Naoki Convention: when 11,922 visitors hit the site at once on the very first day of ticket sales.
A new anime and manga convention in the Rhineland needed more than a website: a ticket shop that holds up under peak load. An admission control that works without printed lists. A platform that manages exhibitors, stars, merchants and food vendors from one central place. We built all of it, and across two successfully run conventions it proved exactly what it can do.
Starting point
A new convention needs more than a website
Anime and manga conventions are not small events. When ticket pre-sales open, thousands of fans hit the site at the same time. When the doors open on event day, hundreds of tickets per hour have to be checked at admission. And behind the scenes, exhibitors, artists, merchants and food vendors all have to be managed centrally, each with their own landing page, their own content and their own social media links.
The organizers of the Naoki Convention had a clear vision: an anime and manga convention in the Rhineland, with a professional presence from day one. What they were looking for was a partner to build the digital backbone, one that holds firm through every pre-sale rush and every admission day.
What we did
One platform for the entire convention lifecycle
We designed and built the complete system, from the idea to the code, from the website structure to the admission control. Six areas that work hand in hand:
- A ticket shop with zero manual intervention. Order, payment, PDF ticket with QR code, automated email delivery: everything runs without anyone sitting at a computer. The organizers only saw the money coming in, everything else happened in the background. At night too. Even at a thousand orders a day.
- A mobile admission system for up to 50 helpers at once. Instead of printed lists that staff tick off by hand, every helper opens a web page on their phone, scans the QR code on the ticket and instantly sees the name, ticket type, add-ons and every previous scan of that ticket. With timestamp, location and full history, central and updated to the second for all helpers at the same time.
- An exhibitor, stars, merchant and food-vendor platform. For hundreds of participants we researched everything individually: all social media channels (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn), logos and website URLs. Each brand got its own landing page in a consistent design, automatically linked, with adapted logos.
- A self-managing website lifecycle. The site steers itself across the year: a countdown to the event, a switch to “happening today” mode on convention day, an automatic pivot to the next convention the day after, including pre-sale teasers on the homepage. No one has to switch content over manually on the big day.
- Automated feedback after the convention. Every ticket buyer received a feedback form one day after the convention. The answers are not just gut feeling, they are the foundation for the next convention.
- Performance under load. The entire system runs on a lean cloud server behind two upstream CDN layers. On the peak day 11,922 visitors loaded the site, and the server did not flinch. All tickets were delivered without delay.
The crux
The first day of sales decides everything
For an event ticket shop, a single day of the year decides success: the day pre-sales open. If the site wobbles on that day, the tickets end up with the competition. If a ticket delivery hangs for two hours, hundreds of buyers write support emails. If the system slows down under load, everyone asks at once: “Are they serious?”
Our approach: no expensive over-provisioned servers. Instead, an architecture that distributes intelligently, with a lean application at its core, upstream delivery via CDN and automatic protection against bot waves. That keeps the technology affordable and still holds firm when 11,922 people knock at the same time.
Result
Two successfully run conventions
At the first Naoki Convention in April 2024 the system ran under real pressure, from the sales launch through thousands of tickets to admission on event day. The second convention in September 2024 followed with the same platform and the same results.
In the post-event survey, 108 visitors rated the website and the ticket shop. On average 4.2 out of 5 stars. 80 % gave 4 or 5 stars, and every second rating was a clean 5. Those are numbers that are rare in the event industry, because most website ratings are not praise but complaints about what did not work.
Numbers, not words
80 % of surveyed visitors gave the website and ticket shop 4 or 5 stars.
From 108 anonymous ratings in the official post-event survey. Average rating 4.2 out of 5 stars, for the function, not the atmosphere.