The events industry, at its core, is a performance. Not just on stage, but behind the scenes. And like any great performance, it’s never a solo act. It’s a messy, complex dance of a hundred moving parts.
No single memorable concert or festival happens because one company just “sold” something. It happens because people build things together.
This forces the event industry to think like co-creators rather than vendor and client.
A software company can’t just deliver a working ticketing system – they need to understand how it fits into the larger experience.
At Nuweb Group, we’ve been on a similar journey. In fact, it’s changed how we operate.
The way we have managed to break through is by realising we don’t operate with “customers” in the traditional sense.
Instead, we have partners who we build with, not for.
This is how the event industry needs to evolve – not through isolated breakthroughs, but through collaborative risk-taking.
The trust account model
The way partnerships work is like a trust account. Every small interaction either makes a deposit or withdrawal.
When you solve a problem quickly, that’s a deposit. When you understand a business well enough to anticipate issues, that’s a deposit. When you’re available when they need you, even for something small, that’s a deposit.
Trust isn’t built in the spotlight
As a technology provider in the events industry, you’ve nailed partnership when your clients trust you enough to bet their biggest moments on your solutions.
Once you’ve reached that point, you’ve built something that can’t be easily copied or disrupted. Because trust, unlike features, takes time.
We recently hit the headlines for selling out Metallica shows in Budapest for over 200,000 fans with our Hungarian partner Funcode.
Now that wasn’t an overnight success. We had been working with our Hungarian partner for years. That moment was built on years of events, gradual growth, learning each other’s systems.
By the time the Metallica shows came around, we weren’t figuring out how to work together under pressure – we already knew.
That kind of high-pressure moment proves a partnership is real, not just something you claim in marketing copy.
Partnership under pressure
Ultimately, in this industry, there’s nowhere to hide. Either your technology works flawlessly, or you become the story – the company that ruined the concert for thousands of angry fans.
If any one piece fails, everyone fails together. There’s no pointing fingers afterward about whose “fault” it was.
The fans don’t care that the payment processor was down, or that the venue’s WiFi couldn’t handle the load. They just know the experience, and they won’t be back.
You get this right by thinking more like craftsmen than salespeople. You have to be willing to grow slowly with customers, learning their business intimately.
The moment when everything is on the line is inevitable. And when it comes, you need to be the person they call, not the vendor they blame.
Rising tides lift all ships
The healthiest partnerships are those where everyone is rowing in the same direction.
However, most companies optimize for recurring revenue regardless of customers’ outcomes.
The incentives are perfectly misaligned: technology providers get paid whether events succeed or fail.
Real partnership is uncomfortable for software companies because it ties their fate to yours.
It means they can’t disappear after the contract is signed, because their success depends on your success.
Some time ago in our journey, we stopped pretending our success at Nuweb was separate from our partners.
Instead, we introduced a shared North Star metric: the total number of tickets sold through our platform.
We wanted a model designed to thrive on active, ambitious partnerships, not passive ones.
This creates powerful incentives for both sides to actually solve problems rather than just go through the motions.
The vision problem
When you’re aligned like this, it means technology providers can’t just build features that look good in demos; they have to build things that actually move the needle for their partners.
This is unlike most companies, who build a product, polish it until it looks impressive in demos, then spend all their energy convincing customers that this is exactly what they need.
This is where the idea of “partnering” often goes wrong in our industry.
Many vendors claim to be partners, but what they really mean is “we’ll sell you our thing, and you’ll use it.”
The problem isn’t that the software is bad – it’s often quite good. The problem is that “good enough” for most people is terrible for the customers who matter most.
The really ambitious projects in events, the ones that stand out, are never built by following a rigid plan handed down from on high.
They’re built by people with a unique vision, who need the right materials and tools to bring that vision to life.
Why building blocks beat templates
This creates a fascinating technical challenge that most software companies completely misunderstand.
Consider hospitality packages. These aren’t your typical ticket offerings. When someone is spending thousands on a ticket, the digital experience matters enormously.
We learned this working with Ten Lifestyle Group, a luxury concierge.
When their ultra-high-net-worth clients want to purchase exclusive tickets, they can’t just redirect them; they need to maintain the seamless experience their clients expect.
Most ticketing companies would respond with “here’s our white-label solution” and show them a template with customizable colors and logos.
But that’s not really customization – that’s just putting your brand sticker on someone else’s experience. The moment a client gets redirected to a page that feels different, the luxury experience breaks.
This is the difference between selling a solution and selling building blocks. A solution says “here’s how we think you should do this.” Building blocks say “here’s what’s possible – now show us something we’ve never seen before.”
The paradox
The counterintuitive thing is that building blocks are actually much harder to sell than solutions.
Solutions look impressive in demos. You can show screenshots and walk through workflows.
Building blocks look boring. They’re just APIs and documentation. The magic only becomes visible when someone builds something with them.
This is why most software companies gravitate toward solutions. They’re easier to demonstrate, easier to price, and easier to replicate across customers.
But they’re also a ceiling on what’s possible. When you sell solutions, you’re betting that you know better than your customers what they need.
The infrastructure advantage
The best platforms feel almost invisible. When someone builds something amazing on top of them, you barely notice the platform at all. That’s the point.
The platform succeeded by making its clients successful in a way that felt completely native to their business.
This invisibility is actually a feature, not a bug. When a luxury concierge service can offer seamless ticket purchasing without any sign that there’s a third-party platform involved, both companies win.
Most companies can’t resist the urge to make their platform visible. They want credit for the client’s success.
But the best platform understand that being invisible is the highest form of praise. It means you’ve become infrastructure.
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