Michael Dodsworth built his expertise in the chaos of high-pressure launches. After seeing Taylor Swift ticket meltdowns and bot-ridden sneaker drops, he founded Fanfare. His platform delivers fair, hype-driven experiences that respect both brands and fans. Today, he helps companies transform launch stress into revenue opportunities and lasting loyalty.
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Beverly Hills Magazine: Hello Michael, I’d love to learn all about your story and what it is that you do. Tell us a little bit about how you ultimately got into what you do and what drew you to product launches and live events.
Michael Dodsworth: I founded Fanfare a few years ago. This came out of complete frustration on my side, both as a customer and as someone who’s worked on the other side of things in a live events ticketing company, and seeing the likes of a Taylor Swift pre-sale going on sale, bringing down Ticketmaster, Oasis tickets go on sale, same thing. We’ve all been in that experience as a customer, as a fan. You see that you have the multiple tabs open. You’re ready at nine o’clock in the morning. You have your coffee. You have your friends on the phone, all doing the same thing. It’s a bad experience.
You sit for hours. You find out the tickets that you queued patiently for have gone to the secondary market and are selling for 10x the price. Bots and bad actors have come in and ruined the day. What we’ve heard over time, so I started in live events and then kept seeing this problem again and again in retail. Kith is a good example, sneaker brands, footwear brands that have this real issue when they launch products of enormous demand, way more scarcity than they have supply, and all of these problems around those launches.
For a small, nascent brand who’s built a large audience, they make or break moments. Fanfare was created to deal with those kind of high-scale events, to remove the bots and bad actors, to make sure people are treated fairly, and to reward your loyal fans. If you have people coming back again and again and again, you should reward them for their time and effort, even if they’re unlucky in that launch. That’s the origin story for me.
Beverly Hills Magazine: That makes perfect sense. I’ve always actually wondered on these major ticket launches, how do they handle that influx of traffic so effectively? But I guess you’re saying sometimes they haven’t, which is where you come in.
Michael Dodsworth: Taylor Swift was the worst one, I think, over the last few years. Ticketmaster crashed. They ended up having questions asked in the Senate and in the House. It’s a bad day when that happens, so these things happen. But we see smaller brands just not able to wrap their arms around these kind of problems. They’re just not set up to deal with 3 million people showing up all at the same time.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Absolutely. We might have to work together for some of our print edition releases in the future. How did you navigate your early years in event tech, and what was your educational background, or are you self-taught?
Michael Dodsworth: Actually, I’m an engineer by training, so a software engineer. My brother brought home a Commodore 64 one day. It’s absolutely dating me for sure. And I was kind of hooked. The idea of building something from nothing, that you could just kind of bootstrap and kind of learn these things and build up over time, that was captivating for me. And then went through university, computer science at university, and then moved down to London for work.
And that’s when I joined my first startup, which was a company called Coral, which fast forward only a few months, we were acquired by Salesforce. And the whole team was scooped up and dropped in San Francisco, which was actually a nice move for the whole team. And I kept working on these really interesting issues of high scale. So Salesforce growing quickly, really interesting issues where you have billions of records and billions of people requests coming in on a daily basis and having to wrestle with those kind of problems. And then finding my way into more consumer tech.
So I worked for a company called Optimizely for a little while. Again, building up these user profiles and really trying to understand who the people are that are coming to your store or coming to your site. And that’s when someone from my past came back and introduced me to Rival. We were just a C-suite and a pitch deck. At that time, I joined as the founding engineer, and we built the service from nothing and built the team from nothing. And that was an amazing experience. But that’s how I found my way into being frustrated from both sides, having to deal with this as a ticketing vendor and seeing all the problems that all of these people have to go through.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Well, they say necessity is the mother of all invention, but sometimes frustration can be too, obviously, in your case. Like, there just needs to be a better solution.
Michael Dodsworth: Yeah. That was always my feeling. It’s like, why is this still like this? There’s absolutely a better way that we can do this. Like, you see the lines around the block waiting for some kind of launch. Like, is there no better way that we can launch a product than having people frustrated?
Beverly Hills Magazine: Well, even though you dated yourself, you still look great. So you’re doing something, right? Whether you’re eating well, exercise, keep doing what you’re doing.
Michael Dodsworth: I can share my regime if that’s helpful. In another chat.
Beverly Hills Magazine: OK, fine. Yeah. So what was the sort of pivotal moment where you actually launched Fanfare and decided, OK, I’m doing my own thing? And how did you come up with the name Fanfare? How was it born?
Michael Dodsworth: That’s an interesting route through Rival, which was the ticketing company I was part of, was scooped up by Ticketmaster, of all people, at the start of the pandemic. So when everything was shutting down, we were being scooped up and spent a few months inside of Ticketmaster and then seeing this problem again and again. So we’d addressed the issue of scale and the issue of bad consumer experiences through these kind of highly hyped moments. And then I kept seeing it all over the place, even in going to the supermarket or going to the mall, these kind of things at the start of the pandemic.
Everything was scarce. And I just kept thinking, why is this still broken? Why hasn’t anyone solved for this problem? And I feel like at that point, I’d built up enough chops. Like I’d been at a couple of startups. I’d been at the large company, the midsize company. And I felt like no one is solving this problem. Like, I should solve this problem. And that was the origin. We’ve definitely gone through a few names of the company. Fanfare is the latest and for sure the greatest.
But the name came out of this idea that these are not just on sale moments. They’re not just queues that you’re joining. These are events. As a brand, you’re creating these moments for your fans. And the idea of fandom, the idea of fairness, even though we are F-A-R-E Fanfare, like that seemed like the perfect name. And these are events that are about creating some kind of fanfare for your brand. And we should be there to help you do that.
Beverly Hills Magazine: I love that. Now, why is it so critical for brands to ensure that their fan experience is top notch? And if it fails, why is it so critical or potentially damaging to the brand’s reputation for potential brand owners that are listening and don’t necessarily understand the importance of this?
Michael Dodsworth: The kind of hazards are on a spectrum. And I think the best case, you launched a product, you’ve managed to create demand and build this audience and create this anticipation around your products. And then it goes live and things start to stumble. People get a little dissatisfied in that process, but maybe they get through and maybe they survive that launch.
We find that brands just don’t know anything about that experience. Like they don’t know who showed up. They know the people who were successful. They don’t know about all the people who failed. And that’s a huge miss. Like you’ve created the scarcity and you’ve built this huge event. You should know who showed up, who spent time, who waited like three hours for their product, but didn’t get it.
It’s fairly common for me to have gone through multiple sneaker drops, tried and failed multiple times and feeling that frustration. You should bring those people into the next drop. You should give them exclusive access because they’re VIPs in the making. You just need to go that extra mile and reach out to those people.
Beverly Hills Magazine: That makes me feel like you’re actually showing the customer and consumer that you care about them. They’re not just a number or just a transaction for you. And that’s also, I believe, what lends to customer retention and loyalty over time. So it’s very important.
Michael Dodsworth: Absolutely. Yeah. And people, when they go through frustrating experiences, there was a survey done, you get maybe four or five chances. And after that, people are gone and they’re gone for good. You have created this anticipation.
If your site falls down just on a normal day, then people are a little frustrated, but they’ll come back. If you fall down in that moment where you’ve created anticipation around, people get really frustrated really fast. And that’s when you get the negative sentiment. You see brands going through, getting raked over the coals on various places when launches don’t go well.
Beverly Hills Magazine: It was a Switch 2 launch a few months ago that didn’t go well for Best Buy, Walmart, large retailers, well-resourced companies. And people just immediately head to X or Instagram and they voice their frustration. Like just reams of Reddit posts where people are just done with whatever retailer it was they tried.
Michael Dodsworth: In today’s day and age, everything is so on demand. So patience, unfortunately, even though I believe patience is the highest virtue and I think the Lord is always testing my patience. But I think people don’t have a lot of patience in today’s day and age. So it’s critical for brands to ensure that the process is as seamless and easy as possible to get the clients what they want.
Beverly Hills Magazine: So what features define Fanfare platform and service?
Michael Dodsworth: We sit in front of that actual checkout process. So we manage everyone through that process. So you’re going into a Fanfare experience and we’re managing all of the traffic. We’re pulling out the bots, the bad actors, and we’re capturing all of that information. I think over time, we can help entertain people and provide them with some more things to do, information that we can provide to them, maybe recommendations for other products.
We can try and help the brand if they have a narrative that they want to get in front of an audience, we can help them with that. We did a proof of concept where we had live streaming enabled for an experience. So we can bring in, so maybe you have an influencer or a celebrity you’re working with and you want to run an exclusive experience just to your subscribers.
We can help you do that. We can have the page that people go to, we can manage people, we can make people go through a process where they log in, but then they can watch a how-to video of the product or they can engage with the community or they can engage with that celebrity or influencer that you have.
Beverly Hills Magazine: I love that idea. You’re giving me new ideas for us, for my publication. We can do like this exclusive behind the scenes interview and access now. Okay, so what makes a queue fair and flexible?
Michael Dodsworth: I think there’s some transparency. There needs to be transparency to this. What are my chances? I think in the 24 hour example, like Disney know way ahead of time whether you’re going to get through the process or not.
Ticketmaster know how long it’s going to be, whether you’re going to get through or not. Those kinds of things they have a good understanding of and everyone has seen that experience. You end up with, you know, there are 50,000 people ahead of me in line.
What does that mean? Should I keep going with this process or should I not? And understanding that part of the experience of being able to self-select and figure out what you want to do in that moment is important. But also the bots and bad actors is a really important factor.
I saw there was an article from OpenAI a few days ago where someone was talking about their experience as an engineer there and they were talking about how they give out swag at OpenAI and it turns out they do internal drops of their swag and people just head to their Shopify store internally to go and grab a t-shirt, whatever it is, for OpenAI and they’ve brought down their site and because they’re engineers they found a way of working around the system so everyone at OpenAI knew how to kind of circumvent and get through the process.
Michael Dodsworth: Yeah, bots and bad actors are a real issue. Brands are finding themselves kind of in a battle with more and more sophisticated bots, people who are using tooling to work around these processes and get through when they shouldn’t. So it’s a real problem for brands. The tooling over the last 12 months means that people can spin these things up and be more sophisticated in the way they attack. So it’s absolutely not something that a small brand should try and get their arms around. We’re here to help. We do this at scale. So please reach out if you have a bot issue for sure.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Perfect. And how can they reach you? Is there a website? Are you on Instagram? What’s the best way to reach you?
Michael Dodsworth: I’m always on LinkedIn. So you can find me there, Michael Dodsworth on LinkedIn. Our site is fanfare.io. We actually have a good set of case studies for brands looking to run this kind of event, what kind of things they should look out for, what sort of things they should plan for. So absolutely head there if you want to learn more about what we do and what we can do to help.
Beverly Hills Magazine: So now how do you measure launch success? Is that number of transactions? Are there prior objectives? How is that qualified?
Michael Dodsworth: I think it goes beyond just did you sell out? I think it’s how do people feel about the brand before and after? You know, that anticipation that you built up, did you satisfy that anticipation? Have you created those fans who are going to keep coming back again and again? And for some brands like streetwear, footwear brands, it’s often actually the resale market that they look to to determine success of a launch. Like is this selling for 2X, 5X what it was before? Is there a lot of anticipation and people trying to pull these things for the next launch that they do? So that kind of thing, are these things creating lasting relationships with the customers or not? It’s not just the bottom line for them.
Beverly Hills Magazine: And some of the most powerful marketing strategies are your word of mouth. And so if your customers are singing your praises, that’s what you want.
Michael Dodsworth: Absolutely, yeah. And we find like more and more, especially with social media, you know, if you can create or be ready for a viral moment when it hits, this is an incredible model. To do a drop and to create scarcity in that moment is a really powerful model to drive lasting revenue and also just loyalty for the brand. And I think a good example is Stanley. From the last few years, they tripled their revenue three years in a row. Like they did incredible things by really chasing after this model and doing it incredibly well.
Beverly Hills Magazine: So now how do you convert that hype into the loyalty? I mean, as you just said, it’s partly or mostly customer experience, but what else?
Michael Dodsworth: I mean, I think you want to make your fans feel special. And that goes beyond discount codes. It’s early access. It’s announcing things to them early. It’s making them feel like they’re part of a community. Those things really move the needle. So that’s what we’re seeing brands doing is more and more, they are using the information that we gather to carve out VIPs and then been able to create an experience just for those people. Like a VIP experience.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Absolutely. Yeah, even if it’s early access, like VIPs, we’re going to show you this on Monday, you get early access because of your loyalty. We’re going to show you these things early and get your feedback. Like those kinds of things are really powerful.
Michael Dodsworth: So now how can brands capture long-term fan data? Because a lot of what you do is data-driven, correct?
Beverly Hills Magazine: It is. So we roll that up over time. So every time someone attends one of these events, that’s a moment that we capture. And then over time, we can say this person, maybe Jacqueline came back five times. She was unlucky five times. For items that would have, she would have spent maybe $2,000, $3,000, but unsuccessful at checkout or for whatever reason, just didn’t get through the process.
Like those people you can reach out to. Or maybe people who’ve been loyal fans with a brand, but they’ve just gone off the radar for a while. Like maybe you want to try and bring them in to an exclusive drop. Maybe you want to give them something that maybe they’ve been craving and bring them back into the brand that way.
Michael Dodsworth: So how do you keep momentum after launch day? Is that part of it? Like is it email campaigns? How do you do it?
Beverly Hills Magazine: We’ve been moving more and more upstream. So thinking about announcements, how often, where, should this be a DM? Should this be something that we like email, SMS? Like people feel fatigue from some of these channels, especially if you do these things frequently. So it’s really a fine balance. And without the data, you can’t make good judgment calls about how often and where.
So that’s another key point of this is, you should be running these things fairly often to keep people’s interest and keep people going, but not so often that you’ll kind of delusion them with announcements and like day after day after day. There are these things that they have to attend. So it’s kind of, you definitely need to understand the data and understand the metrics. And we see that a lot of brands are just kind of flying blind right now.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Yeah, just sending an email, this or that, whenever they sort of feel like it. But when it’s data-driven and informed, it can be far more effective.
Even myself, let’s say I elected to sign up for something and then I start getting emailed every day. No, way too much. So there is sort of a pattern, I think, that effective pattern of communication that works, whatever channel you’re using to stay in touch with your customers. So the data helps to know what works and what doesn’t.
Michael Dodsworth: Absolutely. And knowing where people came into. Like if you posted on Instagram two weeks in advance, knowing that you see people go into the store, they browse around, they come back out. You send her another announcement, they come back in, they browse around. And then when you launch, you get a much higher uplift in the people coming through. That’s valuable information. And I think over time, we want to try and recommend to brands what the structure of these things could be.
Beverly Hills Magazine: So how are you analyzing this data? And like, let’s say a brand starts working with you. You access their Instagram, YouTube website, et cetera, to track this traffic flow?
Michael Dodsworth: It would be announcements that we make through them. So we can help brands create campaigns around these kind of events. And that would mean the email that goes out, the SMS that you send, the Instagram post that you make. And then having ways of saying, this person came in through that campaign that we pushed for you. And then being able to tie all those pieces together to analyze the funnel and seeing where you’re losing people, seeing what’s successful, which channels work, which don’t, what messaging worked, which didn’t. And I think over time, like A/B testing, figuring out which messaging reaches the right people and all of those things is important too.
Beverly Hills Magazine: It makes perfect sense. So what sort of trends inspire Fanfare’s features and progress?
Michael Dodsworth: Absolutely sneaker drops. It was the first port of call. I’m an aspiring sneaker head. I have a wall of, just a wall of shame in my wardrobe. And that was definitely the first place we started, just because we saw all of these smaller brands, maybe five, six people able to bring in 900,000 people to a launch and doing this regularly and just having a loyal fan base of people who keep coming in.
So that was, I think the first place we looked for people who were having these kinds of problems because you can see it. You can see it when you go to Instagram and you can see the negative reactions that people have to these launches. But more and more, we see collectibles, luxury, fashion brands, all having this issue where they have some scarce products, either deliberately or just structurally. And they have these bad consumer experiences. So it’s really the same problem, just again and again in all kinds of different industries.
Beverly Hills Magazine: You really have to master it. You just might be my new best friend, Michael.
Michael Dodsworth: Absolutely, absolutely.
Beverly Hills Magazine: So how will AI shape the future drops and product launches and events?
Michael Dodsworth: I think one of the interesting things that we’re exploring is being able to have a more conversational way of finding out information that we’ve captured. So the standard way is you head to your metrics dashboard, you see a report. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just ask, like, who are my top 10 customers this month? Or who should I reach out to? Like, just in plain text and just in kind of conversational language. So that’s one area that we found incredible use for AI tools right now. As a past engineer, we’ve been sped up massively, especially in the last couple of months by these tools.
But it also means that people who are creating the bots to go after some of these brands have also got access to these tools. We’re seeing more and more sophisticated ways that people are getting through and interesting things that they’re doing to try and circumvent whatever security mechanisms you have in place. So it’s making a huge difference to me as a founder. I would have loved to have started this with all the tooling that’s available right now. It makes me feel like I can run at any problem because I have something there that can provide, even if it’s a foundational amount of knowledge and information, it’s so valuable, I find.
Beverly Hills Magazine: It’s incredible. The resources available to us now, even myself, it just has increased efficiency and productivity exponentially. Now, how do you prepare for the unexpected if there is such a thing preparing for the unexpected? But how do you?
Michael Dodsworth: I think choosing a vendor that is set up to deal with these kinds of events is the first place I would try. But I think understanding that when you create these kinds of events, they can unexpectedly go viral. There was a soap brand, Dr. Squatch, here in LA that did a drop of soap that was infused with Sidney Sweeney’s bathwater. And a really interesting drop. It brought down their site, ended up the soap started to sell on eBay in the UK for 2,000 pounds, I think I saw.
So just be aware, you know, you can be wildly successful with one of these launches. You can find yourself on the tail end of two million people showing up all at once. So you really have to think, you have to be careful and really thoughtful about how you structure these things, what you have ready in that moment, and almost be ready if you don’t use a vendor like Fanfare to mitigate some of the bad outcomes that we see. We see, sometimes it takes weeks, months to try and resolve some of these issues around these launches, where people try and claw back things that went to bots and went to bad actors and try and get them in the hands of real people. And it’s painful for those brands.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Well, and also not to forget the profit loss, you know, so it sounds actually like a good preparation to prepare to go viral. So, you know, increase your server resources, et cetera. Michael, this interview has been an eye-opening exploration into the world of high-stakes product launches and fan experiences. We are inspired to consider how Fanfare’s innovative solutions could enhance our own exclusive releases, ensuring seamless experiences for our readers and fostering lasting loyalty.
Michael Dodsworth: It’s been a pleasure sharing Fanfare’s mission to transform chaotic product launches into fair, engaging, and data-driven experiences. I’m excited to continue helping brands create memorable moments for their fans while tackling the challenges of bots, scalability, and consumer trust.
Michael Dodsworth proves that launch excellence builds brand legacy. Through Fanfare, he turns hype into meaningful connection. His approach combines smart automation, human insight, and strategic storytelling. As he reimagines experiential commerce, he sets a new standard for digital launches—one where every drop delivers excitement, fairness, and trust.