Butterfly Brawl — sold out in 11 days, run by 3 people.

The Butterfly Brawl is an amateur boxing card hosted live on the Santa Monica Pier. The first edition put 14 fights on a public pier in front of a paying crowd in just under three months from first phone call. This is how Fightbook helped run it.

The problem

Independent shows live and die on three things: getting fighters who actually weigh in, selling enough tickets to break even, and looking professional enough that sponsors want their logo on the canvas. Most promoters run all three with a spreadsheet and group texts. The Butterfly Brawl team wanted a single system instead.

What we did

Fightbook handled the entire fight-side workflow: posting open matchups on the public marketplace, collecting applications, vetting fighter records, locking in opponents, and producing weigh-in sheets. The ticketing flow ran on the same backend as the matchups feed, so the moment a fight was confirmed it showed up on the public event page. Sponsorship inquiries came in through the same inbox.

The result

The card sold out 11 days after going live. Two of the four headline sponsor tiers were claimed within 72 hours. The three-person ops team never had to look at a spreadsheet to reconcile the night-of fight order; everything was already in the system.

“We'd normally need a week of frantic phone calls just to lock the card. Fightbook made it feel like running the show was the hard part — and the show is supposed to be the fun part.”