Building a successful online word-of-mouth sales platform

Pollen helps marketers create successful word-of-mouth sales programs for their events by engaging fans and influencers to sell tickets and promote experiences. Established in 2011, Pollen has raised over $30 million in funding and collaborated with over 700 brands on more than 5,000 event campaigns through its network of 200,000 ambassadors.

Pollen (formerly Verve) is an online experience marketplace that helps event marketers create effective word-of-mouth campaigns by enlisting influencers and ambassadors to sell tickets, drinks, and more. Pollen has collaborated with some of the most famous events worldwide and helped event marketers attract new audiences and hit revenue targets.

Pollen approached Sunscrapers right before the summer holidays— the busy season for event marketing. The goal was to fine-tune the existing ticket sales system to integrate with several external services while creating an efficient point and reward system for ambassadors.

Pollen needed a flexible tech partner experienced in their technology stack (Python/Django and JavaScript) and could start immediately. They also needed to scale teams up and down quickly to meet their business needs. Thus, the collaboration between Sunscrapers and Pollen began.

Pollen was so thrilled with the results that their four-month project has evolved into a trusted relationship with Sunscrapers, with continued collaboration six years later.

Technology

Pollen required smooth integration with external services for ticketing (Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, Paylogic, Frontgate), payments (Stripe, Braintree), and CRM systems (Braze, Front, Twilio). They also wanted to enhance the client experience with sophisticated reporting features by integrating financial services with Google Sheets.

Sunscrapers helped by providing five frontend and eight backend services. Our primary focus was streamlining the complex communication between the various services involved in bringing Pollen users and clients the functionalities they needed.

Sunscrapers created a dedicated team of two frontend and two backend developers, adding another developer when the project requirements changed.

Our team contributed to the development of the ambassador dashboard, authentication service, and user checkout. We have worked on several solutions to bring Pollen the external integrations they needed for optimal performance of the platform.

Other key highlights include:

• Work on the existing GraphQL gateway for processing frontend requests
• Developing an Ambassador API (the main component)
• A comprehensive notification service (including email notifications)
• An ETL process that would export data from production
• Capturing payment data from external providers such as Stripe or Braintree, strongly based on RabbitMQ/Celery queues