Case study
The SBK Dance: a marketplace that runs on real tickets.
A multi-sided events platform for the Latin dance community — discovery, ticketing, Stripe payments, maps and organiser tools — designed, built and operated by InteleForge.
Event discovery and checkout, shown with sample data.
The brief
Bring a scattered scene onto one platform.
Salsa, bachata and kizomba events across the UK and Europe were being promoted through a patchwork of social media posts, group chats and generic ticketing sites. Dancers struggled to find what was on near them; organisers were juggling several tools to sell tickets, manage guest lists and get paid.
The SBK Dance needed to be a genuine two-sided marketplace: a place dancers would check first, and a place organisers could run their events from end to end. That meant discovery and search on one side, event management, ticketing and payouts on the other, and a trustworthy payment flow connecting them.
It also had to launch quickly and then keep improving with real usage — so we scoped a focused first release, built it on a stack that scales, and set the product up to iterate in two-week cycles after launch.
What we built
Every part of a working marketplace.
Not a landing page with a form — a product with payments, permissions and the operational tooling organisers rely on.
Ticketing and RSVPs
Paid and free tickets, capacity limits, RSVP lists and QR-coded confirmations for the door.
Stripe payments
Checkout, refunds and organiser payouts on Stripe, with webhooks reconciled so every order is accounted for.
Venue maps
Map-based discovery so dancers can find events near them and organisers get accurate venue listings.
Organiser dashboards
Create and manage events, track sales and attendance, and message attendees from one place.
Search and filters
Search and filter by dance style, date, city and price — fast, even as the event catalogue grows.
Multi-role accounts
Dancers, organisers and administrators, with permissions that match what each role actually does.
How we built it
Architecture decisions that kept it simple.
The platform is a Next.js and TypeScript application backed by PostgreSQL, deployed on Vercel. One codebase serves the public marketplace, the organiser dashboard and the admin tools, sharing a single data model for events, tickets, orders and users — so there is no drift between what dancers see and what organisers manage.
Payments run entirely through Stripe. Checkout, refunds and organiser payouts are driven by Stripe webhooks that are reconciled against our own order records, which means a failed or delayed event on Stripe’s side never leaves an order in an unknown state. That reconciliation is the unglamorous work that makes a ticketing platform trustworthy.
Discovery is built on properly indexed queries and map-based search, so filtering by style, city, date and price stays fast as the catalogue grows. Role-based permissions separate what dancers, organisers and administrators can see and do, and every significant action is logged.
Because the product was scoped as a focused first release, it launched in weeks rather than months. Since launch it has evolved in two-week iterations driven by how organisers and dancers actually use it.
The organiser dashboard, shown with sample data.
Outcomes
Live, paid for, and still improving.
- Live
- Running in production for the UK and European Latin dance community.
- 3 roles
- Dancers, organisers and admins, served by one platform and one data model.
- Stripe
- Every payment runs through Stripe, with webhooks reconciled against our own orders.
What it shows
What this means for your project.
We ship complete products
Payments, permissions, admin tooling and operations — the parts that make software real, not just the demo.
Marketplaces are our home turf
Two-sided platforms with listings, search, checkout and payouts are the hardest kind of product to get right, and we have done it.
Launch fast, then iterate
A focused first release in weeks, followed by continuous improvement based on how people really use it.
Related services
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