What Unifest taught me about events

I started Unifest in my second year at BITS Pilani Hyderabad. Two college friends, one shared Notion workspace, a few cold emails to event teams at neighbouring colleges. The idea was simple — there are hundreds of college fests across India, students struggle to discover and ticket the ones outside their own campus, and there was a real business in being the one place to find them.

For close to two years it worked. We tied up with fests at BITS Pilani Hyderabad — Pearl, Arena and Verba Maximus — NIFT Hyderabad's Spectrum, MIT World Peace University in Pune, and a handful of others. Students could browse, buy tickets, and find their way to fests they'd otherwise have missed. By the end I had spent more time inside college auditoriums than most college students.

The numbers held up better than I expected at the time. Around 20,000 users and 14,000 transactions in the first year, and across those partnerships close to ₹1 crore in ticket sales moved through the platform. For the colleges we worked with, moving off a card table and a spreadsheet and onto proper online ticketing lifted their sales somewhere between 12% and 30%. That range is wide because it depended almost entirely on how early in the cycle they switched.

It taught me everything I needed to know about how events actually work in India. Not the keynote version. The version where the venue Wi-Fi dies at 6 p.m. and the QR scanner stops working. The version where a sponsor wires money the day after the event ends. The version where a student volunteer goes home for dinner and forgets to come back.

I learned that the moving parts of a fest are basically the same as the moving parts of a small business — schedule, pricing, registrations, on-site logistics, payouts. Just compressed into four days and run by undergrads.

Why we actually stopped

The honest answer is not a market one. Growth wasn't the problem, and neither were the customers. What happened is more ordinary than that: three founders, and after a point the interest went out of all of us.

That shows up as a sales problem before it shows up as anything else. We stopped doing enough outbound, not because outbound wasn't working, but because nobody was excited enough to keep doing it. Once the other two drifted, the thing that was actually missing was somebody wanting it badly enough to keep pushing. A company where nobody is pulling doesn't fail loudly. It just slows down.

For my part, I wanted to go deeper into the technology. By the end, the Unifest product had stopped being technically hard. A ticketing platform is a well-understood shape — inventory, payments, a scanner — and with Claude and everything else arriving around then, the parts that used to take a week stopped taking a week. That's a good thing for the product and a bad thing for how much I was learning from it.

So I went and interned at UnrealizeX instead, on 3D mesh processing in the browser, because that was the kind of problem I couldn't get to the bottom of in an afternoon.

What we never got to

The part I'm least satisfied with is how much of the problem we left alone.

Ticketing is one slice. It's the most obvious one, and it's the one with a clean transaction attached, which is why every student startup goes there first. But it's a small piece of what running an event actually involves — scheduling, volunteer coordination, vendor and sponsor management, on-ground check-in, payouts, the reconciliation that eats the week after. We saw every one of those problems up close, repeatedly, at every fest we worked. We had the relationships and the credibility to build into them.

We just never took it on. We stayed in the one lane we started in, and then the energy ran out before anyone made the case for a second one.

That's the thing I'd do differently: not the market, not the customer, not the pricing. Noticing sooner that the interesting problems had moved somewhere we weren't looking, and either going after them or being honest much earlier that we weren't going to.

None of which has put me off the space. Events are still genuinely interesting to me — it's a messy, physical, badly-tooled corner of software, and I've now seen enough of it from the inside to have opinions about what's missing. I'll keep tinkering with it on the side.