PASSTIX

Context

Event producers needed a way to generate and validate QR codes for their attendees. That concrete need was the starting point of everything else.

Problem

The local events market relied mostly on manual processes or external providers for digital ticket sales and access validation.

Constraints

• A small team and our own resources: no room to build a full platform on a hypothesis.
• Real events as the testing ground — access control has to work the first time, in front of a queue.
• Producers and attendees with very different levels of digital familiarity.

The work

• A first minimal solution: register attendees, generate QR codes, send them and validate them from a phone.
• Validation at real events before investing in a full platform.
• The MVP: accounts, checkout, payments, ticket generation, QR, access control, event management and reporting.
• Iteration with real producers and attendees, plus the sales, access, reporting and settlement processes around the product.

Decisions

• Build the smallest thing that proves the need before building the platform.
• A stack optimized for speed of iteration over infrastructure ownership: React, TypeScript and Firebase.
• Design the operation, not only the interface: what happens at the door, in the report and in the settlement.

Result

A product used at real events, with users, transactions and operation under high demand — and a business model behind it.

Learnings

• Validating early changes what you build: most of the first ideas never made it into the MVP.
• The hardest part of a product is rarely the interface — it's the operation around it.