Event dashboard cleanup and lifecycle tool

The moment it breaks is when an event admin opens their dashboard six months in and sees forty items — live events, archived events, test runs from panelist rehearsals, draft events that were never published, events that can't be deleted — and has no way to tell what's active, what's safe to remove, or what's a mistake sitting there in perpetuity.

This gap persists for a structural reason: ticketing platforms archive instead of delete because they need to protect transaction records for refund disputes and audit trails. That's a legal and financial necessity for them. But the side effect — that test events, draft events, and cancelled events pile up with no way to remove or organize them — falls entirely on the admin. The vendor has every reason not to expose a delete button because it creates liability. So the admin pays the organizational cost of a decision made for the vendor's protection.

The specific complaints here are pointed: 'past events cannot be deleted only archived, so test versions run with panelists will exist forever,' 'the inability to delete draft events or sort or categorize them makes the dashboard crowded,' and 'I could not find a way to cancel an event I made by mistake.' These aren't edge cases — they're what happens when any real team uses these tools over time. The dashboard becomes a graveyard.

This is a business because every organization accumulates this problem over time and has no path to fixing it within the tools they already use. The cost is real: new team members can't tell what's live, reporting pulls in junk data from test events, and audit prep becomes a manual archaeology project. A tool that maintains a clean, annotated view of an organization's event history — with soft-delete, tagging, lifecycle state management, and clean export — solves a problem that gets worse every month and never gets fixed by the incumbent.

What to build

Build a read-write layer on top of major event platform APIs that gives admins a unified event list with lifecycle states (draft, live, test, archived, cancelled), lets them tag and filter events, soft-delete items from their working view, and export a clean event history to CSV with configurable fields.

Where to start

Target university event offices that run dozens of small internal events alongside major public ones — they have the dashboard clutter problem acutely, often have a dedicated ops person who owns it, and are willing to pay for admin tooling from a departmental budget without a lengthy procurement cycle.

The hard part

The core value — the ability to delete or hide events — depends on API permissions that most platforms deliberately restrict, so you may end up building a cosmetic layer that hides items in your UI but can't actually remove them from the source platform, which frustrates power users who know the difference.

How it makes money

Flat monthly fee per organization based on number of connected event accounts, starting around $49/month — simple enough that a department coordinator can expense it without approval.