Ask HN: In London? Looking for a startup idea? I have a MVP for you.

13 points

16 years ago

There seems to be gap in the market for an online ticketing system which is very clean and simple for people buying tickets, doesn't use PayPal, and ideally UK based. We needed one, so built a minimal implementation. People love our system and want to use it for their events. We feel it's too much hassle for a side project, so would like to offer the Ruby on Rails code and some introductions to potential customers to an HN user in London as a Minimal Viable Product.

Our company provides a SaaS information management system for small to medium companies with complex requirements. As part of our marketing efforts, we've run a couple of events, charging for tickets. http://www.oneis.co.uk/events

We looked at services like http://www.eventbrite.com/ and http://www.amiando.com/ . They were too interested in promoting themselves to our clients, resulting in a cluttered and horrible UI. It really is not something we would want our clients to see. Plus, they would have forced us to use PayPal, which I do not want to use for anything important.

As we already had a credit card merchant account in place, we decided to build a system ourselves, for two reasons. Firstly, to solve our immediate problem, and secondly, to show our potential clients how good we were at web apps. We got really positive feedback from the system from our first event, except that you could only buy one ticket per transaction. So, for the second event, we made it really simple to buy multiple tickets as well. Then people really loved it, and started asking if they could use it.

Turning this into a product is more than just putting up a web app. Sorting out tax, payments, liability issues and so on are too much for us to take on as a side project.

We have a very polished front end which integrates with PayPoint for payments through their advanced API (so the user never leaves our site, always seeing our hostname in the URL). It supports multiple attendees per transaction, VAT, optional extra items (eg books), free tickets and discount codes, the "Verified by Visa" system and clones, produces printable invoices, sends a confirmation email, has lovely URLs. Most importantly, it has absolutely nothing in the user experience which isn't absolutely essential to getting a ticket.

However, while the user facing side is ready to use, there is no event setup UI or back end system: we just used ad-hoc SQL queries to produce the attendee list and accounts and use a Ruby script to set up each event as it's needed.

We'd like to offer the code to a HN user in London (or group of HN users so pg doesn't complain about single founders) as a Minimal Viable Product to get you going, and introduce you to a few people who might use it. There are no strings attached, apart from an expectation that you'll make decent efforts to use it.

Obviously you'll want to see it first, so contact me, mentioning your HN username, and I'll send you some links. (contact details in profile). I'm not going to post them here because I don't feel like a wave of traffic to our production systems and the resulting tide of emails notifying us of fake bookings.

I'm very much hoping that someone can make something shiny out of this!

Questions?

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