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It’s not really MMR but I have a side business when I provide software for online and in-person festival payments (entry/food/drinks). If you take the total rev

It’s not really MMR but I have a side business when I provide software for online and in-person festival payments (entry/food/drinks). If you take the total revenue (or profit) for the year and divide by 12 I’m well over the $500/mo limit. I currently do 3 festivals a year which all pretty much fell in my lap, I’ve yet to start any sort of sales/marketing due to being busy with my day job/life and not wanting to grow too fast. I started back in 2021 when a local company I’ve worked with to make apps came to me looking for a solution for their food/music festival that didn’t require handing out and (almost as importantly) counting all the tickets/tokens that people bought to spend at the vendors. I did a quick turn around of a couple months to get a v1 out and working in time for the event. In the next year I essentially rewrote 90% of it and added in-person payment support (previously had just supported recording in-person payments made through a CC terminal. Each new festival has new needs but I’m starting to get fewer feature requests and less I need to build for each new client which is nice.

JamesSwift 2y ago
Interesting. Are you comfortable sharing any architecture details? Im half wanting to do the same for a local fair that had a high friction ticket system. I wasnt happy with any designs I came up with though
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Sure! It's QR-based, so customers create an account, load money onto their account, then show their QR code to vendors who scan it to charge their account. We also provide plastic cards (think: gift card) for people who don't want to use their phone but we see 80%+ of people interact completely on their phone/online. We have an app and website (same codebase, Quasar framework) and for in-person payment (entry, bar) we provide iPads with connected CC readers. My best advice is this: your hardest challenges will not be technical in nature. The hardest part is the equipment, dealing with customers, hand-holding the festival organizers. I don't say any of that as some gross thing or bad thing, just reality. In fact, I think I've succeeded larged based on the in-person aspect (We travel to the event and are on-site for the event) and being the "I have all the answers for your festival payments"-person. Rolling with the punches is a huge part of it. The whole thing runs on AWS Lambda with a postgres DB from Neon.tech. I'll be honest, it's incredibly over-architected, the whole thing could run a a couple (or even 1) servers as a traditional NodeJS app without issue (and with less complexity) but I used this project as learning experience and a chance to try our some technology I was interested in. Lambda is incredibly cool and I think I might have one of the best use-cases for it (incredibly spikey load: no traffic for 9 mo, tiny traffic for presales for 1-2 months, 1 month with higher sales, then 1-2 days of the event with crazy sales) but the debugging story isn't the best. SST makes it 10000x better than anything else I've tried and the developer experience is bar-none for writing lambdas but all the other crap (CloudFormation, logs, monitoring, etc) is so much overhead. If I was writing this again today I'd probably look at something like NestJS but I won't let myself re-write the code (again) without a pressing reason and if I need to spend time anywhere it's sales/marketing. Here is my, crappy, "marketing" website: https://grubbux.com/ https://grubbux.com/
  - JamesSwift 2y ago
    Awesome, thanks for sharing
  - ManuelKiessling 2y ago
    I think I might just have downvoted you because I‘m a clumsy idiot. So let me just say I love these honest no-bullshit posts!
    - joshstrange 2y ago
      Thank you! I appreciate you saying that. I love geeking out over my "stack" or talking about the business stuff, it's been rollercoaster and a huge learning experience for me. Really upended a ton of preconceptions I had about a number of things.
  - jf93ap29sh 2y ago
    Good for you man, happy to hear about your success and pains. A sign of maturity is realizing the tech is always the easy part.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    Festival-goers can just pay for their food direct as well? Sorry, I don't understand your offering at all and the questions just sort of keep coming! I see you combine payments, but I'm struggling to see the real-terms benefit over a tap-payment (card, watch or phone)? For a food stand, it would seem, not taking the money directly is a relatively large potential liability. Is the point to enforce a contract between vendors and the festival? Does the festival pay the food stands [something] up front? How's your liability insurance? Or do the festivals underwrite you for when Amazon/wifi is down and no-one can pay for their meals? (I did see you tout live updates, so transactions must be networked) Sounds easy to abuse (show someone else's code?), have you had much fraud? You're in USA? Did you need a banking license? Small festivals in UK would be 4-8000 people, say; average food spend is probably £20+ per day -- are you carrying a debt to food providers for £500,000+ over a long weekend (consolidating payments)? Fascinating. Do you do non-food transactions too - souvenir stands, onsite shops, [festival] activities? Like some festivals include a number of tokens and you can buy activities with them at the festival.
inide 2y ago
This is pretty interesting! What hardware are you using for vendors? Kinda curious how you deal with the network aspect of it. Sometimes venues have low cell reception or flaky venue networks.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Vendors just use their own smartphones and use our app to scan customer’s QR code to charge them. As for the network we rely completely on the cellular network. We use an extremely small amount of data (a tiny fraction of what an image a user might be posting to FB/IG/SC/etc would be) so unless the networks are completely down we can manage without issue. We check out venues/grounds/etc for cellular reception/speed ahead of time to make sure we are a good fit for a festival to try and avoid internet connection issues.
netcoyote 2y ago
You've done a lot of work, and this seems like an excellent way to ensure events run smoothly! Great work in building a useful service for festivals & vendors and reduce the transaction fees to ... well ... as low as they can realistically go given the payment rails :) Can I suggest you add a marketing video or some graphics to explain how easy it is for the festival company and the vendors?
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Thank you for the kind words. Yeah, a video and/or graphics are on my list for sure, I just keep procrastinating tackling that because it's not something I'm strong in, which is a bad excuse but it's the truth.
joseph_b 2y ago
In 2015, I wrote the backend for a registration/ticketing/admission system for our (the company I work for) non-profit. They put on yearly galas in a far-off US state. The system utilized QR codes from printed and electronic tickets. The system was used once and royally failed due to connectivity issues. We relied on the venue's wi-fi and had cellular backup. It worked during on-site testing but failed once the crowds formed. Attendee's couldn't load their e-tickets and we couldn't get a response from the servers as tickets were scanned. Props to you for getting everything working!
crusty 2y ago
Did you decide the vendors do the scanning so you could enable customers who aren't using connected smartphones? On the surface it sends like the digital version of here's my wallet, take what I owe you if I'm just presenting a QR code that links to my event "wallet" to a vendor and they are set the amount to be deducted and confirm the transaction without my input. Is there a customer confirmation step, overcharging just hasn't been an issue, or you've figured something else out to 'prevent' that type of fraud? I keyed on this because I've only ever really seen the reverse in the wild, where a vendor presents a bill with a QR code, and then there's either a confirmation or record of some sort that can be easily checked. Though I don't actually make these types of purchases myself, so I'm just going by cursory observations.

JamesSwift 2y ago

Interesting. Are you comfortable sharing any architecture details? Im half wanting to do the same for a local fair that had a high friction ticket system. I wasnt happy with any designs I came up with though

joshstrange 2y ago
Sure! It's QR-based, so customers create an account, load money onto their account, then show their QR code to vendors who scan it to charge their account. We also provide plastic cards (think: gift card) for people who don't want to use their phone but we see 80%+ of people interact completely on their phone/online. We have an app and website (same codebase, Quasar framework) and for in-person payment (entry, bar) we provide iPads with connected CC readers. My best advice is this: your hardest challenges will not be technical in nature. The hardest part is the equipment, dealing with customers, hand-holding the festival organizers. I don't say any of that as some gross thing or bad thing, just reality. In fact, I think I've succeeded larged based on the in-person aspect (We travel to the event and are on-site for the event) and being the "I have all the answers for your festival payments"-person. Rolling with the punches is a huge part of it. The whole thing runs on AWS Lambda with a postgres DB from Neon.tech. I'll be honest, it's incredibly over-architected, the whole thing could run a a couple (or even 1) servers as a traditional NodeJS app without issue (and with less complexity) but I used this project as learning experience and a chance to try our some technology I was interested in. Lambda is incredibly cool and I think I might have one of the best use-cases for it (incredibly spikey load: no traffic for 9 mo, tiny traffic for presales for 1-2 months, 1 month with higher sales, then 1-2 days of the event with crazy sales) but the debugging story isn't the best. SST makes it 10000x better than anything else I've tried and the developer experience is bar-none for writing lambdas but all the other crap (CloudFormation, logs, monitoring, etc) is so much overhead. If I was writing this again today I'd probably look at something like NestJS but I won't let myself re-write the code (again) without a pressing reason and if I need to spend time anywhere it's sales/marketing. Here is my, crappy, "marketing" website: https://grubbux.com/ https://grubbux.com/
- JamesSwift 2y ago
  Awesome, thanks for sharing
- ManuelKiessling 2y ago
  I think I might just have downvoted you because I‘m a clumsy idiot. So let me just say I love these honest no-bullshit posts!
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    Thank you! I appreciate you saying that. I love geeking out over my "stack" or talking about the business stuff, it's been rollercoaster and a huge learning experience for me. Really upended a ton of preconceptions I had about a number of things.
- jf93ap29sh 2y ago
  Good for you man, happy to hear about your success and pains. A sign of maturity is realizing the tech is always the easy part.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  Festival-goers can just pay for their food direct as well? Sorry, I don't understand your offering at all and the questions just sort of keep coming! I see you combine payments, but I'm struggling to see the real-terms benefit over a tap-payment (card, watch or phone)? For a food stand, it would seem, not taking the money directly is a relatively large potential liability. Is the point to enforce a contract between vendors and the festival? Does the festival pay the food stands [something] up front? How's your liability insurance? Or do the festivals underwrite you for when Amazon/wifi is down and no-one can pay for their meals? (I did see you tout live updates, so transactions must be networked) Sounds easy to abuse (show someone else's code?), have you had much fraud? You're in USA? Did you need a banking license? Small festivals in UK would be 4-8000 people, say; average food spend is probably £20+ per day -- are you carrying a debt to food providers for £500,000+ over a long weekend (consolidating payments)? Fascinating. Do you do non-food transactions too - souvenir stands, onsite shops, [festival] activities? Like some festivals include a number of tokens and you can buy activities with them at the festival.

inide 2y ago

This is pretty interesting! What hardware are you using for vendors? Kinda curious how you deal with the network aspect of it. Sometimes venues have low cell reception or flaky venue networks.

joshstrange 2y ago
Vendors just use their own smartphones and use our app to scan customer’s QR code to charge them. As for the network we rely completely on the cellular network. We use an extremely small amount of data (a tiny fraction of what an image a user might be posting to FB/IG/SC/etc would be) so unless the networks are completely down we can manage without issue. We check out venues/grounds/etc for cellular reception/speed ahead of time to make sure we are a good fit for a festival to try and avoid internet connection issues.

netcoyote 2y ago

You've done a lot of work, and this seems like an excellent way to ensure events run smoothly! Great work in building a useful service for festivals & vendors and reduce the transaction fees to ... well ... as low as they can realistically go given the payment rails :) Can I suggest you add a marketing video or some graphics to explain how easy it is for the festival company and the vendors?

joshstrange 2y ago
Thank you for the kind words. Yeah, a video and/or graphics are on my list for sure, I just keep procrastinating tackling that because it's not something I'm strong in, which is a bad excuse but it's the truth.

joseph_b 2y ago

In 2015, I wrote the backend for a registration/ticketing/admission system for our (the company I work for) non-profit. They put on yearly galas in a far-off US state. The system utilized QR codes from printed and electronic tickets. The system was used once and royally failed due to connectivity issues. We relied on the venue's wi-fi and had cellular backup. It worked during on-site testing but failed once the crowds formed. Attendee's couldn't load their e-tickets and we couldn't get a response from the servers as tickets were scanned. Props to you for getting everything working!

crusty 2y ago

Did you decide the vendors do the scanning so you could enable customers who aren't using connected smartphones? On the surface it sends like the digital version of here's my wallet, take what I owe you if I'm just presenting a QR code that links to my event "wallet" to a vendor and they are set the amount to be deducted and confirm the transaction without my input. Is there a customer confirmation step, overcharging just hasn't been an issue, or you've figured something else out to 'prevent' that type of fraud? I keyed on this because I've only ever really seen the reverse in the wild, where a vendor presents a bill with a QR code, and then there's either a confirmation or record of some sort that can be easily checked. Though I don't actually make these types of purchases myself, so I'm just going by cursory observations.