Chapter 1 — What Attend Is
Attend onboarding guide · ~5 min read · ↑ Back to contents
Welcome. Before any code, it's worth understanding what Attend actually does and how the business works — that mental model is what everything else hangs on. Let's start with the big picture.
Attend in one sentence
Attend is a B2B platform that helps sports teams and venues sell tickets in smarter ways — bundles, subscriptions, premium suites, last-minute deals — on top of the ticketing system they already use.
Two phrases in there carry a lot of weight:
- B2B — Attend's customers are the teams and venues, not the fans. (The fans are the team's customers.) When we say "client," we mean a team like the Golden State Warriors — not a fan.
- on top of — this is the single most important idea in the whole company, so let's unpack it.
Attend never creates a ticket
Every team already sells tickets through a big ticketing system — usually Ticketmaster, sometimes Tickets.com or SeatGeek. That system owns the real seats, the barcodes, and the digital "wallet" where a fan's ticket lives.
Attend does not replace that system. It plugs into it. When a fan buys through Attend:
- The fan goes through Attend's nicer, purpose-built buying experience.
- Behind the scenes, Attend tells the ticketing system: "sell this seat to this fan."
- The real ticket is created inside the ticketing system (Ticketmaster, etc.) — that's where the barcode lives.
- Attend emails the fan a link to that ticket.
Why this matters: Attend is a layer, not a replacement. Almost every feature you'll ever build eventually calls down to the underlying ticketing system. Keep this picture in your head and a lot of later complexity will make sense.
White-label: every client gets their own version
Attend is white-labeled — each client gets their own branded version of the product, on its own URL. The Golden State Warriors get a Warriors-branded store; the Arizona Diamondbacks get a Diamondbacks-branded one. Same engine underneath, different branding and configuration per client. (Exactly how that per-client setup works is Chapter 5.)
Our running example: throughout this guide we'll follow the Golden State Warriors — an NBA team that sells through Ticketmaster — to make the abstract bits concrete.
How Attend makes money
Attend runs on revenue share. The team pays Attend for the sales it helps drive, and Attend pays a cut back to the ticketing system (e.g. Ticketmaster). Importantly, these vendor connections aren't public APIs you can just sign up for — they're negotiated business partnerships. That's part of what makes Attend hard to copy.
Why teams want Attend (the gap it fills)
The big ticketing systems are excellent at exactly two things: selling a single-game ticket, and selling a full season ticket. They're weak at everything in between — and that in-between is where new fans are won:
- turning a one-time buyer into a regular,
- selling flexible bundles and subscriptions,
- selling premium suites online (historically these were sold over the phone),
- moving last-minute unsold inventory.
Attend builds the products that fill those gaps. You'll meet them in Chapter 4.
Recap
- Attend is B2B — it sells to teams/venues, who sell to fans.
- It sells on top of existing ticketing systems and never creates the ticket itself — the real ticket always lives in the vendor's system; Attend just orchestrates the sale and sends a link.
- It's white-labeled (a branded version per client) and runs on revenue share.
- It exists to fill the gap between single-game and season tickets: bundles, subscriptions, suites, and last-minute sales.