How 3 Friends Bootstrapped Goldstar Into A $5+ Mil Per Year Discount Ticket Site – With Jim McCarthy
The first year after Goldstar launched, Jim McCarthy had to work on side projects. He worked in the dotcom bubble days and saw firsthand how companies with lots of funding but little business sense flamed out painfully. He and his 2 friends were going to build a real business that offered discounted tickets to live events, without letting investors determine their fate.
To make up for lack of funds, they used entrepreneurial ingenuity. Like in the early days, when their site only listed 5 events, they decided to categorize their listings based on occasion (like “date”) and give users 5 event options for each occasion. Or when they needed to get more users to their site, they figured out that they could get companies to tell all their employees about Goldstar if they created a co-branded version of their site for each company.
Listen to the interview to hear how that kind of hustle and hard work led Goldstar to sell over $25 million in tickets and earn over $5 million in sales last year. You’ll also hear what Jim did before Goldstar and how he and his partners met.
Jim McCarthy is the Co-Founder of Goldstar, the company whose mission is to make it easy for people to go out more by providing fun ideas, half-price tickets, member reviews and everything needed for great nights out. Before launching Goldstar in February 2002, Jim was Vice President of Marketing for venture-backed Kiko, Inc., and previous to that developed highly successful sales products for GeoCities until its acquisition by Yahoo! in 1999.
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