April, we introduced Stripe payments. Ahead of time, we drew up a multi-stage plan of what payments in IO could look like, from a bare bones “Phase 0” implementation all the way up to full support for everything that Tito does and more. Naturally, we started with Phase 0!

For now, you can set a price for a ticket and redirect to Stripe Checkout to take payment. There’s still a lot more to do, but this initial implementation covers the most basic use cases, and it’s already being used to great success by Rands for his series of Slack 10th Anniversary events.

These updates definitely make IO a strong contender for some of our Tito customers to switch, particularly if they want more customisation options than Tito currently offers.

What’s next for IO?

There’s so much we want to do that it can be hard to decide what we want to tackle next. More onboarding improvements, making it easier to create sharing links, next steps on payments, account-level themes, integrations, and rolling out proper subscription plans, to name a few.

We’re really excited about what we’re building, sometimes so much so that we forget to tell anyone about it! I hope this brief update has whet your appetite, and if you’d like a demo or think your event might be a good fit for IO, let us know.