Ticketbox

Background

Ticketbox had been a popular event ticketing platform in Southeast Asia, particularly in Vietnam, since 2015. It was acquired by Tiki to expand the variety of digital products alongside physical goods on the platform.

My Role

As a Project Manager, my main responsibilities included building processes and the Ticketbox team, managing and delivering projects, coordinating internal and external teams, and sometimes being involved in Agile training, documentation, SEO, security, and product development.

Product

Ticketbox had been a popular event platform for event organizers in Vietnam. The legacy system had been working fine since 2017 without any updates. Although it had some critical problems that needed fixing, there were features that no event ticketing platform in Vietnam could compete with:

1. Custom landing pages for special events
2. Supporting complex seatmaps
3. Offline check-in

Seatmap is Ticketbox’s unique selling point. It is an SVG file with a set of rules for defining and naming layers that correspond with a stage’s areas and tickets.

My first project was to relaunch Ticketbox apps, add movie ticketing, and modernize its website and apps UI on the App Store and Play Store after they had been taken down due to no updates for a long time.

When developing the new site, I learned about onsite performance marketing and the cohort analysis.

Ticketbox’s business model is seasonal, and most of its revenue depends on a few large events that are organized during specific times of the year. The goal of introducing the movie ticketing feature was to make its revenue more stable and less fluctuated.

COVID-19 Crisis

Events require attendees to gather in specific places. When COVID-19 hit, Ticketbox took a significant loss due to social distancing regulations. All events were cancelled, and Ticketbox’s revenue dropped to zero. We were in an adapt-or-die situation.

We had intensive meetings to discuss how we should pivot the platform to survive COVID-19. One of the ideas we discussed was to build a live-streaming platform so that organizers could create their online or live-streaming events. The revenue stream of live-streaming events is from selling tickets or digital gifts purchased and given by users.

The first MVP was built and launched within two months after we received the announcement of social distancing from the government. We then reached out to some indie artists and collaborated with them to organize their shows with our live-streaming product.

Even though we tried hard, Ticketbox development was put on a low priority by Tiki. Our team was assigned to different products.

Key Takeaways

• A product can survive for a long time without any development if it has unique selling points and market that are niche and hard for competitors to replicate.
• Tracking is crucial if you want to monitor the performance of your products.
• The product must pivot to survive or attract new users.