2024 TicketSignup Product Roadmap

One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2023 TicketSignup Recap, 2023 Year in Review, 2024 Company Strategy, 2023 RunSignup Product Recap, 2023 GiveSignup Product Recap, 2023 Infrastructure Report, 2024 RunSignup Roadmap, 2024 GiveSignup Roadmap.

In this blog, we provide an overview of our 2024 TicketSignup product strategy.

Next-Generation Timed Ticketing and Admissions

Our key strategic focus in 2024 is our next-generation timed ticketing and admissions. Behind the scenes in 2023, we made a lot of progress on our next-generation timed ticketing and admissions product. This introduces a patent-pending highly efficient database for generating and editing dates and time slots (and all the associated data like pricing, caps, and rules) with an intuitive and easy-to-use calendar interface.

Why is TicketSignup Creating a Next-Generation Timed Ticket and Admissions Product?

We have a great timed ticketing solution today that works very well for haunts, holiday lights shows, and other timed entry events. However, there are several reasons why we are investing in a next-generation timed ticketing solution:

• Provide a calendar-driven interface to easily set up and manage multi-day events and admissions.
• Offer more flexible purchase path options.
• Solve more complex event problems.
• Solve problems for different types of organizations, including year-round tickets for escape rooms and parks, as well as admissions for zoos, gardens, etc., and bookings for tours, marinas, etc.
• Continue to deliver best-in-class event technology for free.

Product Roadmap

In 2024, there are a lot of foundational and strategic features we will add to next-generation timed ticketing and admissions:

Next-Gen Timed Ticketing and Admissions Release Plan

In the first quarter of 2024, we will officially announce a beta-release of our patent-pending Timed Ticket and Admissions product. For interested customers and prospects, we will have a new wizard to set up your event, admissions, or booking site. Over time we will streamline the new and current ticket wizards to a single onboarding process that will support any event.

TicketSignup will always make it simple for any event to use our free ticket event platform. We will continue to add features that benefit events with and without timed entry or multiple dates – and make it easy to create any type of event!

More Ticket Features

In addition to rolling out next-generation timed entry, we will be adding more ticket features in 2024.

TicketSignup reduces customer service for events with self-serve ticket management options. In 2024 we will add several more self-serve ticket management options that events can enable for attendees:

• Transfer tickets to a friend
• Add store items to an existing purchase (combined with TicketSignup’s automated drip emails to upsell add-ons even after attendees buy tickets).
• Edit ticket information

We will add Private Ticket Types so that events can set up private discounted/early access tickets for sponsors, corporate groups, and other special attendees. We will also add additional views to the CheckIn Interval report to provide 5 minute increment and hourly views.

Towards the end of 2024, we will focus on adding year over year reporting for all ticket events. There will be two solutions for different event types:

1. Events with a start and end date (like a gala, festival, haunt, holiday light show) will be able to renew events while keeping the same dashboard and event website. We will display past event data in the same dashboard to easily track ticket sales trends, view/engage repeat attendees, and more. This is functionality that we have already built in RunSignup, and will be a very strategic differentiator.
2. Admissions, bookings, tours, and escape rooms that have year round ticketing will be able to set up tickets without an end date, and use our calendar-based schedule to make updates to tickets, dates, pricing, caps, etc. across years. We will add year over year reporting to easily view data across multiple years of ticket sales.

Ticket App

Delivering best-in-class and free Event Day technology continues to be a priority for TicketSignup. In 2024, we will focus on a number of new features:

• Adding functionality to check-in and sell multi-day, timed entry tickets
• Edit ticket information, including custom question responses
• Transfer and upgrade tickets within the Ticket App, with an option to charge the difference via Point of Sale
• Additional on site waiver features

Free Websites and Email Marketing

In 2023, we released dozens of new features for both Websites and Email Marketing. This year, we will enhance the onboarding events by adding website template options that fast-track creating a beautiful website. In addition, we’ll add more automation to feature the Event List for customers that have multiple events on TicketSignup. We will continue to add more content block options to the Website Builder, including easy section layout options.

There are two primary Email Marketing focuses:

1. Adding options to email specific dates and/or time slots, by ticket type in next-gen Timed Entry
2. Super Lists to create email lists across events and with different filters – for example, all ticket purchasers with 25 miles of a certain zip code.

Multi-Language

We will bring multiple language support to TicketSignup in 2024. This will take some time as there are many places to change, and we want to architect this correctly and ensure we are not slowed down too much in releasing new functionality in the future. We will support Spanish and French initially and will do automatic browser detection for preferred language.

Memberships + Tickets

In January 2024, we will release our beta membership platform. There will be a lot of really powerful features for many different types of organizations, including auto-renewals and flexible level/duration/pricing set up. Oftentimes, events serve as powerful ways to engage existing members and recruit new members. TicketSignup’s integrated approach to memberships will allow organizations to cross-sell memberships during ticket purchase, and offer discounted member pricing.

Payments

We will also bring new features to our financial system, which we have largely modernized over the past 2-3 years. This includes an invoicing system for events – perfect for sponsor and corporate payments.

We also plan to introduce ACH payments for transactions over $1,000. We will charge a flat 2% processing fee for these transactions, which will be a significant reduction from credit card rates.

Infrastructure

The largest infrastructure project this year is a cross over with Payments. We will move to a new version of Adyen payments, which is our backend payment provider. As with most infrastructure projects, there will be few visible improvements from a customer perspective, but it will provide increased capability in terms of onboarding new customers.

We also plan to upgrade of our code review process to improve the systems, reporting, and automation around how we deploy software. As you can imagine with over 2,000 software releases each year, any optimization we can make in that process should improve our overall efficiency of development.

We have a number of smaller incremental improvements that we want to make over the course of the year. One of the projects we might take on this year is expanding some of our database fields from INT to BIGINT. For example, our Registration ID is an INT field, which seemed plenty big when we started, enabling as many as 2,147,483,647 registrations. We are only up to 78,218,985, so we are only at 3% of our max, but we are growing steadily and each year gets larger. Also the database migration will take longer the larger the database gets. And BIGINT will allow us to get to ~9,000,000,000,000,000,000 registration id’s before we need to worry about it again.