Damilola Jerugba describes his interest in building things as a fascination with how things work and come together. He said he taught himself how to code through Udemy courses and YouTube tutorials, and then went on to work as a software engineer at companies like Reddit, Moniepoint, and Busha.
At Reddit, he worked on the advertising team, helping build the infrastructure companies use to run campaigns. At Moniepoint, he worked on customer support tools as a senior frontend engineer, and at Busha, he worked as a backend engineer. These experiences, he said, shaped how he thought about performance, reliability, and building systems that worked at scale.
“These weren’t just jobs; they were an education I brought back into Jetron Ticket every single time.”
The idea for Jetron Ticket came when his close friend, Jemedafe Caleb, who organised events and parties, needed coordination and a more reliable way to manage attendees. Jerugba saw it as a problem to solve and an opportunity to sharpen his coding skills. He co-founded with Akinkunmi Solomon in 2022.
In its earliest version, Jetron Ticket was an online ticketing platform where event organisers could create events, sell tickets, and manage check-ins through a dashboard. Operated by a 10-person team, the platform gradually grew from a side project to one that supports events across multiple Nigerian cities, including Lagos, Kaduna, Plateau, and Rivers.
Nigeria’s events scene has expanded rapidly in recent years, driven by music, nightlife, and cultural moments like Detty December, the festive period from mid-December through the New Year. defined by partying, concerts, and festivities. In 2025, Lagos recorded nearly ₦400 billion ($290 million) in consumer spending during the period, with over ₦129 billion ($93 million) going to entertainment and nightlife alone, according to a report by YC-backed fintech, Cowrywise.
What pushed Jerugba into ticketing was what he described as a gap between demand and infrastructure.
“When Jetron Ticket started, there wasn’t much out there to help organisers run professional events,” he said. “The infrastructure serving that market still hasn’t caught up with the demand.”
Day 1: The missing emails and the founder who did almost everything
Jetron’s first day was at a Y2K-themed party organised by the same friend whose problem led Jerugba to build the product.
He had spent two months building the platform’s first version: users could create events, attendees could buy tickets, receive QR codes, and get scanned in at the venue. It worked, mostly. But the gaps became obvious quickly.
The platform had no system to store customer emails, which meant that there was no way to build a user base or follow up on attendees after the event. To improvise, Jerugba and his team asked attendees for their names and email addresses at check-in and then typed them into an Excel spreadsheet, one by one
It was slow and made check-in more tedious than it needed to be, but it was the only workaround the team had.
There were other problems. Some attendees completed payments but didn’t immediately receive their QR codes. Because the team was still small, Jerugba handled most of those issues himself.
“I was handling everything during that time,” he said. “I handled the entire software development life cycle, customer support, and check-ins, meaning I went to the events to help them with scanning to make sure everything went well.”
The missing email system was one of the first things the company fixed after that debut event. Payment confirmation was overhauled so tickets could be delivered reliably. With each new event, Jerugba said, the rough edges from that first night were addressed one by one.
Day 500: Growth came, and so did the bills
By Jetron’s 100-day mark, something had started to click.
The platform had grown beyond the initial circle of friends and was showing up across different cities, without a marketing strategy in place, according to Jerugba.
“Once someone uses our platform for an event… attendees who also organise events will look at our platform and use it,” he said.
For what started as a side project, he didn’t hide his surprise at the traction it was getting, particularly when he received a customer support request for an event in Kaduna, one of the most populous cities in Northern Nigeria. As usage grew, so did the demands of running the business behind it.
From its inception, Jetron was sustained by Jerugba and his co-founder’s salaries, channelled directly into the company. According to Jerugba, the team was spending over ₦1.6 million ($1,160) monthly on salaries alone, with labour accounting for the bulk of its costs, followed by infrastructure and third-party tools required to keep the platform running. It worked for a while until Jerugba lost his job at Reddit in 2023 when his contract role ended.
While Jetron was generating revenue, it wasn’t enough to cover costs, and letting employees go wasn’t something he was willing to consider. For about three months, Jetron ran entirely on his personal savings. “It was a tight window, but because our infrastructure costs were lean, the platform stayed live throughout.”
His understanding of the industry itself was also deepening. Working closely with event organisers, especially during peak periods like Detty December, exposed Jerugba to the mechanics of the market.
He began studying global players in the ticketing space like Ticketmaster and StubHub, learning how they handled growth, their unique features, how their systems were structured, and how they supported large events. That research shaped Jetron’s direction.
In 2023, Jetron introduced new features, like seat mapping, to give attendees more control over where they would sit at an event, believing it would bring a level of structure that mirrored more mature ticketing systems. Over time, the product expanded to include tools like group tickets, promo codes, and curated guest lists—features designed to reflect how people actually attend events in Nigeria, often in groups or through coordinated access.
Eventually, revenue began to reflect Jetron’s growth and match its costs. According to Jerugba, Jetron processed over ₦60 million ($43,000) in ticket sales in 2023, a figure that jumped to over ₦250 million ($180,000) in 2024.
The company has continued on that trajectory, as revenue projections at least double its previous performance, driven by increased adoption, he said.
To date, Jerugba said Jetron has supported over 2,000 events, from small gatherings to large-scale concerts.
Day 1000: Starting from scratch, again
Jetron has survived early uncertainty and the strain of funding itself, but a new problem was rising: the system it was built on could no longer keep up.
The earlier version of Jetron had been built quickly without speed or large-scale functionality in mind.
According to Jerugba, the platform began to slow down as more features were added, and the existing infrastructure was not designed for the level of scale the company was now aiming for. So, they decided to start again.
“With our previous infrastructure and codebase, we could not really add more features as quickly as we wanted. So we rebuilt everything from scratch,” Jerugba said.
The rebuild took most of 2025 and resulted in a mobile app launch in December, along with new features designed to improve both the organiser and attendee experience. Users could discover events with tools like event calendars and location-based maps that showed what was happening nearby, and organisers could offer promo codes and administrative dashboard controls.
It also introduced a ticket-sharing feature, which allowed users to distribute multiple purchased tickets to other users, and a queueing system for making ticket purchases. The team also expanded slightly during this period, bringing in additional support for product and mobile development.
Still, even with a revamped system, Jerugba was already thinking beyond the current version of Jetron.
“We’re planning on releasing something we call Jetron Fluid,” he said. “What we’ve learned is that a lot of event organisers want their own personal website. So we’re now building APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that event hosts can integrate with. They can render their events on their own website, users can buy tickets directly from their website, but they’re using our infrastructure under the hood.”
He described adoption as one of the most difficult challenges in building a ticketing infrastructure in Nigeria.
“People are used to a very basic ticketing experience, and expanding that mindset takes work. The technology is the easier part; changing behaviour is the real challenge.”
In a market where multiple ticketing platforms are competing for organisers, including Eventbrite and Tix Africa, Jerugba noted that Jetron’s advantage lies in the depth of its tooling, as the company is focused on building more advanced tools for organisers and attendees.
He said the company was beginning to attract interest beyond Nigeria, hinting at partnerships that could bring international acts into the country and expand the scale of events hosted on the platform.
For Jerugba, these were signals that Jetron Ticket could operate at a larger scale, aligning with his earlier vision.
“When I was starting the company, I had my dream: I wanted to be as big as the big dogs out there,” Jerugba said. “I was not aiming for Eventbrite; I was aiming for Ticketmaster.”
