7-Year Partnership Yielding Award-Winning Ticket Marketplace

Seat Unique has evolved from an MVP to a rewarded marketplace achieving revenue growth of more than 7,900% over the past four years. With an innovative user-friendly platform, Seat Unique offers fans premium tickets and hospitality packages to the most prestigious events in the United Kingdom.

The company and product

Seat Unique and Monterail’s partnership started in 2018 with building the initial MVP. Since then, the company has evolved from an MVP to a rewarded marketplace achieving revenue growth of more than 7,900% over the past four years.

Seat Unique is now a full-fledged product that transforms the live event industry with an innovative ticketing and hospitality approach. The user-friendly platform seamlessly blends technology to address the key challenges of accessing tickets. The company partners with the UK's biggest and most prestigious clubs and venues.

The platform's success is evident in its 2024 performance, facilitating the sale of over 136,000 premium tickets to more than 40,000 customers.

Seat Unique's platform received multiple awards and recognitions over the years, including 'Disruptor of the Year 2021', 4th place in the Sifted 100: UK & Ireland 2024 and 5th in the 2024 Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50

Client’s feedback

Scope and Highlights

REACT AND NEXT.JS, Ruby on rails, ELIXIR

2 DEVELOPMENT TEAMS

18 MONTERAIL & CLIENT TEAM MEMBERS

YEARS OF COOPERATION

6000

TRANSACTIONS/MONTH

800K

VISITORS MONTHLY

The Challenge

Seat Unique entered the market with a bold vision: revolutionizing the outdated, lengthy, and complicated ticket-buying experience. The timing was critical—they needed to rapidly deploy a basic product to establish a first-mover advantage.

The platform's initial success catalyzed its evolution from MVP to a comprehensive ticketing solution. As the business grew, Seat Unique focused on two critical objectives: expanding their partner network to source premium inventory and developing robust API integrations for seamless ticket distribution.

However, rapid growth presented new challenges. The increasing user base and transaction volume demanded significant technical improvements. Achieving high performance in various application parts became challenging–from the event list to checkout, even during the peak sales season (thousands of sales per hour).

Moreover, Seat Unique wanted to expand the offer by adding new partner–theaters, which required developing specialized interfaces.

KEY CHALLENGES INCLUDED

Meeting a tight deadline for MVP release to help the company get to market.

Implementing a continuous UX/UI approach to maintain a competitive advantage.

Optimizing platform performance to handle peak sales periods.

Meeting a tight deadline for MVP release to help the company get to market.

Implementing a continuous UX/UI approach to maintain a competitive advantage.

Optimizing platform performance to handle peak sales periods.

TEAM'S VOICE

Seat Unique Application screenshots

The Process

Throughout our seven-year partnership, the collaboration between Seat Unique and Monterail evolved into specialized Business Assurance and Business Development teams, ensuring both technical excellence and strategic growth.

Our MVP leveraged Ruby on Rails, React, and PostgreSQL as the core stack, with Elixir Phoenix integrated specifically for the ticket-selling part. This architecture supported the development of a crucial milestone: our seller tool—a B2B platform built in Ruby that enables rights holders to market premium tickets and hospitality packages directly.

As we scaled beyond the MVP, we modernized frontend architecture and completely rewrote it to Next.js to ensure the website is fast, adapted to current technological standards, and scalable. Alongside this frontend overhaul, we migrated from Google Cloud to AWS to better serve our growing infrastructure needs.

Application reliability was key. We conducted extensive load testing and performance analysis, focusing on high-traffic event scenarios. Given the complex regulatory landscape of UK ticket sales, we implemented regular security audits and enhanced protection measures.

To manage peak demand periods, we developed a virtual waiting room system. This solution maintains user engagement while preventing system overload during major ticket releases.

This is how we made it happen:

Conducting architectural transformation by moving from a basic MVP stack to Next.js for improved frontend performance.
Ensuring the application handles high traffic during peak periods.
Conducting comprehensive load testing and implementing security audits.
Evolving the partnership model for better focus on technical reliability and market growth.

Team’s voice

The Outcome

Seat Unique has earned a reputation for innovation and excellence.

Over seven years, our partnership with Seat Unique evolved into a seamless collaboration, transforming an ambitious MVP into a market-leading ticketing platform. Our integrated team approach enabled us to adapt our technology stack and expertise to support the platform's growth.

Seat Unique has revolutionized the premium live event experience by connecting fans directly with official vendors, offering immediate online access to premium tickets and hospitality packages at competitive prices. Seat Unique now processes 6,000 transactions per month and attracts 800,000 monthly visitors to their platform.

The success of this project

Successfully launching the MVP within a very short timeframe.

Managing to implement major architectural changes without disrupting ongoing business operations.

Building a long-lasting partnership between Monterail and Seat Unique.