Events & Ticketing
Event and ticketing software, for a festival running 175+ events
Talk about your project
- 175+
- Water Lantern Festival events across the US and Canada, sold through the platform we built
- 1M+
- Lifetime Water Lantern attendees since 2018
- $12M
- Raised by filmmakers through Show&Tell, which we designed and built
- 8 weeks
- From kickoff to launch for Meet My MINI, two weeks before MINI USA's first rally stop
What we build
Software for selling, running and showing up to an event
Browse by city, pick a date, buy, get a confirmation. That's the loop on Water Lantern Festival, where tickets start at $24.99 and rise to $79.16 as an event fills. Every purchase records the ticket type, the amount and any ambassador or discount code, so the festival can tell which partner actually sold it.
When you run 175+ events, a new city can't wait on a developer. Water Lantern's own team creates events in the CMS, and the site carries a page for every city the festival has run in, 241 of them as of September 2026.
Show&Tell lets independent filmmakers sell tickets to their own screenings, take donations, sell merchandise and bring on sponsors without a distributor in the middle. Filmmakers have raised $12 million through it.
Meet My MINI runs on a phone in a parking lot. Owners put a QR cling in the car window, and anyone who scans it meets the car. Sign-in is an emailed magic link, because nobody wants to reset a password at a rally.
Show&Tell tags every lead by event and moves a batch of them through stages in one action. Getting there meant merging years of leads from four spreadsheets with inconsistent columns, down to one email per person.
Meet My MINI's admin tools generate QR codes in batches of around 1,000 and let the team void, reassign and track them. When the client asked for a most-viewed-car award two days before the first stop, the view counter and its dashboard were live on day one.
Events and ticketing case studies
Water Lantern Festival
Water Lantern Festival: 175+ events, 1M+ attendees
USA Today's readers voted Water Lantern Festival the #1 Best Cultural Festival. It runs 175+ events across the US and Canada, and it had outgrown the website it started with. We built the event and ticketing platform it sells through now.
See the case study →
Show&Tell
Screenings filmmakers sell themselves
Documentary filmmaker Keith Ochwat brought us the idea in early 2020. Filmmakers have raised $12 million through Show&Tell, and more than 7,500 of them use it today.
Read the case study →
Meet My MINI
A profile for every car at MINI Takes the States 2026
Octagon, MINI USA's agency partner, wanted owners to be able to introduce their cars at the rally. We designed and built it in about eight weeks, and there were 185 public car profiles after the first stop.
Read the case study →Why HQ for event tech
What event work has taught us
The date doesn't move. Meet My MINI's window clings were headed to print while we were still building. It went live two weeks before the first stop, because there was no version of that project where it could go live after.
Your team should run the calendar. Water Lantern's staff create every event in the CMS, and Show&Tell's filmmakers set up their own screenings. If adding a city means filing a request with us, we built it wrong.
Know where each sale came from. Ambassador and discount codes are recorded with every Water Lantern purchase. That's how the festival tells which partner or which promotion actually produced a ticket sale.
Honestly, we get the tone wrong sometimes. Our first Meet My MINI screens were tidy and correct, and the client told us they looked like business software. We rewrote the whole thing in the car's own voice, and that's the version that shipped.
Where we'd start
We'd start by buying a ticket on your site from a phone, the way your buyers do, and writing down every step between picking an event and the confirmation email.
That said, plenty of events don't need custom software. If an off-the-shelf ticketing tool fits, we'll tell you.
“The way you've handled this is such a testament to why HQ is so damn good.”
Elizabeth Waite
CMO, Collegewise
“This team is insanely reliable.”
Randall Bennett
“These are my favorite vendors.”
Hayden Hill
CMO, Christensen Institute
“As a way to get to a phenomenal product, hiring this team is the best way to go. Overall we're 1000% pleased.”
Austen Allred
CEO, GauntletAI
“There's no doubt in my mind that we picked the right partner in HQ to help us with this.”
Shobin Uralil
CMO, Lively
“If I'm not your happiest customer, I'm willing to fight whoever thinks they are for that title.”
Jeff Allen
CEO, BlueCar
“We feel like HQ has been our secret weapon.”
Jeron Paul
CEO, Spiff (acq. by Salesforce)
Hear it from more of our clients
See our wall of love
Building software for events and ticketing
An event happens on a date, and the software has to hold up before it and on the day. That shapes how we build everything from checkout to the admin tools your team uses the night before.
Our biggest piece of event work is Water Lantern Festival. USA Today's readers voted it the #1 Best Cultural Festival, and it runs more than 175 events across the US and Canada. We built the event and ticketing platform it sells through, and the festival's own team creates every event in the CMS.
We also built Show&Tell with documentary filmmaker Keith Ochwat, where filmmakers sell their own screenings and have raised $12 million through it, and Meet My MINI with Octagon for MINI USA's 2026 rally, which went from kickoff to launch in about eight weeks.
Between them, we've built the ticket flow a buyer sees and the app someone uses standing next to the thing itself.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. HQ built the event and ticketing platform for Water Lantern Festival, which runs more than 175 events across the US and Canada and has hosted more than one million attendees since 2018. Visitors browse events by city, check available dates, buy tickets and get a confirmation. Tickets start at $24.99 and rise to $79.16 as an event fills. Each purchase records the ticket type and the amount alongside the buyer, and ambassador and discount codes are tracked with it, so the festival can tell which partner or promotion produced a sale. The site runs a Canadian domain beside the American one, with city-level redirects, so links saved years ago still land on the right event. USA Today's readers voted Water Lantern Festival the number one Best Cultural Festival in its Readers' Choice Awards.
Yes. On Water Lantern Festival, the festival's own team creates every event in the CMS, including new cities and dates, and the public event pages update from it automatically. That is what keeps more than 175 events current without a developer in the loop. The site carries a page for every city the festival has run in, 241 of them as of September 2026, and the event search has to stay on top of all of them. The same CMS runs the blog and a newsletter section the festival named The Glow. On Show&Tell, filmmakers set up and run their own screenings in the same way.
Yes. In early 2020, documentary filmmaker Keith Ochwat partnered with HQ to build Show&Tell, a platform where independent filmmakers sell tickets to virtual and in-person screenings and earn revenue directly from their audiences. HQ designed and developed it. Filmmakers can also take donations, sell merchandise and partner with sponsors. Filmmakers using Show&Tell have raised $12 million collectively, individual documentaries have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars each, and more than 85 films have been placed on PBS national broadcast. Show&Tell has hosted thousands of events and serves more than 7,500 filmmakers worldwide. The platform also carries lead tooling, with leads tagged by event and moved through stages in batches.
Yes. For MINI Takes the States 2026, MINI USA's cross-country rally, HQ designed and built Meet My MINI with Octagon, MINI USA's agency partner. It's a mobile-first web app where every car gets a profile page. Owners put a printed QR cling in the window, and anyone who scans it opens the car's profile. Sign-in is an emailed magic link, so nobody resets a password in a parking lot, and owners choose whether their car shows up in browsing or only for people who scan it. Admin tools generate QR codes in batches of around 1,000 and can void or reassign any of them. It went live about eight weeks after kickoff, two weeks before the first stop, and there were 185 public car profiles after that stop.
It depends on what you're building, and we'd want to see a real plan before we put a number on it. Two reference points from our own event work: Meet My MINI went from kickoff in late July to launch in mid-September 2026, about eight weeks, two weeks before the rally's first stop. Show&Tell started as an MVP in early 2020 and has kept changing since, based on what thousands of filmmakers actually do with it. Some event work has a fixed date it has to hit, and some is a platform you keep building season after season. We plan for whichever one you have.
Planning an event, or a season of them? Tell us about it.
A ticketing platform, a screening tool or an app people use in a parking lot, we've built each of those. Send us what you're working on, even if it's a rough idea.
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