Free guide ✦ The Bombyhead getting-started manual

Run your first pageant.

A practical walkthrough for new directors — and a checkpoint for directors who've signed up before, gotten stuck, and put it down. Each chapter is one decision. Skip the chapters that don't apply to you. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes.

Prefer to watch first? See the whole setup in a three-minute video.

Chapters, signup to live

20min

Realistic setup time

What it costs to start

✦ Before you start · How Bombyhead fits together

A map of the system.

Bombyhead is one platform with several connected parts. You'll touch most of them; the optional ones you can skip. Here's the whole map in one breath, so you have a place to stand before the chapters get tactical.

Dashboard. Your control panel — every pageant you've created, every action you can take, lives here.
Registration page. The public page contestants land on when they sign up. Built automatically the moment you create a pageant — there's nothing extra to set up.
Pageant website (optional). A separate, polished marketing page for the pageant if you want one. Most directors don't bother — the registration page is plenty for a first season.
People's Choice voting (optional but recommended). Built-in fundraising. The only revenue stream Bombyhead earns from — and the one that pays for venue, sashes, and prizes for many directors. See Chapter 06.
Scoring system. Where judges score on pageant night, on their own phone, tablet or laptop. Tabulation is automatic. Documented in the scoring setup & testing guide — set this up the same week you open registration. Every score is logged and every later change is flagged — see how the score audit works.
Scoresheets. The morning after the show, click one button and every contestant gets her individual scoresheet emailed — judges' scores, written feedback, category breakdown. (Send the next morning, never crowning night — see the scoring guide for why.)

Chapter01

Create your account.

Go to bombyhead.com and click Start free. You'll be asked to pick an account type:

Director — you run pageants. Pick this if you're setting up a pageant for contestants to enter.
Contestant — you compete in pageants. Don't pick this if you're a director. The contestant view hides the pageant-creation tools.
Both — you run pageants and sometimes compete. Most directors pick this.

The hard rule: if you intend to run a pageant, pick Director or Both. Contestant alone won't show you the dashboard tools you need, and the most common reason directors say "I can't figure it out" is that they signed up as a contestant.

Pro tip: picking Both doesn't hide anything or limit you. It just means the dashboard shows both your director side and your contestant side. You can always switch later from your profile settings.

Chapter02

Create your pageant.

Stripe is the boring part, and we'll get there in Chapter 05. First, build something. From the dashboard, click New Pageant. You'll land in the contest editor — that's where the actual work happens. There are a lot of fields, but only a few are required to get something on screen. Fill these:

Name. The full name of your pageant — what contestants will see. "Miss Larkspur Valley 2026", not "my pageant 2026 v3".
Date. The day of the show.
Deadline. The last day a contestant can register. Best practice is at least 30 days before the show; the dempsi research says 60+ days drives the strongest revenue.
State. Where you operate. Helps contestants find you.
Description. A paragraph about what makes your pageant your pageant. Don't write a constitution — write the way you'd describe it to a friend.

Skip everything else for now. You can always come back and add prizes, sponsors, and so on. The editor saves automatically as you type.

Pro tip: the editor auto-saves. There is no Save button. If you walk away and come back, your work is there. "I lost my work" is almost never possible.

Chapter03

Set up your divisions.

A division is a class of contestant — typically by age. Most pageants have between three and seven divisions. Common ones:

Petite Miss — ages 0–5
Tiny Miss — ages 6–8
Little Miss — ages 9–11
Junior Miss — ages 12–14
Teen Miss — ages 15–17
Miss — ages 18–24
Mrs. — married, no upper age limit

For each division, set the name, age range, and entry fee. The age range tells Bombyhead which divisions a given contestant qualifies for — when she registers, she'll only see the ones that match her age.

The hard rule: get divisions right before you share the link. If contestants have already registered, changing a division (especially the age range) can move them or invalidate their entry. Easier to think it through once.

Pro tip: if you're not sure how to split divisions, look at last year's roster. Group ages where you had at least three contestants. If you only had one or two contestants of a given age, fold them into a neighbor division.

Chapter04

Set up your categories.

This is the chapter that confuses everyone, because the word category means several different things in pageantry. In Bombyhead, a category is anything a contestant signs up for, pays for, or gets judged on. Each category has a type that tells Bombyhead how to handle it:

Paid — contestants pay extra to enter (e.g., Photogenic, Optional Talent). Bombyhead collects the fee.
Free — included with the entry fee, scored. (Beauty, Interview, etc. — the core competition categories.)
Voting — People's Choice voting. See Chapter 06.
Individual — non-judged optional add-ons (program ads, photo-op tickets).
Group — judged across divisions (e.g., a "Best Smile" award open to all ages).
Not judged — the contestant's required attendance items: rehearsal, orientation, etc.

Most pageants need three to five categories. Don't over-engineer — you can add more later.

Pro tip: a clean minimum: one Free category for Interview, one for Beauty/Evening Wear, one optional Paid for Photogenic, and one Voting for People's Choice. That covers 80% of pageants and takes ten minutes.

Chapter05

Connect Stripe. Now finish the job.

You've named your pageant. You've set up divisions and categories. You can see the shape of what you're building. Now make it real.

Stripe is how entry fees and People's Choice voting actually reach your bank account. Without it, the pageant exists but can't take a single payment — which means everything you just set up is decoration. This is the boring part. We're going to push you through it because it's the only thing left between the work you've already done and a live pageant that earns money.

Click the Connect Stripe link from your dashboard. (See stripeConnect.html for the full motivation.) Stripe will ask you for:

Your name, address, date of birth, and last four of your SSN. Required by U.S. tax law. Stripe uses this; nobody else sees it.
Bank routing and account number. Where Stripe deposits your money. Have your checkbook or your banking app open.
A photo or scan of your driver's license, if asked. Standard identity verification.
A business website or social page. If you don't have one, your Bombyhead pageant URL or your pageant's Facebook page is fine.

Don't quit mid-form. You've already done the interesting work — divisions, categories, the pageant name and date. Stripe is the last thing standing between that work and a working pageant. The directors who push through never look back. The directors who give up at this step lose the rest of the season.

Pro tip: Stripe takes about ten minutes if you have your bank info handy. If you don't, save your progress and come back. Stripe remembers where you left off — clicking Return to Stripe on the Bombyhead Stripe page picks you up from there.

Chapter06

Turn on People's Choice. Don't skip this one.

Add a category, set its type to Voting, and you've enabled People's Choice fundraising. If you skip this chapter, you are leaving real money on the table.

People's Choice is the only built-in revenue stream on Bombyhead. It's the thing that pays for venue, sashes, crowns, prizes, photographer fees — the production costs that otherwise come out of the director's pocket. Every season we watch directors run pageants without People's Choice and then complain on Facebook about being out two thousand dollars on the show. The two are connected.

It's two clicks to enable. Set up a voting category. Bombyhead handles the leaderboard, the payment processing, the upsell prompts, and the rank-change text alerts that drive repeat votes. You don't have to think about it after setup.

Two pieces of advice from the data:

Don't name it "People's Choice." Distinctive names ("Queen of Hearts", "Fan Favorite", "Community Crown") drive significantly more revenue than the generic name.
Open voting the day registration opens. The longer voting runs, the more revenue compounds. 60+ days is the sweet spot.

For the full playbook — including a chapter on honoring the title that voters paid for — read the People's Choice best-practices guide. Twenty minutes of reading; pays for itself the first weekend.

The hard rule: Bombyhead earns 25% of People's Choice voting fees. You keep 75%. We earn only when you do. If you skip People's Choice, neither of us earns — and you're funding venue and prizes from your own bank account when you didn't have to.

Chapter07

Share the link.

There's no publish step. Your pageant is live, and its registration page is open, the moment you create it. Copy the link from your dashboard; it looks like bombyhead.com/contest.php?contestid=cN. That's the URL contestants register through, so finish the chapters above before you start sharing it.

Five places to put the link:

Direct messages and texts to five-to-ten specific people. The first ten registrations are almost always personal. Skip the public Facebook post until you've hit ten.
Your pageant's Facebook page. Pin a post with the link.
Your Instagram bio. One link slot — make it the registration page.
Sponsor and partner pages. Local businesses with social followings can share the link to their own followers.
An email to past contestants and their families. Past contestants are the cheapest source of new contestants. They already know you.

Pro tip: if your numbers were low last year, the cheapest fix is the part contestants see first. A Bombyhead registration page reads as a real production. Don't undersell that — share it widely.

The next thing to set up is scoring — this week, not pageant week. See the scoring setup & testing guide. Setting it up now surfaces any gap between your scoring rules and Bombyhead with weeks of runway, instead of two hours of panic on crowning night.

Chapter08

After you share, follow the plan.

Setup is the easy part. What separates a full pageant from a thin one is what you do in the weeks after the link goes out, and most first-time directors don't know what that is. So your dashboard shows it: every pageant gets a Pageant Plan, a countdown from now to the week after the crowning, with the one thing to do next at the top.

Get ready. A checklist of what families see before they register: name, date, deadline, divisions, fees, payments, description and a logo. Finish it before you share.
Fill the field. Invite last year's families, post a “Registration is open” graphic, switch on Monday reminders, line up judges, then post your division counts and follow up with families who looked but haven't registered.
The final two weeks. Chase what's missing, set up scoring, assign numbers, print bios.
Pageant day and after. Judges' links, titles, scoresheets, the family survey, a recap for your sponsors, and duplicating it for next year.

Each step says why it matters and opens the tool that does it. Many tick themselves off when Bombyhead can see they're done. Find it on your dashboard, or under Registration → Pageant Plan on your pageant's menu.

Don't panic at a slow start. On a typical Bombyhead pageant, nine out of ten entries arrive in the 40 days before the pageant. A quiet first month is normal; the plan tells you what to do with it.

Chapter09

If you're stuck.

Bombyhead is free because it's self-serve. The guides are the support — this one for setup, the scoring setup guide for judging, the People's Choice guide for fundraising, the contracts guide for year-of-reign agreements, and what to charge for entry if you are still setting your fee. Most "I can't figure it out" answers live in those four documents. Read the relevant one before anything else.

If you've read the right guide and you're still stuck, email support@bombyhead.com. Our support is intentionally light: we fix genuine bugs and answer quick, specific questions — the guides are the step-by-step. A real person reads every email and replies within one business day. Support runs Monday through Friday; we don't monitor email on weekends or holidays, so a question sent over the weekend gets a Monday reply. Tell us:

Which screen, button, or sentence stopped you. Specific is faster — "I clicked New Pageant and didn't know what to put for State" is something we can answer in one paragraph; "the dashboard is confusing" takes a back-and-forth.
What you expected to happen vs. what actually did. The gap is usually where the guide has a hole.
What you've tried so far. So we don't suggest something you've already done.

What we don't do: live calls, screen-share walkthroughs, one-on-one "walk me through my setup" sessions, or "set the pageant up for me" / "make the change for me" requests. Free software at Bombyhead's scale works because it's self-serve. Every clear email we get becomes a paragraph in the guide so the next director can self-serve through the same question.

Don't quietly give up. The directors who email us when they're stuck almost always have a working pageant within a day. The directors who silently abandon Bombyhead are the ones we can't help — and we'd rather hear what was confusing than lose you. One email is enough.

The bottom line