// Case Study
BD Performing Arts
ONE PLATFORM.
FOUR VENDORS GONE.
$350K NEW REVENUE.
Replaced a Frankenstein of event tools with one custom platform. Auditions, ticketing, scheduling, housing, and payments all sit behind one user profile.
// The Challenge
Four tools
& logins.
Four sets
of fees.
BDPA had a website for event hosting, but everything around it lived elsewhere. Auditions on Eventbrite. Ticketing on TicketSpice. Agreements through DocuSign. Check-in on a separate QR app. Staff scheduling and housing in spreadsheets.
Families juggled four logins and four inboxes. Staff reconciled across platforms by hand. The org paid platform fees on every transaction. That was money that should have stayed in the building.
// The Bet
The integration math didn't pencil.
I priced the integrated path first: wire the four tools together with APIs and middleware. The math didn't work. Integration layers don't eliminate platform fees, they add to them. We'd still pay per-transaction cuts forever to companies that didn't know our org.
So we built it. One codebase, one database, one user profile that follows a family from audition signup through payment, housing, and event-day check-in.
// What I Built
I owned architecture, PM, UX, visual design, front-end, and QA. One backend developer handled the server side. I directed scope and integration.
Unified user profile
One account for every family, performer, and ticket buyer. Audition status, agreements, payments, tickets, and housing under one login.
Audition registration & agreements
Registration with signature capture baked in. Replaces Eventbrite and DocuSign.
Ticketing & payments
Direct payment processing. No per-ticket vendor cut. Fee revenue flows to BDPA.
Ticket management
Box office console: transfers, comps, refunds, resends, order edits. Four vendor portals collapsed into one.
Ticket scanner & check-in
Native QR scanning. Scans hit our database in real time and feed the live dashboard.
Executive real-time dashboard
Live event-floor view: ticket-sale velocity, gross and net fee revenue, scans per minute, house capacity, by-tier breakdown, refunds and voids, payment-method mix, and event-day choke points. Every metric a TicketSpice or Eventbrite dashboard surfaces — plus the ones they don't.
Staff scheduling
Shifts, availability, and event-day coverage with role-based views.
Housing assignments
Room, roommate, and check-in details tied to the performer's profile.
// What I Built · system viewPROTOTYPE
Same eight modules — drawn as a system instead of a card grid. The council's design engineer argued a hub-and-spoke view visually proves the "one database" claim the prose keeps making. Compare with the grid above; we'll cut whichever loses.
// The Payoff
$2.5M
Sales processed
$350K
New fee revenue captured
$1.4M
Year-1 profit
// One year after launch
| Metric | Before | After | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platforms / vendors | 4 (TicketSpice, Eventbrite, DocuSign, QR app) | 1 (in-house) | −75% |
| Annual platform & API fees | ~$50k | $0 | −$50k / yr |
| Sales processed (annual) | — | $2.5M | New capability |
| New fee revenue captured (annual) | $0 (paid to vendors) | $350K | +$350K / yr |
| Year-1 profit | — | $1.4M | 56% margin |
| User experience | 4 logins, 4 inboxes | One profile, one login | Unified |
BDPA processed $2.5M in ticket sales and netted $1.4M in year-1 profit. $350K of that came from fee revenue the platform captured — money that used to leave the building as vendor cuts on every transaction. Add ~$50k in killed platform subscription fees, and the build paid for itself in year one. The platform now runs as a profit center.
// Reflection
// What worked
Holding architecture, UX, and front-end in one head cut the translation loss between roles. When a feature needed to flex, I moved it without three handoffs. With a one-developer team, that compression was the only way to ship.
// What I'd do differently
Push back harder on the timeline. We shipped on time, but with a longer runway I'd have hardened each module before the next came online, instead of stacking them and patching forward.
// How I operate
Every per-transaction fee is overhead the mission never sees. When the math says build, I build. For sub-$500k builds at small orgs, holding multiple roles is the operating model — not a workaround.