TicketRev
Funded by Techstars, 500 Startups and the Minnesota Twins
Built a production Bubble marketplace with real-time reverse-bid workflows, Stripe Connect payouts, and city-by-city expansion — all on Bubble.
- 0
- investors
- 0 wk
- to launch
The situation
TicketRev needed to validate a new model for event tickets: reverse bidding, where fans name their price and sellers decide whether to accept. The founding team had tried building it twice before — once with freelancers who disappeared mid-project, once with a code shop that delivered a brittle prototype no one could maintain.
They came to JetBuild with a clear product vision, investor interest from Techstars and 500 Startups, and a hard deadline: a working marketplace in eight weeks, or the funding round stalled.
Bubble was the right choice for this build. The team needed to iterate on complex marketplace logic — bidding workflows, offer expiration, counter-offers — without waiting for deployment cycles. Bubble's visual database and workflow engine meant we could build, test and ship features in days instead of weeks.
What we built
We built the entire marketplace on Bubble, using the platform's native capabilities for everything from database design to payment processing.
Bubble database architecture
We designed custom data types for Events, Tickets, Bids, Users and Transactions with relational links between them. Privacy rules ensured sellers only see bids on their own tickets and buyers only see their own bid history. We optimised "Do a search for" queries with tight constraints to keep page loads fast even with thousands of active bids.
Real-time bidding workflows
Backend Bubble workflows fire the moment a bid is placed, triggering notifications to the seller, updating bid status and handling offer expiration through scheduled API workflows — Bubble's equivalent of cron jobs. Custom states on the bidding page show live bid updates without a page refresh, giving buyers and sellers a real-time experience.
Stripe Connect integration
We built a full Stripe Connect marketplace integration using the API Connector plugin. Sellers onboard with Stripe Connect Express, payments split automatically between the platform and the seller, and refunds flow back through the same pipeline. Webhook receivers built as Bubble API workflows handle payment confirmations, disputes and payout events.
City-by-city expansion
We built an admin dashboard where the TicketRev team could launch new cities, configure venue lists, set pricing rules and manage local inventory — all without touching the Bubble editor. The dashboard gave non-technical team members full control over the marketplace's geographic expansion.
Responsive design
Full responsive build in Bubble's visual editor. The bidding interface, checkout flow and user dashboards all work on mobile. The responsive engine required careful group nesting and conditional visibility rules to make the marketplace feel native on every screen size.
Performance optimisation
As the marketplace grew, we restructured searches, added pagination, implemented "Do a search for" with narrow constraints instead of loading full lists, and used Bubble's "Only when" conditions to defer heavy elements until they're visible. The result: sub-3-second page loads even on data-heavy marketplace pages.
- Custom data types with relational links and privacy rules
- Real-time bidding workflows with custom states and scheduled API workflows
- Stripe Connect marketplace integration via the API Connector plugin
- City-by-city expansion dashboard for non-technical team members
- Full responsive build for mobile and desktop
- Performance optimisation with constrained searches and deferred rendering
The result
TicketRev launched across multiple cities and closed funding from Techstars, 500 Startups, and the Minnesota Twins. The marketplace handled real money from day one — Stripe Connect processed every transaction, privacy rules kept user data separated, and the Bubble backend held up under production traffic.
The entire product was built, tested and launched in eight weeks. The TicketRev team continued iterating on their own Bubble app after handover, using the documented database schema and workflow architecture JetBuild delivered.
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