Now your house party can have its own QR code tickets

What if you had a single app that ticketed your entire social calendar?

Your nights out, house parties, one-off events and more, booked without the need for Facebook Events, Yplan or LivingSocial. Instead, you have a single platform that tells you where to go and lets you get in when you arrive. Handy, right?

That’s the vision for the revamped Fixr. The free Android and iOS ticketing app for nightclubs has opened its platform to events big and small, and it’s fix(r)ated on becoming the de facto social app for those of us who party more than we work – or, to put it another way, for students.

As Fixr’s co-founders Nick Stone and Edmund Glover put it, “We intend that when someone arrives at university, their social event universe will be on Fixr.” A lofty ambition, then, but they have a secret weapon to help them get there: your house party.

Fixr started life in 2013 as a way for people who like to party hard to access and book tickets for rowdy nights out as easily as possible.

Like a club-centric Yplan, it allows you to see club nights and parties in advance or happening near the bar you’re currently propping up, using lists and map views to show you everything on Fixr’s books that the evening has to offer. You then book through the app, receiving a QR code ticket that can be sent to Passbook on iOS or Google Now on Android. So, less browsing, queueing and opportunity for loss or theft of your printed ticket.

But that was an h’or d’euvre. Fixr’s main course is today’s update, allowing anyone to use the platform to put their events up: not just open-to-all club nights, but private parties for limited groups of hand-picked guests.

The ridiculously well-organised party

Using Fixr as a platform, you’ll be able to fill in the details of your event, and your guests can register for a ticket.

Putting an event up is free, but if you charge for entry, it’ll be subject to a 60p card transaction fee. In this way, Fixr’s team hopes it’ll find favour with everyone from the organisers of a grungy house party to promoters putting together a one-off festival: the infrastructure is there to replace a quick private note about your dinner party on Facebook Events, or to help to fund the booking of a big-name entertainer for the student ball. (Also, Fixr gets to make a little money from the transaction.)

Nobody is pretending that every event needs a ticket, but furnishing guests to your house party with one isn’t very different from seeing who has said ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ on Facebook. OK, perhaps it’s just a smidge more anal.

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As a burgeoning platform, one question is how you get people using Fixr when your target market is already mobilising itself in other ways. Fixr’s answer is a system that furnishes the organiser with a direct link that they can then share via their preferred social platforms. Anyone who clicks the link but doesn’t have the app will be taken to the Play or App Store to download it.

To begin with, then, Fixr is reliant on your social networks and messaging platforms for private event promotion. The team hopes a network effect will come into play, so that as users try the system, they become more inclined to use it for their own events.

Down the line, Fixr’s team plans to introduce deeper social functionality, so that friends of users can see which events they’re going to. Following that, they’ll be looking into ways to promote private events within Fixr directly. With enough users in the right places – faculties, halls of residence, sports clubs and beyond – who needs Facebook Events?

Building up networks of users as comprehensive as Facebook’s is something of a pipe dream. But offering convenient, secure ticketing to all and sundry remains a very neat idea. And any of the key Millennial market pre-disposed to Fixr might be less so towards a TicketMaster or SeeTickets – which will put them in a very interesting position as they grow.

A tip: if you decide to use Fixr to ticket your dinner party, you needn’t actually scan everyone’s QR codes as they arrive. But if you do, even if your mates think you’re a tool, your nerd credentials would surely go through the roof. Win.

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About

Will is a contributing editor and ex-Editor-in-Chief of Stuff. He's been here a while: since 2004, in fact. Things have changed a fair bit since then, although he still gets ribbed for his ongoing respect for 'pioneering' Windows Mobile PDAs. He lives in hope that a new gadget will some day emerge that excites him as much as his Amiga did when he was nine. (The iPhone came pretty close.)