GoOut is a well-known ticketing platform and culture guide in the Czech Republic. People use it to buy tickets for concerts, theater, and festivals, or to quickly see what’s going on in their city.
Over the years, as the company grew, some of their internal tools and processes couldn’t keep up. They wanted better insight into their user behavior and tech that would help them scale. So they partnered with Revolgy to improve their infrastructure, clean up their data, and — in their own words — “get bigger, get better.”
A “feeling-based” approach
For a while, building new features at GoOut was based more on intuition than insight. If something seemed useful, they’d add it. But there wasn’t an easy way to check if a new idea was actually working.
“We were doing feeling-based development,” said David Zettl, now the CTO. “We would say we need a feature, and we’d build it. But we didn’t have the tools to check if it helped or not.”
Adding to this, GoOut — which started 14 years ago — had built up a fair amount of technical debt. Their system setup was managed by the previous CTO, who was also the only DevOps. This meant that if something broke, David would often have to step in and fix it himself.
“I want to share an example from last year, back when we didn’t have proper support in place. Sometimes, at the worst possible moment, the website would just go down,” said David.
“Last year, we had a big issue during Rock for People, which is one of our biggest festivals, and one I actually really enjoy myself. I was off, attending the festival, standing in front of a stage, when I got a call that something was broken on the website. I had to stand in the crowd at Rock for People with my phone, trying to go through a dashboard and get it back up and running. That was basically the moment I started looking for help.”
Fixing infrastructure and reducing pressure on the team
GoOut’s first move was to find someone who could help them scale their infrastructure, without burning out their team. Revolgy helped write the infrastructure as Infrastructure as Code, upgrade the GKE setup, and build a one-click deployment setup, making updates and recovery fast and safe.
Later on, the Revolgy team added 24/7 monitoring and incident response, which meant GoOut’s tech team didn’t have to stay on call at all hours anymore.
“You really need someone 24/7 making sure that this thing survives. So either I sacrifice my life, I hire someone who does it, or I find a partner who specializes in spreading this workload out,” said David Zettl.
“I like that guys from GoOut can actually go out and enjoy the shows and the concerts now, and have peace of mind,” said Miroslav Vlasák, CEO, Revolgy.
“What good does data do if you don’t work with it?”
Parallel to building a stable infrastructure on Google Cloud, GoOut needed to take better control of their data, which would allow them to make decisions based on facts, not assumptions. At that time, David hired Jan Halama as GoOut’s first Data Lead. His main goal was to take all the disconnected systems and build one clean, usable data platform.
“When I joined,” said Jan, “they told me the data was a black box. We had data spread out across tools — tickets here, marketing over there — but no real way to use it together. The first main goal was to get the data in one place and start really using it for some insights.”
Because of this, their back-end teams spent too much time on data requests and reports instead of actual development. Today, that’s completely changed.
Here’s what GoOut’s current data setup looks like:
- Production database runs on Google Cloud SQL
- Data is streamed in real-time to BigQuery via DataStream
- Data includes ticket sales, app events, website traffic, ad performance (from sources like Meta and TikTok), and even exchange rates
- Organized in BigQuery into raw and analytical layers
- Using Looker Studio and Power BI to create dashboards and reports
- Testing Apache Superset to show data directly on their website
“Get bigger, get better, that’s our goal. That’s what we need to do. That’s what we need the data for, and to utilize machine learning on top of it, like forecasting, that’s really something which we want to look into. What good does data do if you don’t work with it?” said David.
Business edge and operational freedom
Switching to a data-first approach has changed the way GoOut works — both internally and in how they support partners.
- They can test ideas properly: GoOut now works with a “hypothesis-driven” mindset. They can check if new features work, manage resources better, and focus on the parts people are using.
“We learned we were wrong about a lot of our assumptions,” said David. “Now we can focus on the parts people actually use.”
- Teams don’t have to wait for data: The data system has created so-called full data democratization inside GoOut. This means people within the company can pull the data they need themselves, using a BI platform, instead of developers having to get reports for other teams.
“The back-end team should be mainly focused on the development and not on reporting. So right now, as we move forward with the data infrastructure, we can really move all those requests to the data team. We have basically full data democratization for the people inside the company. They can self-serve,” said Jan Halama, Data Lead, GoOut
- Faster reporting for external partners: Many of GoOut’s concert and event partners want data right after their shows, even at one in the morning. With the new setup, they can log into a report and see how the event went. There’s also a full reporting system for group-level business metrics, including money, website visits, and how features are used.
- GoOut can compete better in a crowded market: The Czech ticketing space is competitive, and having good data gives GoOut a big edge. Promoters like being able to see performance trends, year-over-year comparisons, and even weather correlations.
“It’s extremely competitive and that’s where, again, the data helps to have the slight edge over other companies. If we have the data speaking for us, that’s always a good indicator and a good point of discussion with potential future promoters and comparing it to competitors,” said David Zettl.
- It’s easier to book a ticket as a user: GoOut constantly looks at how users act on their website. For example, they count the number of clicks it takes for someone to buy a ticket. They learned that fewer than 2% of visitors bought tickets to more than one event at a time, and they removed the shopping cart altogether. That cut unnecessary steps and made the process faster.
- The systems are more reliable: Before Revolgy, if something broke, the fix often relied on one person’s time and phone battery. Revolgy assisted with making the Infrastructure as Code a one-click deploy solution, including incident and operations management, and a 24/7 managed service.
Building a data platform for all of Europe
A few years ago, GoOut was acquired by PLG, an Estonian investment company that also has its own ticketing platform. They’re now looking to expand, with part of it being in the Czech Republic. GoOut is not only growing their own business, they’re also helping PLG modernize data across the group.
Companies in the group are based in countries like Poland, Slovakia, Romania, and the Baltics. Many of them still run on on-premise tools. A major step will be for GoOut to lead the effort to bring together data from all these new European companies onto one system, mostly using BigQuery.
“A lot of those companies are still running on-prem. It’s sometimes really hard to figure out how to move the data, and not just once, but continuously. When you’re switching from one system to another, you still need to keep the data flowing from the first system while also moving it into the new one,” said Jan.
“This is a business-critical project,” said Jan about moving to BigQuery. “We’re connecting different systems, different ways of doing things. It’s not easy. But once it’s in place, the whole group gets better reporting and more insight.”
Once that setup is complete, the next step will be using AI and machine learning to forecast demand, improve pricing, and support better planning. From there, the focus will shift from just collecting data to actively using it, helping the business become more efficient, customer-focused, and scalable.
GoOut’s goal is clear: “get bigger, get better”. And Revolgy is helping them do exactly that.
Are you solving a similar challenge to GoOut or looking for an innovative cloud or AI solution for your business? Get in touch for a free consultation.
