Buying tickets for a show can be stressful.
Sure, it sounds like a mundane detail of an otherwise privileged Western life, but that doesn't mean the process has to be so horrible. Think about the last time you bought tickets to an event. Chances are, you weren’t intimately acquainted with the venue and had a hard time picking seats. And, once you did find tickets, you got sticker shock. New York-based TickPick is changing all that, putting the knowledge and power back into the hands of the consumer.
TickPick runs a platform where people can buy, sell and bid on tickets. The entire thing is backed up by a 110 percent guarantee and with a zero percent buyers fee.
“We want to give people who are buying tickets a lot of power,” Brett Goldberg, co-founder at CEO, said. “But, at the same time, we want to keep the whole process simple.”
Let’s say you want to see Bob Dylan — or maybe, if you're that sort of person, Justin Bieber — next time he plays at Madison Square Garden. You can hop on a site like StubHub and buy whatever’s available and pay a 10 percent fee. Or, you can get on TickPick and let sellers know what you’re willing to pay for a seat. If someone has extra seats they’re willing to sell you for that price, the deal is on.
The system seems to be a huge hit, both for buyers and sellers.
“It’s amazing the amount of $10,000 and $20,000 tickets we see being bought with Apple Pay on our app,” Goldberg said.
And, it's not just wildly expensive Cubs tickets being sold on the site. In 2012, the company's first full year, TickPick sold $600,000 in tickets. By 2013 that grew to $5 million and this year, they’re on pace to reach $50 million in ticket sales.
Like most good things that came out of 2006, TickPick owes a good deal to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
“I found myself with a couple of extra seats to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” Goldberg said. “So, I put them up on StubHub and ended up going to the show for free.”
Like any sensible person, Goldberg kept coming back for more.
“After that, I did the same thing four or five times during my senior year,” Goldberg said. “I thought, wow, this is a really inefficient market, why does this exist like this?”
It turns out that creating a two-way market for tickets isn’t easy. Not every seat in a venue is valued the same. You can’t for example, expect someone to pay the same amount for front row center seats as nosebleed seats in the back row with a pillar blocking the view of the stage.
“But, we really wanted to build out a bidding platform, to make a two-sided marketplace,” Goldberg said.
TickPick created algorithms that allow people to set a price they’re willing to pay for the best or worst seats in any section. If you’re willing and able to pay top-dollar to be covered in Bieber sweat, someone on the site will happily sell you the privilege. If you just want in the door at bottom-dollar, someone with an extra ticket that would have otherwise gone to waste can recoup their loses.
“We built the platform for ourselves,” Goldberg said. “We asked, is this something we’d use?”
That passion has led the company to operate on an incredibly lean team. Despite their exponential sales growth, TickPick is operated by just 14 employees and has never done a venture round.
“Virtually every person we hire does customer support,” Goldberg said. “Of course, then they all have other responsibilities as well. That’s how we’re able to be so lean. Everyone contributes to customer support.”
Image via TickPick
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