Squad Up – From Legacy Bloat to Modern Velocity: SquadUP’s Path to Frontend Revival

Introduction

Rebuilding Without Starting Over: The SquadUP Reinvention

SquadUP isn’t new to the event tech space. With years of experience powering ticketing for events of all sizes, SquadUP had already built a name for itself. But the platform was ready for a transformation. Years of growth had left its frontend brittle and its UX stuck in a different era. A reinvention was due — one that didn’t compromise the backend maturity but reimagined the user interface and developer experience from the ground up.

This is the story of how SquadUP partnered with Nolte to rebuild its interface, re-energize its product, and modernize the experience for a new generation of event organizers and attendees.

SquadUP began with a simple yet powerful insight: event organizers—especially those in the entertainment and live experiences industries—deserve software that moves as quickly as they do. Sam Mogil, Co-founder of SquadUP, saw the company as more than just a white-label ticketing platform. He envisioned a scalable, intuitive system that empowered users with complete control over their events, branding, data, and monetization.

But by early 2025, SquadUP’s frontend stack was showing its age. Technical debt had accumulated, design consistency was slipping, and iteration had become slow and costly. The backend team had done heroic work modernizing APIs and systems under the hood—but the frontend needed the same energy and clarity.

That’s when Sam brought in Nolte.

SquadUP began with a simple yet powerful insight: event organizers—especially those in the entertainment and live experiences industries—deserve software that moves as quickly as they do. Sam Mogil, Co-founder of SquadUP, saw the company as more than just a white-label ticketing platform. He envisioned a scalable, intuitive system that empowered users with complete control over their events, branding, data, and monetization.

But by early 2025, SquadUP’s frontend stack was showing its age. Technical debt had accumulated, design consistency was slipping, and iteration had become slow and costly. The backend team had done heroic work modernizing APIs and systems under the hood—but the frontend needed the same energy and clarity.

That’s when Sam brought in Nolte.

Project Overview

Expertise

Product Management

Design Modernization

Responsive Web Architecture

Quality Assurance

Platforms

Responsive Web

About

Private Equity

Event Tech

The Nolte Way

Every project at Nolte begins with alignment — not just on goals, but on risks, architecture, and long-term sustainability. With SquadUP, the mission was clear: modernize the platform’s frontend, elevate the user experience, and do it without compromising the battle-tested backend that powered thousands of events. To ensure success, we led with strategy, not assumptions.

Our engagement began with a Strategy & Planning phase where we aligned design direction, scoped technical feasibility, mapped a pragmatic timeline, and set up the tech stack and monitoring tools. This upfront investment allowed us to confidently build on top of a legacy system, minimizing future rework while maximizing delivery confidence.

Following validation, we shifted into rapid, structured execution. In just four months, we delivered a fully redesigned responsive dashboard. Each week, we shared business rules, clickable prototypes, and async updates—while keeping communication tight through weekly syncs. The result was a high-trust collaboration model that kept momentum high and surprises low.

The Vision

A Platform Ready for Growth, Held Back by Its Own UI

By early 2025, SquadUP had a paradox on its hands: the platform was powering some of the world’s most dynamic events, yet its own frontend was stuck in the past. The product looked and felt like yesterday—while its users were demanding tomorrow.

For Co-founder Sam Mogil, this wasn’t a cosmetic issue. Inconsistent layouts, clunky workflows, and a lack of reusable components weren’t just frustrating users—they were slowing the business down. Release cycles became fragile, innovation stalled, and even small improvements carried heavy design debt.

The real challenge was bigger than a redesign. SquadUP needed a platform that could match its ambitions: modern, resilient, and ready to scale with the next generation of event organizers.

Streamlining Event Management for the Modern Organizer

Strategy: 1 Month

Strategy & Planning: Building the Blueprint for Change

Every transformation needs a solid foundation. In March 2025, Nolte partnered with SquadUP to reimagine not just the look of the platform, but the way it was built. We launched a Strategy & Plan phase designed to map the future: aligning product goals, validating technical feasibility, and laying down the infrastructure that would make fast, confident execution possible.

01

Research

Week 1 – 2

Strategy Workshops
Competitive Analysis
User Journey Analysis 
Technology Research

02

Define

Week 3 – 4

Customer Profile
Tech Architecture
Design Direction
Product Roadmap

Goal

To ensure SquadUP’s modernization was future-proof: a responsive frontend, a scalable architecture, and a clear execution path that didn’t disrupt the stability of its proven backend.


Pains and Needs

SquadUP’s growth had created a strong platform, but the cracks in its frontend were becoming impossible to ignore. Users faced inconsistent interfaces across roles and views, leaving the experience fragmented and confusing. Release cycles were fragile, slowed down by manual testing that made every update feel risky. Without reusable components, design debt piled up, turning even small changes into heavy lifts. And beneath it all, the platform lacked the modern foundations, like scalable authentication and flexible event creation, that were essential to unlock future innovation.

Solutions

Breaking the Bottlenecks
To overcome the blockers, Nolte and SquadUP rebuilt the foundation of the frontend with scalability in mind. We introduced a modern component library powered by shadcn, ensuring design consistency and accelerating future development. Automated testing and monitoring replaced manual, fragile release cycles, giving the team confidence to ship faster. A reusable design system reduced debt and complexity, while improvements to authentication and event creation set the stage for more powerful, flexible experiences. The result was not just a facelift, but a frontend built to evolve.

Reading the Market, Listening to Users

Before a single line of code was written, Nolte and SquadUP set out to understand the landscape. We benchmarked industry leaders like Eventbrite, Tixr, and TicketSpice, identifying where they excelled and where SquadUP could stand apart. This wasn’t just about features — it was about uncovering market territories such as empowerment, ownership, and innovation, and defining where SquadUP would compete. Alongside this, we mapped user roles and journeys, capturing the needs of organizers who demand control, scalability, and efficiency. The outcome was a clear, evidence-based foundation to guide design and development.

From Fragmented Screens to a Unified System

SquadUP’s old design was a patchwork of screens built over years of growth. Nolte’s Design Direction transformed this into a cohesive system. Inspired by competitive analysis and powered by modern frameworks like Tailwind and shadcn, we introduced reusable components that made the platform consistent, scalable, and visually modern. The goal wasn’t rebranding — it was modernization: creating an interface that felt intuitive to users while empowering SquadUP to move faster, release with confidence, and evolve without debt.

Consist

Scalabe

Clear

Efficient

We set out to modernize without losing strength, creating a design language that matched SquadUP’s ambitions for the next decade of event tech.

The Co-founder Is a Designer — and That Changed Everything

Sam Mogil, SquadUP’s Co-founder, brought a background not just in product strategy, but in design itself. That made our collaboration deeper, sharper, and faster from the very start. From the first kickoff meeting, the tone was set: this wouldn’t be a typical redesign. This would be a ground-up reinvention.


Instead of generic wireframes and uninspired rebuilds, Sam and Nolte’s Design Lead, Dan Urruela, engaged in a continuous feedback loop. Their collaboration led to a design process that wasn’t about painting the old house — it was about re-architecting the floor plan for performance and flow.


We weren’t just changing colors. We were fixing behavior.


Each design component was carefully addressed to optimize conversion, usability, and readability. Hover states were refined, component hierarchy was clarified, and the entire interface was stripped of friction. The result? A fresh, fast, and user-friendly experience.

Pillars

When Pillars Align, Transformation Happens

At Nolte, our pillars are more than capabilities — they are the drivers of transformation. Strategic Foresight ensures every project begins with clarity and ambition. Design Modernization transforms complexity into elegant, intuitive systems. And Engineering Excellence turns vision into scalable, resilient technology.

At SquadUP, the pillars were equally powerful: Reliability, honed over years of powering events; Scalability, proven in handling growth without compromise; and Domain Mastery, built from deep experience in event technology.

On their own, each set of pillars stood strong. Together, they unlocked a reinvention. By pairing Nolte’s foresight, creativity, and precision with SquadUP’s proven foundation, we didn’t just refresh a platform — we built the next era of event tech.

Tech Architecture/Stack

Core Technology Stack

To deliver a scalable and future-ready platform, we rebuilt SquadUP’s frontend with a modern web architecture. Using Next.js and TypeScript as the foundation, we combined Tailwind and shadcn to establish a reusable, consistent design system. For reliability and performance, we integrated Playwright for automated testing and Sentry for monitoring. This stack ensured not only a refreshed interface, but a frontend built for speed, confidence, and long-term scalability

Next JS

Web Framework

Playwright

Testing Framework

Tailwind + shadcn

UI Framework

TypeScript

Programming Language

Sentry + MixPanel

Monitoring & Analytics Platform

Launch: 4 months

From Plan to Execution: April, May & June Delivery Phases

With designs leading the charge, engineering needed to follow suit — but also guide the path. The SquadUP x Nolte partnership operated like a finely-tuned relay team. Nolte focused entirely on frontend engineering: modernizing the tech stack, rethinking architecture, and introducing clear development workflows. SquadUP kept backend development in-house, ensuring business logic continuity.

Between April and June, Nolte moved from planning to execution, embedding a dedicated frontend squad inside SquadUP to modernize its most critical workflows. The focus was not on introducing new features, but on rebuilding and strengthening what already existed. The main dashboard and transactions module were restructured for clarity and performance. Core flows like check-in, sub-admin management, and reserve seating were re-architected for reliability.

Even complex processes—such as gift cards, bundles, cashout, and reporting—were rebuilt with reusability and test coverage at their core.

Close collaboration with SquadUP’s internal engineering team ensured that every release was production-ready. Together, we validated staging deployments across Cloudflare and Next.js, prepared the path for RodAuth migration with cross-domain session handling, and integrated PostHog and Sentry for full visibility into system and user behavior.

We migrated to a modular architecture that reduced interdependencies, added new environments for seamless testing and releases, and established CI/CD workflows to reduce deployment risk.

Evolve: 1 month

Paving the Future: What July and Beyond Unlocks

With the new foundation in place, the focus shifted from transformation to momentum. Multi-event creation and recurring event logic unlocked powerful new workflows for organizers, while UI refinements delivered polish informed by real-world client feedback. Security took a leap forward with the full rollout of RodAuth, bringing modern authentication that matched enterprise standards.

To ensure reliability at scale, Nolte and SquadUP implemented robust internal testing frameworks and fallback strategies for even the most complex user journeys. The result: SquadUP’s product team now operates on a modern, stable base, capable of iterating weekly and delivering features with confidence and speed. What began as a reinvention has become a launchpad for continuous innovation.

Team members and their role on the project.

Nolte Team

Yanna Lopes

Head of Products

Paulo Justiniano

Product Manager

Daniel Urruela

Sr. Product Designer

Italo Lino

 Lead Software Engineer

Arthur Takeda

Sr. Software Engineer

SquadUp Team

Samuel Mogil

Samuel Mogil