2.El Bilet

About the app

Event tickets have a two-sided problem: on one side, people who have a ticket but can no longer go; on the other, people who couldn't get one. These two groups look for each other in social media comments and forums, scattered all over the place. 2.El Bilet started from the idea of moving that exchange into a single place — concerts, theatre, matches, stage shows, family events, all split into categories.

When posting a listing there were two options: fixed price or auction. The two sit side by side in the interface, but underneath they are not the same thing. An auction has a bid order, a closing time and auto-accept rules; a fixed price has none of that. Instead of writing them as two separate products, I built a shared "listing" model: a listing has a sale format, and the closing condition and the rule for picking a winner change with that format.

The genuinely hard part was trust. In a second-hand marketplace nobody wants to move first: the buyer doesn't want to send money before seeing the ticket, and the seller doesn't want to hand over the ticket before getting paid. So instead of a single "buy" button, I turned the exchange into a staged transaction — payment completed, ticket sent, and payment released to the seller are separate states. On the home screen the user saw their own "pending transactions" and knew whose turn the next step was. That was also my strongest card against the risk of fake tickets: the money was not released until the ticket reached the other side.

This marketplace also had a quirk of its own: the thing being sold has an expiry date. The moment the event starts, the ticket is worthless. So listings close on their own based on time, and on the search side, time-based filters like "very urgent", "last 48 hours" and "price dropped" were front and centre. For sellers I added visibility tools too — featuring on the showcase, ranking higher in search, sending offers to users who favourited a listing — and the product's revenue model was built on that.

Buyer and seller rarely settled things in a single message, so I didn't keep the chat side light: real-time messaging where they could negotiate, plus voice and video calls. On top of that there was map-based discovery of people selling and people looking for tickets; finding someone in the same city, or even heading to the same event, made the exchange easier.

The app isn't in the stores right now — I put the project on hold for a while, I didn't shut it down. I paused the release because I prioritised other products; the listing flow, verification and the escrow structure are all still in place, and I plan to keep developing it.