Original Summary

I built a ticketing app for one customer: my kid's high school afterprom. The parent committee needed online tickets, signed waivers, and a way to let parents know their kid actually made it inside. About 14 months ago I opened it up to anyone, assuming the market was "other schools." This week it crossed $100k processed. Here's what I got wrong and right getting there, in case it helps anyone building for a similar crowd. I picked the wrong market, and the right one found me. Schools came, slowly. But so did community benefit dinners, a bar, festivals and small nonprofits. Turns out anyone selling general admission tickets has the same two options: a cash box, or a big ticketing site that takes a cut of every ticket. That middle is wide open. If I'd stayed narrowly "for schools" in my copy, I'd have turned half of these people away. Flat pricing does a lot of the selling. Most of the space charges per ticket. I went with a flat annual fee. A volunteer treasurer has to explain the cost to a board, and "it's one fee a year, no matter how many tickets" ends that conversation in one sentence. If your buyer has to justify spend to someone else, make the price easy to repeat. Let customers write part of your roadmap. Silent auctions were never on my list. Then a customer who was already selling tickets with us asked if they could run their auction in the same place, instead of juggling paper bid sheets and a separate app. I built it for them. We've now run two auctions start to finish, and one had 86 people bidding from their phones. It's become one of the main reasons new orgs reach out. The best feature I've shipped this year came from someone already paying me, not from my own planning. The boring features are the sticky ones. The waiver is the feature nobody asks for and everybody loves. At our afterprom, 560 kids came through the door and only 3 hadn't signed their waiver ahead of time. That used to be a table of paper forms. Find the spreadsheet or paper stack your customer hates and replace it. Schools buy slowly, then in bulk. I just signed my first school district, and a few others are asking. One district deal covers multiple schools, so it can be worth more than months of one-off signups. It's a long cycle, but worth it. Where it's at: $100k+ processed About 3,600 tickets sold 12 paying orgs, including one district 2 silent auctions run What I'm trying now: cold email, and as of this month, physical postcards mailed to schools. Yes, paper. School offices still open their mail, and it's a lot harder to ignore than another cold email. Too early to say which wins, but I'll share numbers when I have them. Goal is 50 paying orgs by end of year. If you've sold into schools, nonprofits or volunteer-run groups, what was the channel that actually worked for you? I'd love to compare notes.   submitted by   /u/lamarus [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/10/16 05:12:25