How a Nigerian Engineer Built a Ticketing Platform to Rival Ticketmaster
Damilola Jerugba, a former software engineer at Reddit, Moniepoint, and Busha, co-founded Jetron Ticket in 2022 after his friend struggled to manage event attendees. Starting as a simple online ticketing platform, Jetron grew from a side project to supporting over 2,000 events across Lagos, Kaduna, Plateau, and Rivers.
The Nigerian event market is massive—Lagos alone saw ₦129 billion ($93 million) spent on entertainment during Detty December 2025. Yet Jerugba identified a gap: "The infrastructure serving that market still hasn't caught up with the demand." Early versions had critical flaws like no email storage system, forcing the team to manually collect attendee data at check-ins. Jerugba personally handled software development, customer support, and on-site scanning during the first events.
Revenue scaled from ₦60 million ($43,000) in 2023 to over ₦250 million ($180,000) in 2024, but the company nearly collapsed when Jerugba lost his Reddit job in 2023. For three months, he funded operations from personal savings as salaries alone cost over ₦1.6 million monthly. The platform survived due to lean infrastructure costs.
A complete rebuild in 2025 addressed performance issues as the user base grew. The new system launched with a mobile app, seat mapping, group tickets, promo codes, and a ticket-sharing feature. Now, Jetron is developing "Jetron Fluid"—APIs allowing event organisers to embed ticketing directly on their own websites while using Jetron's backend.
Jerugba’s ambition is clear: "I was not aiming for Eventbrite; I was aiming for Ticketmaster." The challenge now is behavioural: "People are used to a very basic ticketing experience... changing behaviour is the real challenge." With competitors like Eventbrite and Tix Africa, Jetron's edge is deeper tooling for organisers, with potential for international partnerships.
For Nigerian event organisers and tech builders: Jetron's journey shows that solving a local problem with global-scale ambition can work, but surviving the early funding gap requires extreme personal sacrifice and lean operations. The next frontier isn't just technology—it's changing user habits. Will you build infrastructure that serves local behaviour, or try to change behaviour to fit your infrastructure?
SOURCE: https://techcabal.com/2026/04/04/jetron-tickets-day-1-1000/