Shipped: TicketTrek Is on the App Store
Quick one today, because it’s mostly just me being happy: TicketTrek is out on the App Store.
Back in February this was a web app running quietly at tixtrk.com for me and a few friends. It’s been growing up all spring, and this week it graduated to a real, native iPhone app. It’s free. If you travel for live music, or keep meaning to, I’d love for you to try it.
Why It Exists
I plan a decent chunk of my life around live music. Some shows are local. The best ones usually aren’t. And they’re rarely solo: there are flight times to coordinate, a group chat that can’t agree on where to eat or what to see while we’re there, the puzzle of who’s staying at which hotel, and (true story) an investigation into which one of us actually bought the tickets. The moment a show is in another city, it stops being a ticket and becomes a project. And the project scatters across your phone: tickets in one app, travel in an inbox, rooms in a third, and the master plan in your head.
“The moment a show is in another city, it stops being a ticket and becomes a project.”
Every general-purpose tool holds one piece. TicketTrek holds the show at the center and hangs everything else off it. That’s why I built it. What follows is why I keep opening it: the features I catch myself using the most.
Nearby Tonight
This is the feature I show people first. Based on where you’re standing, Nearby Tonight lists live events happening that evening: music, comedy, sports, arts. Free night in a city you don’t know? Open the app and you have plans. It has already paid for itself in newly discovered bands and venues. It’s how I found The Hold Steady in Boston, a night that gets its own post soon.
Follow Your Artists. And Your Rooms.
Search millions of events, follow your artists, and follow the rooms you love too, because sometimes the venue is the reason to go. Red Rocks. The Salt Shed. Tipitina’s. Follow them like you’d follow a band, and whatever they book comes to you.
And here’s the part I’m genuinely excited about: when an artist or venue you follow announces a new show, your phone tells you. A real push notification on iOS, the moment it happens. No refreshing, no digging through promo emails. It has already beaten a few of the fan-club mailing lists I’m on: Pearl Jam’s Ohana announcement hit my lock screen before the official email hit my inbox.
Trips Built Around Shows
Pick a show, one tap, it’s a trip. From there you build out the weekend: flights, hotel, dinner stops, all on an itinerary that groups by day.
The itinerary isn’t just show logistics, either. Mine usually carry the routine-keeping essentials: an office to work from, a gym with day passes, the things worth seeing between check-in and doors. Traveling for shows works a lot better when your normal life comes along.
Discover Events might be my favorite party trick: it searches the destination city for the exact dates you’re there, so a trip you booked for one show can come home with two. That’s how my upcoming New York trip, anchored on Bon Jovi, picked up Oh, Mary! along the way. And you can share the trip with the friends meeting you there, so everyone stops texting screenshots of the same itinerary.
Every Show You’ve Ever Seen, in One Place
This is the one that’s personal. After a show, it rolls into History: date, venue, and the actual setlist, verified against setlist.fm. Stats pile up across years and artists, and there’s a map with a pin in every venue you’ve ever walked into. Zooming all the way out on that map might be my favorite thing in the app.
It’s my single source of truth now. The shoebox-of-ticket-stubs importer on the web app feeds the same record, so decades of half-remembered shows live in one canonical list next to last weekend’s. My Pearl Jam count is in there. Still 53, but only until September: that Ohana show is number 54, and the trip is already built in the app.
If you’ve read my posts before, you know how this gets made: the agents wrote the Swift, and I played product manager, QA department, and the guy who says no. What it actually takes to get through App Review is a story for another day. Today is just: it’s out, and I’m thrilled.
Go See a Show
TicketTrek is on the App Store now, free, for iPhone. The web app lives at tixtrk.com and stays in sync. Questions, ideas, and bug reports genuinely welcome: admin@tixtrk.com.
And if TicketTrek routes us to the same show, come say hi.
These are my personal observations from tinkering on a side project, they don’t necessarily reflect the views of my firm. That said, we have some great AI tools and solutions, and I’d love to tell you about them.