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Comment by thehodge | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN!,

My wife and I have created Dress Circle.

The idea behind Dress Circle came from a Google Doc I've had for years with every show (Play, Musical, Opera) I've seen in ranked order, eventually we translated it into a webpage (https://www.dresscircle.co.uk/+thehodge) so others could view it and then friends wanted their own list.

To enable features such as alerts and showcases, we started to build a database Theatres in the UK then we added the shows that were in them and THEN we added the actors (and creative teams).

Then we started to add historical productions and.. well here we are, we've accidentally built IMDB for UK Theatre

(I thought with the timezone this might be a good time to post)

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Looks really neat. I use to work in this space, and it's just a dreadful collection of slow outdated systems cobbled together, so your site is a breath of fresh air.

I notice that you are redirecting to 3rd parties when people "book now", do you have affiliate/kickback agreements with these places, or are you just doing it out of the goodness of your heart?

The company I use to work for maintains an API for integrating with all these systems for booking tickets etc. It is... interesting...in terms of reliability, but it might help you integrate an "on platform" solution. Given that your website is slick, and that the industry is horrendously technologically backwards, you could probably turn this into a decent biz.

API: https://docs.ingresso.co.uk/

Python Wrapper: https://github.com/ingresso-group/pyticketswitch

Disclaimer: No current affiliation, use to work there, helped build the current JSON API, learned the hard way about how backwards these systems are.

Feel free to reach out if you want a point of contact or something

Less than 5% of the links we have are affiliate links, a few sites in the industry we noticed will only list venues that give a kickback, but we want to list everything and we've got a few other ideas of monetisation later down the link (the small number of affiliate links we have at the moment are working pretty well).

A ticketing solution is certainly one of the options we have, especially for the smaller productions which are in makeshift theatres (a fair few in working mens clubs!)

It's such a gross industry, heavily dependant on who you know.

Best of luck out there.

I also work in this space, mostly on websites for theatres, including lots on OP's list. Very cool to see this project

Such a backwards industry sometimes, although change is slowly coming at least in Box Office/CRM APIs for individual theatres.

Thanks that's appreciated, please feel free to email dom@dresscircle.co.uk if you think of anything we can improve :)

Design looks really good and is very performant (peak hacker news comment?).

I also enjoyed this snippet from the 'About':

>After starting the first version and getting a proof of concept working, this soon caught the attention of his wife who was a much better developer and she rewrote elements of the source to make them... well work.

Haha I can't lie, she is a MUCH better developer than me and typically I build a proof of concept and she gets annoyed with my code and takes over.

Nice - although the coverage locally is a bit spotty (I'm not talking missing shows, I'm talking missing theatres!).

Thanks, let me know what we are missing and I’ll try and get them added (as a two person team we know we have a challenge to try and get everything!)

Hi Dom,

Enjoyed your pitch at Thinking Digital last week, good to see it popping up on HN too! How do you get all the show data backing this - is it scraped from the individual theatres? (since I'm guessing there's no nice API ...)

There is no scraping (at the moment) it's all manually input to avoid issues, every theatre website is different (and a lot of them are terrible) but we are getting on a lot of press distribution lists so the next stage it to see if we can automate the parsing of those emails.

Thanks for the comments re: pitch, it was a fun day and looking forward to next year

As some one not familiar with theatrical terms, what does the term "Dress Circle" mean? Is it a class of seating?

Yes, in a sense. The Dress Circle is the first balcony (closest to the ground) in a traditional theatre.

Thanks for answering that! I went for some lunch :)

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