Case study · Platform rescue

StageTime Trivia

A live-trivia company’s membership platform was leaking revenue — missed charges, double charges, and lapsed players slipping into members-only games. We rebuilt it, stabilized the billing, and stopped a leak worth nearly $1,000 a month.

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Platform rebuildmemberships, billing, e-commerce tracking

~$1,000/moin leaking revenue stopped

The setup

StageTime Trivia runs live trivia events and a weekly members-only game. Members sign up, get charged on a schedule, and play every week. When it works, nobody thinks about the machinery behind it.

By the time they reached us, the machinery was the problem. Some members weren’t getting charged at all. Others were charged twice. Players whose memberships had lapsed kept getting into the weekly game, while paying members hit friction trying to re-subscribe. Every week meant refunds, apologies, and spreadsheet archaeology.

The business itself was healthy — people loved the games. The platform underneath was quietly bleeding close to a thousand dollars a month. That’s where we came in.

The challenge

Memberships only work when billing is boring. This billing was anything but.

Leaking revenue. Missed charges and double charges added up to nearly $1,000 a month — plus the refunds and goodwill that go with them.
Access drift. Lapsed members kept getting into the weekly members-only game; paying members sometimes couldn’t.
Re-signup friction. Players who wanted to come back hit walls — failed renewals and duplicate payments instead of one clean path.
No visibility. Without e-commerce tracking, nobody could say who was charged, who wasn’t, or why.

The solution

Rebuild the platform and make payments boring again — then make the whole thing look as good as it runs.

Platform rebuild. We took over the membership stack and rebuilt it — stable recurring billing and one source of truth for who’s a member.
E-commerce tracking. Orders and membership events tracked end to end, so revenue questions have answers.
Painless re-signup. Duplicate payments cut off at the source, with a clean path for lapsed members to rejoin.
Events, automated. A custom Eventbrite integration pulls their events onto the site, displayed in a custom event calendar we built for them.
Redesign + refresh. Once the platform was stable, we redesigned the site so the front of house matched the new back of house.
ActiveCampaign consulting. Ongoing help getting more value out of the list they’ve worked hard to build.

The results

The leak, stopped: nearly $1,000 a month.

~$1k/mo

in missed and duplicate membership charges recovered — the leak that prompted the rescue.

Billing, boring

members get charged when they should, once — and only members get into the weekly game.

Events on tap

Eventbrite feeds the site automatically through a custom event calendar — no copy-paste event admin.

Sanity, saved

fewer refunds, fewer apology emails, happier members — support noise way down.

First, stop the bleeding

The rebuild stabilized recurring payments and shut down the double-charging. Members get charged when they should — once — and lapsed players have a clean way back in instead of a support thread. The nearly $1,000 a month that was quietly walking out the door now stays in the business.

Then, make it shine

With the platform steady, we redesigned and refreshed the site, wired their Eventbrite events into a custom on-site calendar, and stayed on as their ActiveCampaign consultants — helping them get more out of every send.

Your turn

Is your platform leaking money?

Missed charges, double billing, members slipping through the cracks — it’s usually fixable, and faster than you think. Let’s find your leak.

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