Tito in 2013: A Look Back and a Quick Look Forward

It’s been a very exciting year. Twelve months ago Tito had processed about 2,500 payments for our early adopters involved in the private beta.

As we close out 2013, we’ll have processed nearly 20,000. Equally, in that twelve month period, we’ve also processed an additional $9 million, bringing us to a total of over $10 million worth of tickets sold through Tito.

In other words, in 2013 we helped 10 times as many people have a stress-free ticket purchasing experience.

It’s a good start. Our focus in the last year has been on building a solid platform on which to grow, and establishing ourselves with customer support that cares deeply about the needs of our users.

Here’s a selection of some of the praise that we’ve received on Twitter:

“By the way, may I just say that the folks at @useTito are absolutely awesome at support :)” —Aral Balkan

“Really appreciative to our @useTito for not only their amazing software but their support and always being there.” — Zach Inglis

“MASSIVELY impressed by the https://tito.io/ booking process for @mkgn. / @usetito” — Andy Clarke

…and there are many more.

We’ve been delighted by the calibre of the events that our customers have put on. We opened up our doors and began charging for our service this past August, and signed our first customer up within hours of going live. Since then, we’ve brought in €16,500 in fees. It’s a modest start, but it’s given us the confidence to know that we can follow through on bootstrapping our business. A somewhat unorthodox approach in today’s start-up world, but that’s another blog post. We now know that we’re building features that our customers value, and are willing to pay for. We’re so excited for 2014.

Over the course of the year, we crowd-funded over €60,000 with our Founding Customer programme, and signed up some of the most exciting developer conferences in the world. This year, we accommodated ticket sales for JSConf (US and EU), CSSConf (US and EU), SassConf, GopherCon, NG Conf, RubyConf, NodeConf (US and EU), jQuery Conf (US and UK). We’ve been the ticket provider for meetups and conferences in Germany, Australia, all over the US, Ireland, the UK, France, Poland, Belgium, Brazil, Uruguay, and beyond. We’ve processed payments for over 25,000 tickets in 8 currencies in over 300 paid events, and shipped another 25,000 free tickets.

So where do we go from here?

Despite what we consider a great start, as a team of four, we still have to find sources of income outside of Tito to simply keep the lights on. The number one priority for the coming months is to get ourselves into a position of sustainability. Growth will be our primary focus, in terms of maturity as a product and a platform for being able to support more and bigger events.

We’ve already prepared a new processing engine along with a freshened event homepage design. We successfully soft-launched this recently for Clearleft’s UX London. We’ll be talking a bit more about that as we upgrade our existing customers over the coming weeks.

Our customer support experience has already received a lot of praise, but we don’t want to stop there. In terms of support, we’re aiming for second to none.

Overall, we’ll continue to focus on our mission: to make the most compelling, simple-to-use, attractive platform for hosting events, managing attendees, and selling tickets. For us, our job in 2014 is clear. Since we now have a solid platform, it’s time to build, time to ship.