First Post! The Tito Story

Since we’re at the tip of a public release, it’s about time that we started talking a bit more publically about what we’re up to. This blog is the first step. Tito has come a long way since the first line of code, written by me on a Ryanair flight back in April 2011.

Two years ago, Eamon Leonard and I were about to launch the second Funconf, and I was insisting on “writing my own” ticket site. I wanted a smooth, consistent ticket purchasing experience for Funconf attendees, and I wanted a way to manage the attendees that didn’t make me panic. “We can do it in a weekend” I said. A month later, the first version of Tito, no more than a few API endpoints, was born.

Simple as it was, the Funconf sale went well, and Funconf went on to generate its own kind of mythology. After a few cautious iterations, the first event to make the leap of faith to use Tito for a real event was one that I had the pleasure to attend and speak at: Northern Lights in Aberdeen.

Shortly after that first successful event, Horace Dediu got in touch, having been inspired at Funconf to host an event of his own. Asymconf was the result, and became the first event to use our hosted event page.

A long line of top tier conferences have followed since then: Nodeconf, JSConf, New Adventures, Brooklyn Beta, Greenville Grok, Nordic Ruby, The Realtime Conference … and recently the Dublin Web Summit.

Even though we’ve not yet launched publically, we’ve still racked up some pretty good stats. We’ve sold over 12k tickets accross 150 events worldwide, amassing ticket sales of over US$2m, and €1.5m. All of this has been bootstrapped by our own sweat, heart and patience. It’s a good start. It’s been a good beta.

We’ve made new relationships, new customers, new friends along the way, and we’ve worked hard to respond to feedback and ensure that Tito meets our desires in terms of user experience, polish and craft, as well as our customers’ needs in terms of features that are important to them.

We moved from our living rooms to be part of the first batch in Dogpatch Labs Europe, and then moved to our current space: the office where pix.ie was born.

We’ve been busy rolling out features, and we have a few more that we’re working on that we can’t wait to ship. When we do, we’ll write about them here.

Huge thanks to everyone who has contributed so far.

I hope you can join us on the journey.