A touring DJ's site that runs his guestlist, his newsletter and the questions at the door

The problem

Jonas Monteiro plays three weekly residencies in Bengaluru and a growing run of nights in other cities. Every one of them produces the same questions on Instagram, all day: what is on tonight, are stags allowed, how early do I need to arrive to get in free. His site was an old template with the events typed into it by hand, the guestlists ran through borrowed forms, there was no mailing list, and private bookings such as weddings had to appear as busy nights without revealing the client or the fee.

What we built

One place that everything else reads from

He edits his own events, venues, photos and news in a visual editor, and everything else follows from that: the public calendar, the feed people subscribe to in their phone’s calendar, the weekly email, the answers the chat assistant gives, and a monthly poster he can export and put straight on Instagram. Weekly residencies roll forward on their own. Nothing is typed twice.

A guestlist that does not lose people

Most of his audience arrives from Instagram, whose in-app browser drops connections halfway through a form. So the signup was built to expect that: it retries quietly, and anything that still slips through is picked up automatically within the hour and confirmed without the guest ever knowing there was a problem. Guests get a confirmation with their own entry terms and a calendar invitation.

An assistant that answers the door questions

A chat assistant on the site answers what people actually ask, from live event data rather than a script: what is on this weekend, what the music will be, whether their group can get in, how early to arrive. It can check whether someone is already on a guestlist, and put them on one without leaving the conversation. When someone asks about hiring him, it stops answering and hands them to the booking page rather than inventing a price or a free date.

A mailing list he owns

A weekly email drafts itself from the week’s events, he approves it in the same place he edits everything else, and it goes out that evening. The list is his, built entirely from people who ticked a box on his own guestlist form.

The hard part

An assistant that talks to the public will be tested by the public. People tried to talk this one into doing their homework, into revealing its own instructions, and into believing a forged instruction pasted into the conversation. Fixing that is not one clever filter, it is a series of defences, and more importantly it is proof. Every trick that worked once became a permanent test that runs against the real assistant, so a future change cannot quietly reopen a door that was closed. Alongside those, several hundred automated checks run before anything reaches the site.

What it changed

The mailing list went from nothing to more than 1,400 subscribers in under three months, every one of them organic, with two people unsubscribing. In a single quarter the site took 2,814 guestlist signups across 81 nights, with the median guest going from opening the form to a confirmed spot in 46 seconds. He manages 237 events at 48 venues himself. And three months of signup data told him something no instinct would have: exactly which hours of which days his advertising should run.