On-Tap Trivia - Website and Subscription Members Area

Client Overview

On-Tap Trivia sells ready-to-run trivia packs to bars in the United States. Each week a venue gets a new pack with the slides, answer sheets and host material it needs to run a quiz night. The business is run by Sam from GeeQuiz, and the pitch to venue owners is simple: a trivia night fills a quiet weeknight with people who stay, drink and eat.

Sam needed a new website to win those venues, and a way to deliver the packs once they signed up.

The Challenge

Selling and delivering the packs depended on people doing it by hand. That raised a few problems that would only get bigger as more venues signed up:

• Delivery relied on a person. Packs had to go out every week to venues spread across several US time zones, and a missed week is the week a venue cancels.
• New venues landed in the wrong place. A venue joining late could start deep into the content library on a quiz pitched harder than a first-timer should get.
• One subscription could be shared. A pack forwarded around a group of bars is revenue that never comes in.
• Billing had no automation. No automatic account set-up, no handling of failed payments and no self-service cancellation.

How It Was Built

The website and members area are one Next.js application on AWS Amplify. Behind it, a set of AWS Lambda functions handle checkout, the Stripe webhook, downloads, contact enquiries and the scheduled jobs, with DynamoDB for subscriber and release records, Cognito for member sign-in, SES for email and EventBridge Scheduler for the hourly release sweep. The packs themselves stay in Dropbox, as the client wanted, and are never linked directly.

• Time zones done properly. Release times are worked out from each venue's own time zone, including states that do not observe daylight saving, and the drip engine is covered by a timezone test matrix.
• Safe to run twice. The release job and the payment webhook are built so a repeated or retried run cannot send the same pack or create the same account twice.
• Ready for new countries. Currency, tax, time zones, content library and domain are settings rather than code, so new markets can be added without a rebuild.

More Than a Subscription

The same platform now sells one-off packs as well. A single pack is emailed to the buyer after payment, with an expiring download link. For Halloween we added a campaign page with its own one-time checkout and protected downloads, so a seasonal pack could be sold without touching the subscription.

The Results

On-Tap Trivia now runs on a system that takes a venue from first visit to weekly delivery on its own:

• A venue can pay and download its first pack straight away, with no one setting up the account.
• New packs go out every Monday morning in each venue's local time without a person sending them.
• Failed payments are chased automatically, and paid-for content is never taken away.
• The team loads content, manages downloads and checks subscribers from one admin console.
• Leads from the free sample form are stored, answered with the sample, and followed up.