A nightlife platform that knows who signed up, and who actually turned up

The problem

Alfa Entertainments runs club nights at venues across Bengaluru and fills them through guestlists pushed by artists and promoters on Instagram and by Meta ads. The industry’s open secret is that a guestlist sign-up is not attendance: people register and never turn up, and nobody can say which channel brought the guests who did. Each night also had to be launched from scratch: artwork branded, an event page built, ad creative cut for every placement, a campaign configured, and a long list of things done in the right order. Without a system of record there was no reliable answer to the questions that decide where the next campaign’s money goes.

What we built

A Nuxt 3 site on Netlify with PocketBase behind it. Every event page carries the guestlist form, and the server owns the rules: names, party size and entry type are validated, phone numbers are normalised, duplicates within an event are flagged, and each registration is stamped with first-touch and last-touch attribution from the promoter’s referral link, the campaign’s UTM parameters and Meta’s click id. A guest directory keyed on phone number recognises returning guests across events.

Guests who opt in get a WhatsApp confirmation the moment they register, sent from Alfa’s own WhatsApp Business number through Tempestronics’ Meta integration. A registration only counts as confirmed once WhatsApp has accepted the message, so a wrong number is caught while the guest is still on the page. The confirmation carries the details for the night and a personal pass with a QR code, a reminder goes out on the day with doors and cutoff times, and a Stop button ends the messages. At the door, staff scan the pass with a phone: one tap admits the party, a second scan of the same pass is refused, and the list updates live with a headcount by entry type and promoter.

Launching a night is a guided pipeline. From the poster and the promo clip, the Alfa mark is composited onto the artwork in line with the collaborator logos, the event record is created by cloning the nearest comparable night, each clip is exported as the Stories master, a Feed cut centred over a blurred fill of itself and a web banner, and a Meta campaign runbook is produced with audiences, budget, a schedule that ends at the guestlist cutoff, verified interest targeting, per-event exclusion audiences and a click-by-click Ads Manager walkthrough. Every event also gets its own operations checklist, taken from a master template and nesting five levels deep, which the organisers tick as the night comes together.

The admin system covers events, venues, artists and videos, and each guestlist opens with an attribution summary by promoter, source, medium and hour. Artist Instagram follower counts are read weekly and charted per artist. Google Analytics 4 carries 27 custom dimensions on the registration funnel and the Meta Pixel fires the standard conversion events, so the ads optimise on real registrations and the exclusion audiences keep them away from people already on the list. Six legal documents, written from an audit of what the code actually collects, ship as pages and as PDFs.

What it changed

Alfa knows, per channel and per promoter, not just who registered but who came, so the next campaign’s budget follows show-ups rather than sign-ups. A new night goes from artwork to live page, ad creative and campaign plan in one guided pass. Guests get an answer on WhatsApp instead of silence, and the door works from a live list on a phone. Alfa runs a night every week with more than a hundred guests each, and the site behind them scores 100 for performance and SEO on desktop; a later pass moved images to Netlify’s image CDN and cut the HTML per page from 111 KB to 34 KB. The database schema lives in its own repository, so the backend can be rebuilt from code.