James Tagg

The three co-founders knew they wanted to do something in e-commerce but didn’t know what the problem was that they could solve.
Their first idea was a group-pay booking system.
Quicket was born out of their combined skills sets and experience, and finding an innovative way to provide a self-managed ticketing service.

Quicket is a business-to-business-to consumer business.
The B2B aspect involves the contract with event organisers, which are businesses, to sell their tickets.
The B2C aspect relates to the marketplace Quicket creates to link event organisers that sell tickets and consumers who buy tickets.

A great ticketing business can handle high volumes, while treating every transaction with fiduciary care.
It meets the needs of every individual event organiser, regardless of the size or action of the event.
It gives ticket buyers a high quality experience.

The biggest challenge was to build a platform that can handle huge concurrent loads of people.
The platform had to be adaptable and fiduciarily robust, but still easy to use.
The technology provider for an event must be able to deal with stressful situations and stressed out people.

Simple apps can be built using no-code or low-code solutions.
App complexity always grows, hence it’s advisable to find a framework with good community support.
James recommends solutions that allow a hybrid web/mobile approach.

You should structure your development team around your needs.
Quicket has a small core team of full-stack engineers working with a product lead.
Quicket hires newly qualified coding engineers and trains them up on its stack and methodology.

Quicket has spent far more time on developing features and functionality than on UI and UX.
Feedback over the years has alerted them to the need to pay more attention to the user experience.
Realising they don’t have the necessary in-house expertise, Quicket is now working with a specialist design agency to get UI and UX that match the platform’s powerful features.

Always be grateful for feedback, and find a way to use it constructively.
Implement and use feedback mechanisms that give all areas of your business a voice.
Internal and external stakeholders must have a say in how feedback is acted upon.

Not being desperate for funding is a good position to be in and gives you negotiating power.
Funding should be a calculated decision based on what you want to achieve by when.
Look at funding beyond just the money to see how else the funder can add value to your business.

The pandemic has pushed the eventing industry forward technologically.
In-person connection is a fundamental human need, which is reflected in the growing demand for events.
NFTs, crypto and AR are all technologies that will play a big role in events in future.

James Tagg shares his secret ingredient.