Casey Reas, @reas

Creator of Processing

(via pablojimeno)

(Source: reas.com, via pablojimeno)

This has been our first full year operating stagehq.com and it has surpassed all our expectations. Tons of customers, thousands of new users and an increasing pool of recurring events:

We know that we still have to improve a lot of corners in our service and we’re going to work harder than ever in 2011 on our way to becoming the best registration system out there.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the trust of our customers: thanks for making of 2010 a great year.

In our last post we talked about how the lack of clarity in our booking notification emails caused doubts and problems to customers and, therefore, dozens of support tickets. We’ve worked hard to get what we think is the more clear and simple booking notification out there.

Old booking notification

For a year we’ve been sending a short and -too- simple email that basically contains the booking reference, an unique serial number used to track the booking. Attached to the email was one PDF file for each ticket included in the booking, so when you received our email the view would be something like this:

This email was causing frequent support tickets. Attendees had doubts in many areas:

• Is this email containing all the tickets for the booking or just one?
• Where is the date, place and general info about the event?
• Are the PDFs required to access the event? Must we print them?
• What can I do if I can’t open the PDF files?

New booking notification

In order to answer all these questions we’ve redesigned our booking notifications. This is the new design:

We’ve increased the information about the event and the details of the booking itself. Now the person that have made the booking gets a clear resume of the transaction and what to do if he/she have any problem.

Additionaly we’ve used event’s branding in the notification. The frame and links that appears in the emails are using event customized colors so they match the look in the booking process, reinforcing event’s branding. Our product, Stage is never mentioned in the email sent to attendees because we try to keep customers focused in the event, not in ourselves.

We try to make Stage as invisible as possible for the event’s customers, specially in the events where we’re already charging our fee, because we understand that the focus must be kept in the event. Our competitors use these kinds of notifications as an opportunity to sponsor themselves and include advertising of their own services, even when their customers are already paying for online registration process. We find that nasty.

By the way, notifications are now fully internationalized and each customer will receive the booking notification in the same language used for make the booking.

We’ve also changed the naming of the PDF files attached in emails. With this change, the person making the booking can clearly see the person to whom each ticket is addressed and even forward the right file to them if wanted:

In the next weeks we will be adding more new changes to Stage, related not only to the usability of certain areas, but also with some of the features most demanded by our customers as the VAT management.

Happy Staging!

In Stage we know how important good communication in an online sale process is. The confirmation email we sent when a customer makes a booking is the perfect moment for increasing attendees’ confidence.

When a new booking is made in a Stage powered event, the customer receives a confirmation email that includes the event’s basic information and the booking reference, an unique serial number used to track the booking.

This process has been working for one year, since Stage’s initial public launch. The results have been pretty good but we had three main concerns with the process:

1. Occasionally some of the emails we sent ended in the user’s spam folder. In many cases the user was simply not aware of the problem, and contacted us trying to know what was the problem.

2. Sometimes the user entered a typo in the email address, and never received the confirmation email. This obviously generated more support tickets.

3. The information we sent in the confirmation email was too poor and sometimes the lack of clarity in the message caused doubts, problems and again more support tickets.

In order to fix these problems we’ve made changes to the application, always trying to give the better possible service to our customers but keeping at the same time the simplicity they are used to.

First step: New email processing queue

To solve the first two problems we’ve migrated our email sending process to a dedicated web service: Postmark.

We started sending our emails with this service one month ago and we’ve sent already sent a few thousands emails with no significant problem, albeit sometimes the email queue takes a few minutes to be processed.

Now we have real time statistics on volume, bounces, and spam complaints for all the emails generated in our application. Additionally we’ve integrated DKIM and SPF support, that improves reputation with email authentication and is supported out the box by Postmark. The results are really good:

In order to have quick resolution of any problem that could potentially appears in the email processing we’ve used the Postmark bouncing API to automatically open a new ticket in our support system for each bounced email.

We want to go further with this and enable event organizers to see when a customer have not received its booking notification and take action to fix it: change email and resend email, contact user by phone and update personal info, etc.

We hope this new email processing system will help not only to reduce the number of support requests but to increase the percentage of correctly delivered emails and the trust in not missing a single email notification again.

We’ll explain the changes to fix the third point in our next post. (Update: See how we’ve redesigned our emails notification in this post)

A couple of weeks ago we added a new small feature: Stage selling widget integration in your website. This was one of the most required features, specially for people with many ticket types since it makes easier to see which types of tickets are available. Additionally the website’s branding is reinforced and the booking process shorted.

You can find the code for the widget integration in your event’s detail page and copy&paste it into your own website. This will add a table with the information about ticket types, price, deadline, etc.

We will probably add some customization options in the near future, but right now the integration looks really nice.

(image taken from agilismo.es)

Last week we made a small presentation at the Rejectconf, the unofficial -preconference of Conferencia Rails. The talk was not perfect since I did’t want to make it too long and because it was my first talk in english in the last five years, but feedback has been good. So we have published its slides today.

During the talk we tried to make a review of the three years Stage has been around. We tried to relate our experience as honest as possible: we talked about good and bad moments, problems and decisions the product and ourselves have passed through in these last years.

We hope these slides will be helpful for everyone else who is in the way of bootstrapping his own product.

Today is Stage’s birthday. Or better said, one year ago we opened Stage to the public. A year full of good moments, so once again we can only say thank you to all of you who have helped, supported and trusted us.

This has also been a hard year, but it seems that we are doing it well and in a good pace. We also learn what it really means to have your own product and to care and support each customer. During the past weeks some more great events like the RubyConf, Full Frontal, UX Brighton or the Scottish Ruby Conference have trusted us and joined our list of customers and many others not present there.

As we said a few days ago, we have sold tickets worth USD 1M but as we have also said, we never end polishing and in the coming hours some new features will come (like duplication of events or resending of notifications emails) and a few more to come soon (like the most wanted VAT support or iframe integration).

So, stay tuned because if the first year of Stage has been good, the second is going to be great. Thank you all!.

Last weekend we have achieved an important milestone: our customers have sold tickets worth USD 1M. And just before our first birthday, a nice present :). We are also very happy because last couple of months Stage is getting bigger and more events are trusting us as it registration platform.

So, we can only say thank you to all of you for trusting and supporting us!.

Image: One Million perfume by Paco Rabanne

Recently we found more and more customers making virtual events. One great example are the incredible JavaScript Virtual Master Classes offered by Amy & Thomas, and it appears they are having a wonderful time doing it:

Virtual Events may lack the feeling that perhaps can only be achieved with the physical presence at a conference, but have lot of advantages: lower costs for organizers and attendees, more flexibility, new forms of interaction and a potential audience limited only by the Internet access.

Until recently, the venue was a required element in Stage. To make these virtual events’ creation easier we have removed this requirement and in addition we’ve added the time zone in which the event takes place, a detail which is particularly critical in virtual events:

So… go virtual and enjoy the feeling of spread your knowledge from the couch. Now is easier than ever with Stage

Do you know what is our priority #1? Kick the ass of every other ticketing solution under the sun? Have a great customer service? Build a cool web product? Make big money?

No.

All these things are great but we think they are in some way a by-product of focused working in another things: help our users to rock the party with their events!

And with this approach in mind we’re constantly trying to find ways to make our customer’s events more appealing, easier to register and reach out to all of the potential audience. To improve this last point we’ve integrated Twitter and Facebook sharing features in Stage:

From now on all attendees that arrive to the event’s page and/or buy a ticket can share the event with their friends and help organizers to spread the voice.

So… tweet, share and enjoy!