Audience Accounts and Story Posts

The last update ended with "Come to the show." You came.

Octiv.Fest took over the Bronze Boar on September 12, and it went better than a booking platform's first show had any right to. So while I'm still recovering, here's everything that shipped since the last update.

Octiv.Fest happened

Jack Surtman, an open jam, Wavelane, Silicon Death Ray, and Willow Run. All booked through Octiv, all on one bill, all in Toledo.

The event page got a full makeover to match the poster, and the set times now come straight from the bookings, so the schedule can never drift from what the artists actually agreed to. Toledo Money signed on as our first live partner and made it onto the poster.

Thank you to everyone who played, came out, sponsored, or yelled requests at the jam.

Fans get their own accounts

Until now, Octiv was for the people on stage and the people booking the room. Everyone in between had nowhere to go.

There's now an "I'm a fan" button on the homepage. Fan accounts can follow bands and venues from their page, or straight from Discover without clicking in. Bands and venues get a fan count right on their page.

A feed of shows worth leaving the house for

Your fan dashboard now shows what's coming up from the bands and venues you follow. A night with four bands shows up as one night, not four, with the bands you follow in bold so you can see why it's there.

Every show has Going and Interested buttons. Bands see how many people are going on their own dashboard, so they know the room won't be empty before they load in.

I was there

Once a show starts, you can say you were there and tick off which bands you actually caught.

Then make a story card: a poster-style image sized for Instagram, with the show, the date, and the lineup. You can drop in your own photo from the night as the background. That photo is used to draw the card and then thrown away. We don't store it anywhere.

Missed the button at the show? Recent shows now wait for you on your dashboard under "Were you there?", so you can mark it the next morning, coffee in hand.

Show chat for the whole bill

When a night has more than one act, the venue and every confirmed band on the bill now share one group chat. Load-in times, who's bringing the extra DI box, all in one place.

Your private thread with the venue is still there too, for the conversations that don't need an audience. Like money.

Venues see a night as a night

A four-band bill used to show up on a venue's dashboard as four separate bookings. It's now one show, with how many acts are confirmed and the total for the night.

Gigs that happened, counted

Guests who book an artist can now confirm the gig happened, and it counts toward that artist's gig history. Venue accounts get asked to confirm too.

Smaller things worth mentioning

Artists and venues can see how many different people viewed their page each week. Discover puts profiles with photos ahead of ones without, and thumbnails no longer spin forever. Every email from Octiv now actually looks like it came from Octiv. The Rider can hold images inside a post. Password resets by phone work again. Upcoming shows now appear on every artist's page by default. The header stopped telling you to log in right after you logged in. A handful of people who signed up quickly ended up with two copies of their profile; those are cleaned up and the cause is fixed. And Liam gave the whole codebase a serious reorganization behind the scenes, the kind of work nobody sees but that makes everything after it faster.

What's next

Fans, go follow the bands you saw. Bands, go book the next one.

See you at the next show.

Jake Varner Co-Founder | Octiv.live