Waitlist
Turning on-sale anxieties into flywheel revenue.
Front Gate Tickets
2020-2021
Lead Product Designer
Problem & Context
Unknown demand for tickets
The return to live events post-COVID compounded an already difficult problem of anticipating demand in order for festival promoters to allot capacities and set pricing.
Missed revenue during high-demand
Clients miss out on capturing demand at its peak, when items sell out during a high-volume on-sale.
Secondary market price-hikes
With no first-party solution, fans are forced to rely on the artificially inflated and scam-riddled secondary market when they miss out on an on-sale.
Impact
A 2025 platform‑wide report 56 festivals with active waitlists, capturing 184,848 total requests for 318,118 tickets, with 45,813 approvals and 33,466 completed requests
Average 73.05% conversion rate for approved waitlist orders
Higher final sell-through for participating events by converting post-sellout interest into actual purchases. For example, one headliner festival converted 31k additional sales by adding a second day post‑sellout.
In 2023 (for events that used waitlist), 26% of orders originated from a waitlist request.
Design & Development
During the covid shutdown, I worked with lean team of 7 to research, design and launch waitlist in 5 months.
We researched models across industries and landed on two options:
Opt-in: fans sign up and return later to purchase.
Opt-out: fans store a card upfront, and tickets are automatically purchased unless they cancel.
Stakeholders were split, but the opt-out model offered a built-in filter for serious buyers. Leveraging our experience with layaway, we designed waitlist to operate like a zero deposit, one step layaway plan, using a stored payment method.
In 2021 we shipped a flexible waitlist experience that:
Integrates with the existing purchase flow so fans could sign up for the waitlist in just a few steps.
Captures demand at multiple touchpoints in the festival lifecycle (pre-sale, high-volume onsale, and post-sellout).
Allows promoters to configure waitlist offers (price types, retry and cancellation period, fees, delivery method, ticket insurance).
Surfaces actionable data for promoters to adjust capacities and guide pricing decisions.
Waitlist captures demand at its peak by automatically converting returned and unsold tickets into new sales.