A run does not fail the way one night does. Nothing goes wrong in week three. Something small is slightly wrong every week, and by week forty it has cost more than any single bad night could. Here is what to decide at the start, and what a year does to it.
Two of them cannot be changed later at all, and the third is merely expensive to change once dates are selling. That is unusual. Most decisions about an event can be revisited the next time you run it, and a run has no next time.
This is the decision everything else inherits, and it is the one people get wrong, because both answers look reasonable in week one. The difference only shows up in the work you are still doing in month eight.
A series is one page selling many dates. Separate events are many pages, each complete, grouped for promotion. The test is not how similar the dates look. It is whether they are the same thing.
Avoid: Do not choose separate events because you might want a different price one week. Price changes are easy inside a series. Fifty-two pages you have to edit individually are not.
Pricing a run is not pricing a night. A single event can be priced to sell out, because there is no next one. A run has a next one every week, and a price set for the best date quietly punishes every other date on the schedule.
Set the price against the date you will run most often, not against your best one. Then decide separately what a poor date is worth, because you will have plenty of them.
Avoid: Do not discount a slow date without deciding whether that discount now applies every week. A one-off price cut on a repeating event is not one-off unless someone remembers to put it back.
Capacity on a single event is a limit. Capacity on a run is a target you hit or miss dozens of times, and the gap between them is the number that decides whether the run is worth running at all.
Work out the attendance a date needs to cover what it costs to open, then compare that against the room rather than against your hopes.
Avoid: Do not set capacity from your best date. Every date inherits that number, and a room built for the busiest night looks empty on the other fifty.
Six empty seats on a Tuesday is not a problem anyone stops to fix. Six empty seats every Tuesday is the largest number in the run. Put your own figures in and look at the two panels together.
$108 a date, at $18 a seat. On its own this is not a problem anyone would stop to fix.
$5,184 across 48 dates. Same fact, same room, and now it is the largest single number in the run.
85% full on a typical date, 34 of 40 seats sold.
Worth knowing: Selling one more seat a date is worth $864 across the run. That is nearly always a cheaper thing to fix than finding another date, and it is the fix no one bothers with, because on any given Tuesday it is one seat.
This is multiplication, not a forecast. It uses the seats you say usually go unsold, because no one outside your room knows that number, and there is no industry figure worth quoting at you. Use what you actually see rather than what you hoped for.
None of these can happen to a single event, which is the point. They are the failures of duration, and they are quiet by nature: nothing forces the question until something breaks, and by then it has been true for months.
The page still says the thing it said in January. The instructor changed in March, the start time moved in June, and the parking advice has been wrong since the lot closed.
The fix: Put a standing date in the calendar to read your own event page as a stranger would. Once a quarter is enough, and it takes ten minutes. A series page is the only page on your site that no one has a reason to open.
No one else knows why the cutoff is four hours, why one date has different windows, or what the price was meant to be. The run keeps selling, so nothing forces the question until something breaks.
The fix: Write the decisions down where the event lives rather than in someone's memory: what the price is for, what the capacity assumes, and which dates are deliberately different. A run outlasts the people who built it.
It was forty a night in spring and it is twenty-eight now. No single week dropped enough to alarm anyone, because a bad week always looks like a bad week.
The fix: Compare dates against each other rather than against a feeling, and look at the trend across the run rather than at the last one. A run gives you the one thing a single event never does, which is a baseline.
Costs rose twice and the ticket did not, because there was never a launch to hang a new price on. A single event gets repriced every time it comes back. A run just keeps selling at whatever it was.
The fix: Set a date to revisit the price, and change it on the date rather than on the mood. Buyers of a repeating event accept a price change far more readily than a run that quietly becomes unprofitable accepts staying still.
The schedule ran to December and the room was only held to September. Tickets sold for four dates that were never going to happen.
The fix: Set the end date to the last date you have actually secured, not to the end of your ambition. Extending a run is a small job. Refunding people who bought a night you never had is not.
Someone asks to move to next week, someone wants a refund for a date they missed, someone wants to buy six dates at once. On one event these are rare. Across fifty they are constant.
The fix: Decide the policies once, publish them on the page, and make sure whoever answers messages has them. The volume is not the problem. Answering each one from scratch is.
The decisions stay yours. What a series does is make the cheap things cheap: one price to change, one page to keep accurate, and dates that stop where you told them to.
Set the pattern once and the dates are generated in the event's own time zone, up to the end date you choose.
The run stops where you say it stops, which is what keeps dates from selling past a room you have not booked.
A series is one event, so a price change is one edit rather than fifty.
Spread arrivals across the day, with a limit per window counted separately from ticket type.
The bulk editor puts attendees across the whole run in a single editable grid, rather than one screen per date.
Money deposits into your own Stripe account through Direct Payouts as it clears, rather than waiting for the run to finish.
This guide is about what to decide. These pages are about how each piece works.
How schedules, occurrences and timed windows actually work, and the two decisions you cannot undo.
See how it worksSetting a base price, fees, and what to do when a date is not selling.
Read the pricing guideThe shape of a ticket run, and which channels move tickets for a date that needs help.
Read the selling guideOne page, one price to change, and a schedule that stops where you told it to. Free to start, with no monthly fee, and every date's money deposits into your own account as it clears.