Megatix: “Queue-it lets us push our servers to the edge without going over it”

Before founding Australian ticketing software company Megatix, Roshan Odhavji and Ashley Ratten worked in the live event industry as performers, promoters, and event organizers.

Like many others, Roshan and Ashley saw first-hand the limitations of the available ticketing software. But they also saw what others didn’t: an opportunity to do better.

“Megatix was created to solve our own problems,” says Roshan, Megatix’s Co-founder and CEO. “That gave us a unique perspective that really enabled us to break the mold. We’ve always approached Megatix with the goal of using technology to give control and power back to event organizers.”

Founded in 2014, Megatix’s client-centered mission and agile team drove rapid growth across Australia and South-East Asia. Megatix now operates in six countries and has sold millions of tickets through their platform.

But as Megatix grew and took on bigger clients, they knew they needed to be proactive to handle increasing demand on their infrastructure. Discover how Megatix uses Queue-it to ensure fair and reliable onsales, how the virtual waiting room provides peace of mind when they roll out new features and traffic is unpredictable, and how Megatix’s work with an Australian festival led to Queue-it’s 'Q-man' going viral on TikTok.

“There’s three things that led us to working with Queue-it,” Roshan says.

“First, we were growing fast and landing a lot of bigger clients. As we got bigger, so did our concerns over traffic management. We saw how a high-profile site crash could damage the reputation of a solution and knew we needed to avoid it.”

“Second, site protection and traffic control are particularly important for us because we take an aggressive approach to innovation, where we’re constantly rolling out and testing new things. Our agility and willingness to tailor our solution is what makes us unique, but constant change also creates risk.”

“And the third factor has to do with how we operate as a company. We focus on doing what we do well and integrate with others who are already the best at what they do.”

Confident they needed a queuing solution, Roshan and the team looked into several options.

They built an in-house solution, Roshan says, “but it was very rudimentary and just a holding page that let people into the site at a controlled rate and ended up being random and not a true queue.”

With a lifetime of experience as both fans and organizers, the Megatix founders knew this wasn’t good enough. They weren’t willing to use a solution that didn’t offer a fair and smooth user experience.

“It always bothered us seeing ticketing companies using ‘queuing solutions’ that are just holding pages, which aren’t real queues. It’s unfair, because some people sit there for 2-3 hours without getting tickets, while others who enter the ‘queue’ later get access in 10 minutes.”

With this in mind, Roshan and the team settled on implementing Queue-it’s “tried and tested” solution, which offered not only sophisticated fairness mechanisms, but also easy integration and local customer support.

“The Queue-it approach of randomizing visitors, then running a first-in, first-out queue is a fairer and more predictable process, which is crucial to us, our clients, and their customers.”

Roshan Odhavji, Co-founder and CEO

“The integration process was seamless,” says Roshan. “I was impressed by the fact that, once Queue-it is up, we can spin up a new waiting room within a minute. It’s a quick and easy process that’s very self-managed, which is useful.”

Like most companies running large-scale online events, Megatix regularly load tests their systems to determine their capacity and throughput.

While these tests help Megatix optimize their systems, they’re not enough to give the team full confidence going live with a major onsale.

“In a test environment, we can generate a huge number of ticket purchasers and simulate a high-volume onsale without any problems,” Roshan explains. “But in a real life onsale, our database reaches its limits long before we hit that number. In our experience, the servers respond to load tests in a way that gives you a false sense of what’s possible. My hypothesis is that it’s because load testing is so programmatic and systematic. Whereas in real life there’s a huge randomness factor that can’t be simulated.”

This is a common problem for companies like Megatix. When running large-scale events, the unpredictability of real-life user behavior makes it extremely difficult to protect bottlenecks and optimize systems, even with regular load testing.

“In ticketing, allocations are absolutely sacred. You must maintain complete consistency and avoid overselling tickets at all costs,” Roshan says. “By controlling the flow of traffic to the ticket or seat reservation, Queue-it lets us ensure the database never gets overloaded—which has always been a key bottleneck for us.”

“Queue-it lets us push our servers right to the edge without going over it. It lets us adjust the traffic outflow on the fly to maximize throughput without compromising reliability, which gives us peace of mind during large onsales.”

Roshan Odhavji, Co-founder and CEO

Megatix’s first big onsale with Queue-it was for Australian festival Beyond the Valley, run by Untitled Group.

“There was an expectation for over 100,000 people trying to get tickets. That kind of demand would be tough to handle under any circumstances, but we also had a completely new sales pipeline we’d customized for the event,” says Roshan.

“We had about 50 different ticket types going on sale all at once—everything from multi- and single-day passes, to camping slots, to bus tickets and car passes. We didn’t know how long customers would take to select their tickets and progress through the user journey, so we needed Queue-it to ensure we were in control and could keep everything running smoothly.”

When the Beyond the Valley onsale went live, customers entered the queue at a rate of over 1,000 per minute for more than 30 minutes.

Given the new purchase pipeline developed for the event, Megatix closely monitored traffic and site performance, gradually increasing the outflow from queue to website as the onsale progressed and their systems continued to handle the load.

“The onsale was a big success,” says Roshan. “Everything went very smoothly. The whole event was very controlled, without a single glitch or issue.”

Tickets to the hugely popular festival quickly sold out, and “not everyone could get the tickets they wanted,” says Roshan. “But with Queue-it in place we could at least say that we delivered a really fair process and onsale experience.”

“Queue-it just works. Once it’s there, you don’t have to worry about how many customers you’re going to get. You can just focus on processing the orders on your end as fast as you can.”

Roshan Odhavji, Co-founder and CEO

During the onsale, creative fans of the festival took to TikTok with videos where they sent words of encouragement to the little walking man we call ‘Q-man’.

For the festival, the Untitled Group team embraced these videos, sending a real-life Q-man (or ‘Green man’, as they called him) to Beyond the Valley to meet fans and create some content.

Queue-it's Q-man/Green Man walking through Beyond The Valley festival.

Credit: @beyondthevalleyfest on TikTok

Several fans even made signs out of their waiting rooms, bringing them to the festival and holding them up during concerts.

“We choose to work with Megatix because they offer exceptional functionality for large-scale events and give us access to the latest in ticketing technologies, such as Queue-it. The waiting room not only ensured our onsale went smoothly, but also let us engage fans with our festival playlist and ensure every visitor got a fair chance.”

Courtney Tahar, Ticketing Manager, Untitled Group

After their growth throughout the Asia-Pacific and success in embracing each new challenge, the Megatix team is eager to expand their solution into new markets and verticals.

“We’re working on a tourism project in Asia, expanding into stadium and sports ticketing, and setting up a presence in the U.K.,” says Roshan.

“We’ve shown there’s an appetite for more control and flexibility in ticketing software providers. With the help of Queue-it, we’ve been able to bring those benefits to some of the biggest event organizers in the Asia-Pacific region. Now we’ve got the confidence and track record to expand our mission internationally.”