Building an Event Platform as a 1-Person Startup (While Competing with Cvent's 4,000 Employees)

Let me start with the number that makes people laugh when I say it out loud: Cvent has around 4,000 employees. Eventbrite has hundreds. I have me.

I am not saying this to brag. I am saying it because the contrast is so absurd that it forced me to think completely differently about how to build a product. When you cannot compete on headcount, you have to find other advantages. It turns out there are more of them than you might expect.

How This Started

Eventfold was born at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. I was surrounded by student organisations running events on spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, and whatever ticketing platform happened to have the lowest barrier to entry — usually one that quietly took 5-10% of every ticket sale.

I saw the same problem on the corporate side. Conference organisers paying enterprise prices for software that felt like it was built in 2009, because it was. The incumbents had gotten fat and slow. Their products reflected their org charts: bloated, siloed, full of features no one asked for and missing the ones everyone needed.

KTH Innovation backed the idea. I started building.

The Real Advantage of Being One Person

Everyone assumes being a solo founder is a disadvantage. In some ways it is, and I will get to those. But let me tell you what no one talks about: the advantages are significant.

No meetings. I do not have a product meeting where a roadmap item gets debated for three weeks before anyone starts building. When a customer tells me something is broken or missing, I can have a fix shipped the next day. That speed is genuinely impossible at a 4,000-person company.

No politics. There is no engineering team lobbying for a rewrite, no sales team pushing features that look good in demos but nobody uses, no executive committee that needs to sign off on a pricing experiment. I make a decision, I ship it, I see what happens.

Direct line to customers. Every support email comes to me. Every feature request lands in my inbox. I know exactly who is using the product and what they are struggling with because I talk to them constantly. No customer success layer, no product management layer filtering the signal before it reaches the person who can actually do something about it.

This is not theoretical. This is how Eventfold ended up with five distinct ticket release methods. That did not come from a product brainstorm or a competitive analysis. It came from event organisers telling me over and over again that they needed more control over how tickets became available. Presales, ballot systems, staged releases, member-only access — each one came directly from a real conversation with a real customer.

Shipping in Two-Week Cycles

I run on two-week cycles. Not because some methodology book told me to, but because it is the shortest window that lets me build something meaningful while staying connected to what customers actually need.

At the end of every cycle, something ships. Sometimes it is a major feature. Sometimes it is ten small improvements. But it ships. This creates a rhythm that keeps momentum going even when individual weeks feel unproductive.

The discipline here is ruthless prioritisation. With one person, you cannot work on everything. You have to constantly ask: what is the highest-leverage thing I can do right now? Not what is interesting, not what is impressive to show at a demo — what will actually make the product better for the people using it today.

I keep a running list of every customer request, every support ticket, every complaint. Before each cycle starts, I go through that list and pick the things that come up most often or affect the most customers. The roadmap is not built in a quarterly planning session. It is rebuilt every two weeks from real signal.

Constraints as a Design Tool

When you are one person, you cannot over-engineer. You simply do not have the time. And it turns out this is a feature, not a bug.

Every decision has to pass a simple test: is this the simplest thing that could work? If something is complicated to build, it is usually complicated to use too. The constraint forces clarity.

This is how Eventfold ended up with a landing page builder, digital wallet passes, a CRM integration layer, seating optimisation, and an AI email agent — not because I planned to build all of these things from the start, but because customers needed them and I had to find ways to deliver them without spinning up a team of twelve engineers.

The AI tools available to founders today are a genuine multiplier. I will not pretend otherwise. What used to require a team can now be done by one person working smart. It is not magic, and it does not replace judgment or customer knowledge, but it absolutely changes what one person can ship in a year.

Disrupting the Commission Model

Here is the part of the incumbent model that I find genuinely infuriating: the commission-based pricing structure that charges a percentage of every ticket.

If you sell a 1,000-person conference with tickets at €150 each, you are handing a chunk of €150,000 in revenue to a ticketing platform that provided maybe €50 of value. The platform scales its revenue with your success, not with its costs. It is a great business model for the platform. It is a terrible deal for the organiser.

Eventfold uses a combination of affordable subscription tiers and transparent per-ticket fees (3.5% + 3 SEK for standard organizations, with reduced rates for non-profits). No hidden costs, no feature gating behind higher tiers, and a free tier during beta that gives you access to everything.

For a mid-sized event organisation, the total cost is typically significantly lower than what legacy commission-based platforms charge. That becomes very concrete very fast when you run the actual calculation for a specific organisation.

The subscription model also aligns incentives differently. I want you to run more events, sell more tickets, and grow your operation — not because I take a cut, but because a successful customer stays a customer. That alignment matters.

What You Actually Give Up

I said I would be honest about the sacrifices, so here it is.

Sleep is the first thing. Not dramatically — I am not pulling all-nighters every week — but the background hum of responsibility does not switch off. Something is always running in my head. An edge case I noticed at midnight. A customer email I have not responded to. A bug that showed up in production and needs a fix before Monday.

The comfort of a team is real and I miss it. When you are stuck on a hard problem, there is no one to think through it with you. You cannot turn to a colleague and say "does this make sense?" You have to develop your own internal quality bar and trust it, even when you are not sure.

The social dimension is also real. Building something is consuming. It crowds out other things. I do not think this is unique to solo founders — plenty of people in demanding jobs experience it — but when the product is yours and there is no one else to handle it, it is harder to step away.

There are also the things I am not good at. Marketing. Legal. Accounting. Partnership conversations that should have happened months ago. Every hour I spend on those is an hour not spent building, and I do not always choose correctly.

Why I Keep Going

The honest answer is that I think the problem is genuinely worth solving. Event organisers — from student unions at universities to corporate event teams running annual conferences — are paying too much and getting too little from the tools available to them.

Eventfold handles student events, corporate events, festivals, and conferences. The customers are diverse, but the underlying problem is the same: they want professional-grade tools without the enterprise pricing and the enterprise complexity.

I started this because I saw a market being underserved by incumbents that had stopped innovating. I keep going because the customers who have switched keep telling me it was worth it.

That is enough for now.

If you are building an event and want to see whether Eventfold makes sense for your organisation, the best place to start is just getting in touch. No sales process, no demo call with a rep reading from a script — just a conversation about what you are trying to do.