The Demand
Operating System

List size × 5% email conversion = orders. Orders × 3 tickets avg = presale tickets sold. That number as a % of capacity is your launch momentum score — the single best predictor of final sellout.

To fully absorb Tranche 1 (210 seats) through presale alone you need 1,400 registrations. At 1,200 you enter GTM with roughly half the house sold and manageable work ahead.

Still viable, but GTM and the 72-hour window carry more weight. Paid acquisition has to work harder to close the remaining 57%.

They subsidize demand with paid acquisition at full cost instead of converting warm buyers first. CAC goes up. Urgency goes down. And they never build the returning visitor base that converts at 2.5× — because they never captured them to begin with.

Tranche 1 is the reward for registering early — lowest price, real scarcity, and it closes whether it sells through or not. Tranche 2 opens at a higher price point and to a broader audience: email subscribers, social followers, or a partner list. The 72-hour hold releases at face value or above when urgency is highest. The reserve never goes on public sale. Each step up in price is validated by the demand signal from the step before it.

Never release the 72-hour hold early. The temptation is strong when pacing feels soft mid-cycle — but releasing inventory into weak demand trains buyers to wait for availability instead of acting on scarcity. The hold only has power if it's actually held. Protect it like a tool, not a buffer.

Every buyer who misses Tranche 1 has a concrete reason to register earlier for the next show. Over time the list builds itself — and the quality of the list improves because the people on it have already demonstrated intent. That's the asset compounding.

Don't release more inventory. Diagnose first. Is it a list quality problem, a pricing problem, or a messaging problem? The answer changes the intervention. Releasing inventory into weak demand trains buyers to wait.

A quiet link dropped to a tight inner circle before the official presale. No announcement. No paid push. It seeds early transactions that show up as social proof when the real presale opens — and tells you at near-zero cost whether the price point is right before you commit.

The velocity model sets a daily ticket target based on remaining inventory and days to show. At 80%+ of that target each day, you're on a trajectory to enter the 72-hour window with the late-hold inventory intact and urgency working in your favor.

In order of preference: refresh the messaging before changing the offer, then activate local partnerships and organic channels before touching paid, then adjust paid targeting before adjusting price or releasing inventory. Releasing inventory into soft demand is always the last resort — it signals availability where you want to signal scarcity.

It's long enough for three distinct touchpoints — email, paid retargeting, and a final direct push — but short enough that each one carries genuine urgency. 48 hours compresses the sequence. 96 hours dilutes it. 72 is the window where "limited availability" is believable and "act now" has teeth.

The 70-seat late hold is the fuel. Releasing it at this moment — when scarcity is visible and the show is imminent — is what creates the conversion spike. It only works because the inventory was protected through the sustain phase.

Recap closes within 7 days of show. Every report produces at least three insights that change something specific in the next cycle — list build strategy, tranche pricing, channel mix, urgency timing, or in-venue experience. If the insight doesn't change a behavior, it's an observation, not a finding.

Recap doesn't hand off to a separate planning process — it feeds directly into the Announce stage of the next show. The Segment Leader who opens the next cycle starts with a brief from Analytics that answers: what worked, what didn't, what the list target should be, and what the pricing ladder should look like based on last cycle's demand signal.

This is where the system becomes a genuine competitive advantage. Atlanta doesn't launch cold — it inherits every learning from LA and Dallas. Detroit inherits Atlanta's. Cleveland inherits Detroit's. Each market benefits from a richer playbook than the one before it. By the time Cleveland opens, Cosm will have run this system across four markets and dozens of show cycles. That institutional knowledge is not replicable quickly by a competitor starting from scratch.