Becoming Pools in 2026
Beginning in the spring of 2026, our memberships platform for event organizers is now known as Pools.
Preview coverage
What is live now, and what is still coming
Live in the Pools preview
Still coming
These sections are still on the previous styling for now.
No organizer action required
If you worked with us before 2025, please note this change is exclusively visual and brand-related, not an account, data, or infrastructure upgrades. Logins, organizer data, and existing workflows stay intact, regardless of which domain you use.
Redirects are coming
On Monday, April 20th, legacy links began redirecting automatically to pools.events. You do not need to notify your community unless you want to, as this should have no impact on their use.
The path to Pools
2025 was a massively transitional year for our platform.
We spent the entire first half of the year working tirelessly to rebuild our entire underlying infrastructure to best serve the event organizers we love. We made it faster, more flexible, easier to build new features for, more intuitive, and simpler to navigate. Organizers began adding events to this upgraded infrastructure over the spring, and over the summer we upgraded every existing profile.
It was easily the largest milestone we’ve achieved since starting the company.
The parts of Pools
Since this upgrade, our dedicated team has been able to iterate quickly on feedback for the first time in years, rolling out new features every week based on close discussion with those using our platform every day.
Event Discovery
Explore upcoming events, automatically filtered to your location, with highlights for those selling the most tickets. Available on dashboard post-purchase, individual event pages, and organizer profiles.
Add-to-Wallet
Add tickets & memberships to your phone on iOS and Android.
A card reader app
Collect card or phone payments at the door. Look up your members right from the app to give them the welcome (and discounts) they deserve.
Co-hosting
Event organizers can partner with and support one another by adding their profiles to the event page and sharing event data in the dashboard.
Promotion Guides
Spread the word about your event. Follow best practices from other event organizers, use unique tracking links to learn where your attendees are coming from, and take advantage of our growing database of local listing platforms to get your community off the algorithm.
Hidden addresses, events, ticket tiers, and scheduling tickets
Keep your event both accessible and protected at the same time, without hiding from Event Discovery. Additional visibility settings by event and ticket tier, as well as sale scheduling for tiered price or special pre-sales.
Member-only events & Ticket Tiers
Set specific tiers for pre-sale benefits only applied to higher membership tiers, boosting membership signups, or create meetups just for members.
Member nicknames
Invite cats to join your catship or whatever nicknames work best for your community.
Membership status lookups
Check membership status directly inside guest check-in, so when a member shows up unannounced it is easy for the door staff to check their status and add them to the list.
Guest list imports
Make sure your whole crew of VIPs is taken care of.
Advanced analytics
Powerful new tools to explore your community. Stack multiple filters at a time, with new functions like contains or excludes. Hide, rearrange, sum, or copy columns to create quick custom dashboards. Export filtered data to CSV, or connect to Google Sheets, Zapier, or a webhook to sync with your community's other tools.
Custom checkout questions
Expand on default options to collect any information you want from your attendees, with text, drop down, or date entry fields. Set questions account wide, or by event or ticket tier.
Performance charts
Easy to glance highlights by Org and Platform average. Still fully customizable in the Analytics dashboard.
Event Organizer Community
We’ve also been hosting Event Organizer Meetups and running a parallel Event Organizer Chat on Instagram and WhatsApp for over a year now here in New York City. It’s a great way to share resources and meet other local organizers working on similar challenges.
What Pools means
to us
This name is meant to invoke the kind of spaces we were built to support: space to gather and find one another, to recharge and relax. Events, especially those rooted in showcasing the wealth of creative talent bubbling all around us, are beautiful in how they can bring together not only the people, but the resources needed to grow resilient communities.
Our platform Pools brings together these people and resources in a way that is meant to feel fun and effortless, simple enough for a kid learning to throw events in the shallow end while still going deep enough for arts institutions dedicated to swimming the laps that build true strength.
We chose Pools because it has multiple meanings, including both the action of collaborating on a shared goal ("pooling resources") and also the open-ness of the collective result. We believe that memberships and contributions grow collaborative "pools" to make events more sustainable.
Our platform isn’t a single place to gather, but a framework for thousands of discrete event organizers to grow their own experimental art, music, and DIY communities. We’re thinking of cenotes, the interconnected underground pools throughout the Yucatán (caused by a meteor!). Pools that function as access points to a vast network of creativity in every community, more than tiled pools full of chlorine, but the important thing is that every community pool is designed however best fits.
What Pools leaves behind
This transformation leaves behind our previous identity.
The company was first started back in 2017 (as Better) while we were still running Silent Barn. I (Joe) joined my cofounder (Kunal) at the time because I was passionate about organizers doing the difficult work of producing events, and almost 10 years later I’m as dedicated to that mission as ever.
Since then, so much has happened. We raised a crowdfunding round (so many of our investors are the same organizers who use our platform!), completed Y Combinator, and were clobbered by Covid.
Most notably, we explored the role memberships might have for retail businesses. In 2024 we decided to split this idea off from the events platform entirely, since they had distinct and different needs and goals. I began to build a new chapter and identity for the company, with a new partner, exclusively focused on the event organizer. Kunal left to build software for bookstores and other retail, under our previous our previous .co brand brand, so you’ll still see that as a platform for subscribing to and supporting other kinds of small businesses.
Come explore Pools
Event organizers have always been our core purpose, and we will continue to empower them with a new team, a new framework, new features, and a whole new look.
Our founding principles commit us to serve the hundreds of event organizers that rely on us as a critical part of keeping their work sustainable.
Currently this preview is limited to our Discovery and Event pages, but will soon roll out to the dashboard, profiles, and all other parts of the site before eventually redirecting automatically.
Please share your feedback with us at [email protected] during this preview so we can continue to build the platform to be the perfect tool for event organizers and their communities.
You’ll still be able to visit legacy URLs, but Pools is our path forward now.
Visit pools.events Email [email protected]