Location-Based Concert & Event Social Platform

Customer Profile

A team that organizes and curates concerts, festivals and niche cultural events. Their brand is built on "putting the right event in front of the right audience" — but when they use off-the-shelf ticketing platforms, the customer data stays with the platform, they cannot deliver a brand-specific experience, and measuring repeat attendance across events is essentially impossible.

The Problem

Existing ticketing platforms fell short on three fronts:

1. No brand experience. A generic off-the-shelf ticketing page does not carry the organizer's niche identity (indie rock festival, jazz night series, niche electronic curator) to the user. Once an event ends, the user does not remember the organizer — pulling them to the next event requires another ad spend.

2. No location-based discovery. A user 2 km from a niche concert happening Thursday night cannot organically discover it. Push notifications on existing platforms are either absent or generic spam ("30% off"). Geo-targeted "your city / your neighbourhood / starting in N hours" logic simply does not work.

3. No post-event community. After a concert, the 800 attendees from the same event cannot find each other. A shared Spotify playlist, a photo stream, a "pre-sale for our next event" announcement from the organizer — none of these exist. The organizer cannot retain their most loyal customer.

On the ticketing layer there were additional pains: QR fraud, transfer / refund policy ambiguity and gate-scan speed (even 5 seconds per ticket at a festival gate causes queues).

Our Solution

We designed a five-stage, mobile-first platform.

1. Ticketing + Anti-Fraud QR

Payment integration via Stripe and Iyzico-style providers; tickets via rotating QR (the hash rotates at short intervals — screenshots cannot be used for fraud); fast gate scan (offline-capable scanner app — if connectivity drops at the gate it still works and syncs later). Ticket transfer (gift to a friend) is audit-logged; refund rules are configurable per organizer.

2. Location-Based Event Discovery (Geo-Push)

Not continuous GPS — it drains battery. Instead, iOS Significant Location Change + Android Geofence API drive event-driven push. When a user enters a city or zone, events matching their interest profile, opt-in preferences and notification-frequency rules are pushed. The frequency cap is enforced inside the backend rule engine; geo-spam is blocked at both the technical and policy layers.

3. Organizer-Branded Social Feed

Each organizer owns their own channel: event announcements, artist playlists (Spotify embed), backstage content, memory photo streams, follower count. Attending an event does not auto-follow the organizer — opt-in only. But for users who do opt in, the organizer's next event appears under "organizers you follow" rather than as a paid ad — structurally lowering the organizer's CAC.

4. Sponsorship + Premium Ticket Module

Per-event sponsor showcase (sponsor logo, pre/in-event special campaigns), VIP / fast-track / backstage ticket tiers, bundle combinations (e.g. "concert + after-party + discounted whiskey package"). Organizers configure all of it from a self-serve panel — no code deploy required.

5. Post-Event Community

The event page does not close when the event ends — it shifts into "post-event" mode: attendee photo stream, organizer-shared setlist / playlist, "pre-sale for the next event" CTA, post-event survey. This layer keeps the user from drifting away from the organizer once an event ends — the follower base, which used to live on the ticketing platform, now sits with the organizer.

Results

• Multiple event formats (concerts, festivals, niche night series) live on one platform — organizers no longer juggle separate tools per format
• Geo-fenced push infrastructure runs event-driven on PostGIS + iOS Significant Location Change + Android Geofence API; battery cost is low and the frequency cap is enforced in the backend
• Ticketing + QR anti-fraud: rotating QR + device binding + offline-capable gate scanner; designed for fast gate-side scanning
• Organizer-branded social feed and post-event community modules are live; the organizer retains their own follower base inside the platform
• Sponsorship + premium ticket engine is wired for organizer self-serve configuration
• Organizer retention: their own branded channel plus full ownership of customer data (which used to sit with the platform) structurally bind organizers to the system

Why This Approach Worked

Three decisions made the difference. First, making geo-push event-driven (Significant Location Change + Geofence API) instead of continuous GPS — battery usage stays low, users do not uninstall. Second, baking the push frequency cap into the backend rule engine — even if an organizer wanted to send five pushes a day, the system refuses; this is what keeps users from drifting into notification fatigue. Third, treating post-event as a first-class product phase rather than the moment the user disappears — that is what lowers the organizer's customer acquisition cost structurally.