Building Tikiti: lessons from launching an event ticketing platform in Kenya

Tikiti is our event ticketing platform for Kenya. It handles ticket sales, M-Pesa payments, QR code entry management, and organiser dashboards. Here is the story of building it.

The Problem

Walk into most Kenyan events and you will find a queue of people showing WhatsApp screenshots of M-Pesa confirmations to a person with a printed list. It works, but it breaks at scale — double entries, fraudulent screenshots, cash handling at the door, and no data for the organiser.

What We Built

Tikiti gives event organisers a dashboard to create events, set ticket tiers and prices, and share a public event page. Attendees pay via M-Pesa or card, receive a QR code by SMS and email, and scan it at the door.

For organisers: real-time sales data, door scanner app for their team, revenue tracking, and same-day settlement.

Technical Decisions

Laravel + Livewire for the web dashboard — fast to build, easy to maintain, reactive without the overhead of a full SPA.

Flutter for the door scanner app — needs to work offline and on cheap Android devices. Flutter's performance on low-end hardware made it the right call.

M-Pesa STK Push as the primary payment method — that is where 90% of payments come from. Pesapal handles card payments for the remainder.

What We Learned

SMS delivery is not guaranteed. We send QR codes via both SMS and email, and display them immediately on the confirmation page. If SMS fails, the attendee still has their ticket.

Organisers do not want to learn software. The dashboard had to be simple enough to use without training. We cut features that added complexity without clear value.

QR scanning in poor lighting is hard. The scanner app needed extra processing for low-light venues. We tested it in actual event conditions before launch.