Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, and you know that my favorite interviews are interviews with entrepreneurs who listened to my interviews, built up something phenomenal and then came back on here to tell their story so that you could learn from them, build something phenomenal and ideally for me, come back and share your story. That’s what we’ve got here today.
In fact, beyond that, what excites me about this guest is that this guy, because he listened to me, might have heard me interview two of his competitors before. He definitely knew going into his space that there were tons of competitors and more piling in even after he started his business. Why did he get into his company? Why is he still standing? Why is there room for all this?
The guy’s name is Brett Goldberg. He is the founder of a company called TickPick, tick as in tickets, TickPick. It offers a no-fee ticket marketplace where you can buy, bid and sell tickets for sporting events, concerts and theater performances. It also of course has an Android app and an iOS application. You know he’s got competitors and still I found him on the Inc. 500 list, number 90, doing really well. How is he doing it? That’s what we’re going to find out in this interview.
And it’s all sponsored by two great companies. The first is what I used to book Brett on here and every other guest and to make sure that we don’t drive them nuts with our whole process. So, we’re organized and they can respect us and feel proud to do an interview here. It’s going to help you grow your sales. It’s called Pipedrive. The second will help you hire your next great developer or designer or MBA, etc. It’s called Toptal. I’ll tell you more about those later.
First, Brett, you know this interview. You know one of the first things I’m going to ask you is revenue. What is your revenue?
Brett: So, for 2016, we had $49.88 million in ticket sales. So we’re a marketplace. So we’re taking a cut of that. It’s always interesting because to me that’s a really high number. We’re making about 10% of that.
Andrew: Ten percent is your cut and then, of that, you have to pay your employees.
Brett: Correct.
Andrew: Okay. Are you guys profitable?
Brett: We are profitable.
Andrew: So about $5 million is your cut and you guys are–wow. How much funding do you have?
Brett: We did a small friends and family round in 2012. We raised $250,000 then. Since then, we were bootstrapping before and continued to bootstrap afterwards and that’s all the fundraising we’ve ever done.
Andrew: Wow. So, since that Inc. 500 number, which was 2015 was $23.6 million, you’ve more than doubled the business.
Brett: That’s right.
Andrew: I wonder what the transcribers do when I whistle like that? Do they type down, “Andrew whistled at this point?” You’re a guy who started this because you had Red Hot Chili Pepper tickets. Can you tell me that story?
Brett: I was a senior in college. I was supposed to go to a concert with a couple people. Out of the four people, two bailed on me and I had to sell the other tickets and ended up paying for me to go to the concert for free. So I said, “Well, this is pretty awesome. Let me see if I can do this again.”
Andrew: How did you sell it?
Brett: It was StubHub at the time.
Andrew: StubHub. Okay. By the way, I remember the founder of StubHub was one of the first big gets that I had on Mixergy because he sold his company to eBay, it was really big. But he was like so insistent that he got to edit it at the time. He was worried about the way I would treat it. He would want the ability to pull the interview, really interesting things like that. So StubHub is where you sold it. So, anyway, I’ll continue. You sold it there, and then you said, “Hey, I actually was making so much money that it paid for my Red Hot Chili Pepper tickets.” I want to do this again.”
Brett: Right. So I did it a couple times. I went to four or five concerts my senior year of college. I said, “Wow, how is this possible? How does this exist?” I started doing the research into the industry. At that time, I was going to work at Barclays Capital in their investment banking. So I probably naively thought that I knew how to do industry research and put together pitch materials.
So I think even back then, ’06-’07, I then started to do some preliminary deck building. Really what it came down to is I showed my roommate at the time, Chris, who’s now my cofounder or co-CEO, he’s the technical side, I would scrape StubHub’s listings and put it into Excel and show him how I would figure out how I want to price my tickets. If I were looking to buy tickets, because sometimes even back then I would still buy an extra pair. At this point, I was like telling everyone. I’m like, “Hey, I’m going to all these Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts.”
So I would put it into Excel and then I would figure out in the objective/subjective way what was a good deal, which tickets I should buy or how I should price them. I said, “Could you automate this?” He laughed and goes, “Yeah, that would be pretty easy.” So that was ’06-’07. I went at worked at Barclays Capital. He went to work at Nuance Communication. We continued to talk about it.
Andrew: You were at the time doing arbitrage. You were trying to figure out, “Where can I buy low and sell high?” Where were you buying and selling?
Brett: I didn’t do it quite like a trader, in that sense. So, in the way I broke it down, those were kind of two different use cases, one being potential buyer and then one being potential seller, but they both come into place because from the buyer perspective, I’d but myself in the buyer’s shoes and I’d say, “What are they going to buy? What are they going to be looking at?” Thinking through their perspective, I then would figure out, “How should I price my tickets?”
Andrew: Okay.
Brett: So that was kind of like my way into the industry. I then continued to buy and sell tickets as a hobby. It’s really fun going to concerts. I may be jumping forward here because I’m about to give the big idea.
Andrew: You know what? Why don’t I talk for a moment about scraping StubHub? You were scraping them so you had data. If the founder of StubHub is so concerned with how I portray him in a Mixergy interview–because he didn’t know me, I was just getting started, I get it–how did he let you scrape his site without clamping down?
Brett: It was 2006. I’m just thinking about how basic–I was literally taking my mouse and scrolling over all the ticket listings.
Andrew: I see. You weren’t even automating it. You were just manually going and copying and pasting, putting it into Excel and then going to Chris and saying, “Look, can you actually systemize this somehow?” Chris says, “I could do this. I see what you’re doing, totally doable.” He starts to do that and then you guys essentially then have a product.”
Brett: Yeah. You’re fast-forwarding quite a bit.
Andrew: Okay. Then you take it a little slower. I want to understand the details.
Brett: So that was the basic idea. Okay, we can figure out algorithms to help people figure out what’s a good deal when they’re shopping for tickets and also for a seller, how to price their tickets. So, when we graduated and we started to talk about it for a year when we were getting serious, we said, “Okay, this is nice. We can sell tickets for less because they make 20% to 25%. We don’t need to make that amount of cut. We can do 10% to 15%. We’ve got these algorithms and we weren’t convinced that was enough to quit out jobs.
So, as I continued to buy and sell tickets, I was really bad at it and I started to lose money. My thinking was what happened was I’d be working. I couldn’t go to the concert or whatever it was. I was just trying to sell it. I would have a ticket that cost me $100. I was trying to sell it for $150. If I couldn’t sell it for $150, I’d drop my price to $100. I’m doing this constantly. Ultimately, I’ve got $50 and I’m going, “What are people willing to pay? I would love to just get rid of my ticket and just sell it?”
So that was from the seller side. Then the same thinking happened on the buyer’s side. I can remember the experience. I was looking to go to a Giants game. There are thousands of tickets. Everyone’s got them within a couple dollars of each other, at least like of the thousands I’m looking at, maybe 200 to 300 that are relevant to me.
I’m thinking in my mind, “Is someone now willing to cut a deal? Are they not willing to accept $80 instead of the $90?” I said, “How can we create this marketplace where you can have bids and asks and negotiations more like a financial marketplace, where you have bids and asks?”
Andrew: So I was going to say like eBay, but you were thinking more than just bids and asks. You want negotiation to happen on there.
Brett: Virtually as it gets more sophisticated down the road, it would be automated because you don’t have when you think about a financial marketplace, it’s not like two different brokers that are negotiating. It’s all transparent, someone willing to pay $0.99 for the stock and someone’s willing to pay $1, $1.01. The ticket industry is not that efficient yet. I think at some point it will start to get there, though.
Andrew: So then you call up Chris–sorry, yeah, it’s Chris from FareCasting, which became SeatGeek, right?
Brett: No. It was a different Chris. So Chris was my roommate in college at Lehigh. We continued to talk about this the whole time. Ultimately ’09 was when we came up with the bidding concept. Then 2010, we started working on a patent because we didn’t know what else to do.
Andrew: Okay. Was that a good move?
Brett: It was a good move in the sense it got us comfortable to quit our jobs and to work on it full-time.
Andrew: Okay. Because you knew software is not defensible, but at least patents maybe are. But you did call up the guys from SeatGeek, didn’t you?
Brett: That’s an interesting tidbit that you have there, yes.
Andrew: Tell me about that.
Brett: So, ’09, 2010, we started calling some industry folks to see if we were on the right page and how people responded. I had called up a contact at what was PayPal’s biz dev team, which was an eBay company which also owns StubHub. I just was telling them the idea in general. It was the right distance from StubHub where they knew what was going on there.
I remember one of the tidbits someone gave me was, “When you think you’re going to give your idea to someone and they’re going to stop what they’re doing and working on it, you’re so naïve. No one is just going to hear this idea and start working on it.” So we were not openly talking about it with people, but still comfortable.
So that conversation went really well with PayPal. Then we did reach out to the SeatGeek guys, who were doing something pretty different than what exists today, what we’re doing and what they were doing. In that conversation, everything that we said we wanted to do, they kind of were nodding their heads like, “Yeah, we’re thinking about that too.” So, when we got off the phone, we said, “That was a good conversation. I guess we won’t be speaking to them for a couple of years.”
Andrew: Why didn’t that scare you off? Why didn’t you hear, “These guys are going to do it, they started already?” Why did you continue?
Brett: Well, they liked what we were saying. We didn’t say everything we were doing. So we had talked very high-level. We really thought–the ironic part is the real details and what we thought was so different for us being this ticket marketplace. What’s so different is really a small piece of our business at this point.
Andrew: Really?
Brett: Yeah. The bidding aspect is about five percent of our business.
Andrew: The process now is I just get to go on. I don’t even know that I noticed it was a marketplace. I just buy it.
Brett: That’s right. So, jumping forward, when we launched our beta product in 2011, we went out with just the bidding piece. We knew we wanted to do the algorithms and the ability to buy now, but to us, the biggest difference in what we were creating was for you to name your price in a very efficient way.
Andrew: Got it. Where were the tickets going to come from?
Brett: So the thinking was potentially do you try to go tap API and get that inventory? The realization very quickly was if we’re going to be taking a piece of this, we’re going to be kind of negotiating with the brokers in this automated way, you need to have a live feed. So, as Chris was building the site, we quit our jobs June, 2011. What I was doing at that point was I was going door to door to brokers’ offices. I was cold calling all day and getting brokers ready to start uploading inventory to us.
Andrew: And they were okay with this whole bidding process?
Brett: No.
Andrew: No? So, then how did you get them into this marketplace where you were forcing them into it?
Brett: Well, forcing. . .
Andrew: Forcing was not the right word, actually. As soon as it came out, I said, “I just polluted the pool on that one.” How did you do it then?
Brett: We started to learn the pitch and the angle, which was, “We just want your inventory.” To them, if you’re selling their ticket, you’re selling their ticket. I learned people would literally hang up on me when I’d say, “We’re starting to create this bidding platform. We want to give consumers the ability to negotiate and name their price.” People go, “Are you kidding me?” Click.
So there are only a couple of those phone calls before you go, “Okay. . .” By the way, our name used to be Ticket Picket. So it would go like this, “This is Brett Goldberg. I’m the founder of Ticket Picket?” They go, “What did you just say?” So we quickly realized we need to change this name. We spent $600 or $700 on that URL and that’s one of my lessons I learned was never spend any money on a URL, particularly when you’re that early. So, after that, we bought TickPick for $13.
Andrew: Okay. These brokers are like mom and pop shops from what I understand, right? Maybe not even mom and pop. They’re like tough guy operations, these guys who are willing to spend a lot of money to buy a bunch of tickets and are smart enough to move them before they explode, essentially and they lose their money on them, right? So you call them up and if I’m understanding–well, you just did something when I asked that. Am I mischaracterizing them? What are they really like?
Brett: I think it’s so diverse, so it’s really tough to just say this is what they are.
Andrew: I see. Okay. I guess I’m thinking of the ones I used to go to when I was in New York back before like I would go on a website and get it. It felt like they were these guys–I don’t know. Go ahead.
Brett: No. I’ve got to be careful with what I say because these are my users.
Andrew: Got it.
Brett: But there are some mom and pop shops and they’ve been doing this for 30-40 years. That I don’t want to say is the right way to explain them, but they know how to get inventory. They are mom and pop shops. Some of them have storefronts in malls or used to. So there were some storefront operations going on, some of them have relationships with box offices. More recently in the 2000s, a lot of it is 20 or 30-year olds that start off with one person and go, “Jeez, why am I a lawyer when I’m making so much more money as a ticket broker?”
Andrew: They buy the tickets themselves and then they resell them on different websites.
Brett: Yeah. That’s the quick summary. Some of them have relationships with teams. So the more sophisticated ones–there’s a company that’s 50+ people and they have walk through the front door deals with teams and they’re buying 500 to 1,000 season tickets from that seat.
Andrew: I see. Okay. I got it. Yeah. The market definitely has changed a lot since I was a 15-year-old kid trying to get a heavy metal concert ticket from the one guy who had it. All right. You didn’t say to them, “Put it on our marketplace and let people bid for it at the lowest price. That got you a hang up.” You did say to them if I’m understanding right, “Just list it at the price you’re willing to sell and we’ll either sell it for you or not.” And then you could start to allow people to bid up until this lower level that you could sell it for. Is that right?
Brett: That’s right. And early on, particularly when someone placed a bid really early on, you were super-excited, like, “Someone actually placed a bid. They’re trusting us.” You don’t really know what you’re getting, but you’re specifying either one section or a group of sections and you’re giving a price range.
So, it’s a multi-priced algorithm. It looks at the best seat location that you get with a price of $100 and then you give a price for the worst seat location that you’re okay with, maybe $10. So, you don’t know what you’re really getting. You know you’re willing to pay $100 for the best seat or $10 for the worst seat. A broker may come on and go, “Okay, this guy’s willing to pay $30 for this seat,” and then they hit that bid.
Andrew: I see. That was the way it was in the very beginning too?
Brett: Well, in the beta product before we even went live, I can’t remember the person, but I remember the exact comment, which was, “This bidding platform is great. How do I just buy tickets?”
Andrew: All right. Let’s get into that in a moment because you did do a test to understand what people wanted. You did spend some time building this up. There was a craigslist connection there that we didn’t spend any time on. Let’s take a moment and then I’ll come right back.
The thing I want to tell people about is a company called Pipedrive. Here’s the thing. I love, Brett, that when you came to sit here, you said, “Look, Andrew, I know you need the background really clean here, so I wiped off the stuff that I didn’t want people to see. I know you wanted Ethernet connection, so I’m a little bit late because I had to rush to get an Ethernet connection so you could hear me clearly.” I can. I can hear you really clearly.
The reason for all that is because I’ve got a system that works like a freaking machine. We know that we have to deal with hundreds of different potential guests, not just the ones who appear here. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say 1,000 really good entrepreneurs come through our system every year and we have to figure out the ones that fit on Mixergy and treat them right.
In the past, it might have taken us like–we’d send a request to you to do an interview and then maybe we’d drop the ball and we’d never get back to you and then you come back to us and say, “Can we do an interview?” And we’d say, “Yes, of course.” We’d realize, “Oh, we screwed up.” The whole thing was just junky.
We then got this software, Pipedrive, because a guest on Mixergy said it streamlined his sales process and it organized everything. Every part of our sales process has its own column. Every time I suggest a guest or someone suggest themselves or someone suggests someone else or we found you, I think, on Inc. is where we read and we said we need to have you on here–that goes right into the first column on Pipedrive and then we as a team work to move you from column to column until we get to the final column, which is the sold column, which actually here gets you on to do an interview. That’s how we organize things.
But Pipedrive is not used for booking interviews. It’s used for making sales. Anyone out there who has a sales process that involves talking to people or emailing people has got to do this, has got to go and sign up for Pipedrive because it will organize you and make sure that you close your sales right, you know where people are in the pipeline. More importantly, I like the statistics. I want to know how many people did I suggest as potential deals this week. How about this past month? How are we doing as a team? Who’s suggesting the best people, the ones who actually make it through to the end?
In fact, Brett, what I should actually say is also I had this idea for a course. I tested it. I said to my audience, “Would you pay for it?” A bunch of people said yes. I put all the people who said yes into Pipedrive, column one. Then I said the next step is I want to know if they would put a deposit down. So, the people who did made it into column two. Then I said, “I want to talk to them.” Only the people who I got to talk to made it to column three. I’m walking them through step by step until I understand exactly which ones they’re going to buy and close the sale. Pipedrive guides me through it. Yes?
Brett: What year was that?
Andrew: When I signed up for Pipedrive?
Brett: When you were doing the paid subscription and you were figuring that out?
Andrew: When I figured out the paid subscription, I don’t remember. That must have been like 2011.
Brett: Yeah. I was using it in 2011 and I remember you went to the paid and I was like, “Okay, startup, scrappy, I don’t know.”
Andrew: You didn’t buy. Totally fine.
Brett: You still had content that was available for me.
Andrew: We had a bunch of free stuff. I produce like a maniac. I’m sitting here in the seat today recording three. Tomorrow I’ve got four interviews. I work like a madman. Anyway, Pipedrive is what keeps me organized. If you are selling anything and you want to be as organized as we are here at Mixergy, where people really feel good about working with you, where you know how many sales you’re closing, who’s closing the most sales.
In fact, frankly, forget about who–are you opening and closing enough sales? Pipedrive will organize you. Go check them out. You owe it to yourself to go to Pipedrive.com/Mixergy. If you do that /Mixergy at the end, they’re going to give you a really nice, healthy, very long free trial period so that you can actually close some sales in that free trial period. Then if you’re not happy, you can cancel it, but frankly, you’ll then have closed enough sales that you’ll want to keep subscribing to them–Pipedrive.com/Mixergy.
Brett: So you think your user base would be a good audience for TickPick because I would love to advertise with you? You’re doing an incredible job.
Andrew: I wonder. Thank you. I think it’s worth a shot. We should actually talk to Sachit, the guy who sells because frankly, he has a good sense of what works and what doesn’t. I wonder about your margins. Like if we sell just one ticket, I don’t think that’s enough. How many tickets would we need to sell?
Brett: It’s true. But with Super Bowl right now, if you sold on ticket, maybe it would be enough.
Andrew: That’s interesting, actually. Yeah. Maybe we do it around a big event and we see if we can get one Super Bowl ticket sold. That would be hot. Cool. Thanks. You did tell our producer that you had an MVP, right? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Brett: So the beta that we were talking about, yeah. There was so much content in 2011 of the startup and the lean approach. So I followed that as much as I could. It was good, right? We put up that bidding platform. I think we probably sent it out to 100 friends. We had people come in, in person. That’s how we found out, “Crap, people aren’t going to really use this in itself. We need to change the product.” So I almost think about 2011-2012 that whole time was probably MVP even though by 2012, we were up and running, selling tickets, a decent amount.
Andrew: At what point did you quit your job?
Brett: I quit my job June, 2011. At that point, in the start of 2011, we got really serious. It was August, 2010, we had probably $10,000 on the patent and that’s where we got a couple of those conversations that you referenced, the patent and then we started applying to the accelerator programs in New York. With really just like a pitch book, we were making it to the final rounds. That was reinforcing to us as well. We ultimately didn’t really want to do those programs. We felt that particularly my partner, Chris, that wasn’t our personality so much to have someone leaning over your shoulder telling you what to do. I think that’s proved right for us.
Andrew: So you didn’t go through any of those accelerators. You built it on your own. You had the inventory because you called up ticket brokers directly. You had a website where anyone could by. To get customers in the beginning, did you go to craigslist?
Brett: We did. Did I talk about this?
Andrew: Not within the interview here. But you did go to Craigslist, right? You would post a listing for every single one of your tickets?
Brett: I’m laughing because no one knows this.
Andrew: Tell me about this process.
Brett: It was 2012. We had an intern. He was incredible. He was a freshman going into sophomore year at NYU. At that point, I’m working out of my apartment. Most days we would work out of Chris’ place literally on the couch. You do anything to sell.
At this point, we’re completely bootstrapping. We had not raised any friends and family. You’re just trying to scream from the top of a mountain. Craigslist was certainly like I couldn’t believe it. Back then I’m like, “People are still using Craigslist to buy tickets? Don’t they know this isn’t safe?” I would test it to use Craigslist to see what happened and I even got scammed once or twice, even though I thought I wasn’t going to.
So, ultimately, this intern helped me create kind of a script to post to Craigslist. So it scraped our own website and posted real tickets that were on our site and put them onto Craigslist. I had like one computer running, I think, from my parents’ house that I was posting and you had to do it like every 30 minutes. We even had the time variable, so it wasn’t every 30 minutes. At night time it would turn off for a little bit. We probably had 100 different variations of the way the posting would actually get put up there.
Ultimately it worked. It sold tickets. It also brought a decent amount of fraud of bad buyers who were using stolen credit cards. Ultimately it became too much to maintain, but it’s still in the back of my mind of like, “I wonder if got even more sophisticated now, that would still be a good channel?”
Andrew: I wonder about that too. They crack down on this stuff a lot harder now and the audience doesn’t seem to be there. I do think it’s worth a test to see if it could still deliver. For some reason, I still think to go look at Craigslist if I want tickets. It’s the worst. I’ve had Craigslist nightmares.
Brett: The crazy part is if you’re getting a deal where you’re saving 20+ percent, it’s too good to be true. So maybe you’re going to save 10% compared to what you’re going to pay on TickPick and TickPick will save you 10% to 15% from StubHub. That’s a lot of risk you’re taking to save 10%.
Andrew: You know what? The worst Craigslist experience I ever had was I wanted somebody to just move a couch from the car that I had downstairs, Zipcar, up into the apartment. These guys came in. They were these meat heads who were so aggressive with me that they jammed the door with the sofa, like boom, boom, boom. They’ll ruin this new sofa I wanted to get.
I was afraid of them because I would say things like, “I think we need to take the legs off the couch. Can you take it off?” He goes, “You didn’t pay me to take it off.” I said, “Okay, can I use your screwdriver?” He goes, “Who’s going to use my screwdriver?” “All right, um. . .” I finally just said, “I have an idea. Let’s go downstairs. The guys downstairs can break this $100 for me and then I could pay you to use your screwdriver.”
This meat head, both of them, they go downstairs. I go into the bar that’s right underneath our house at the time, which was the worst few days of San Francisco where I was living over a bar. I say to them, “Give me a little bit of change.” I give the guy some money and with that bartender who knew me, I say, “I think actually I can take it from here. We don’t need you anymore. This is the money to close this out.” The guy looks at me like he’s going to hit me, but he sees the bartender is a friend and he walks away.
I think, “Dammit, Craigslist, Craig Newmark, I know you think you’re a good person and I know your intentions are good. Let me come back and report this person.” But there is no way to report it because there’s no validation system. There’s nothing. This meat head could actually hit somebody in their house and there’s no connection to him. There’s no one who knows who he is. So frustrating.
Brett: That’s right. Yeah. In one of the cases, I actually got NYPD to get involved. I got a detective that actually got involved and was willing to help and then ultimately I was like, “How much time am I going to have to spend on this? This isn’t worth it.”
Andrew: What was the NYPD case? What was the case you had to bring in the police?
Brett: It was a fake ticket that was sold to me through Craigslist. So I was at terminal five right nearby apartment I lived in, in the city. So I saw some cops and I told them. They go, “Wait here. We’ve got some unmarked cars. We’ll get you an unmarked car and you can spot the guy for us.
Andrew: I see.
Brett: And my fiancé at the time, we missed half the concert. She was absolutely livid at me, like, “How is this your business, first off and this happened?” I’m like, “I’m testing. That’s what I’m doing.” So I made it up to her. We went to another concert.
Andrew: Okay. Wow. That’s one of the problems. In fact, you guys were taken for a while there, right? People would actually commit fraud on your platform.
Brett: It still happens. Anyone that runs an ecommerce business is getting taken advantage of with stolen credit cards.
Andrew: Why is it heavier and a bigger risk in the ticket space?
Brett: E-tickets. So easily transferable, easily sellable. So you buy Knicks tickets for tomorrow, you can go resell them pretty easily. There’s a paper trail, but it’s not a great paper trail. It’s hard to find out who’s using these stolen credit cards, what devices they’re actually using.
We have one case where we’ve nailed down and know exactly who the person is, we have his ID and he’s bought over $30,000 worth of tickets from us with stolen credit cards. We worked with the New York General Attorney. The person is in Illinois and we’ve been passed to that district and are trying to work with proper people there. But a year later, with a foolproof case, it’s still hard to get anywhere.
Andrew: Wow. Yeah. It’s a tough space. At some point, you did start looking for money. The first bit of capital came from where? I actually can’t even see it on CrunchBase.
Brett: That’s the $250,000 we raised from friends and family. That $150,000 was from real friends and family and another $100,000 was from angels that we got introduced to and we had one particular person really support us and help us raise an extra $100,000.
Andrew: Are you private about who this person is? It’s not online as far as I can tell.
Brett: It’s not like a well-known angel investor. That’s why. I’ve never asked them if they want me to disclose it or not.
Andrew: It’s just a person who happened to have this idea, from what I understand. They said, “Hey, these guys are already doing it. Why don’t I see if I can get to know them?” and he ended up backing you.”
Brett: That’s right. We didn’t have an office at that point yet. We were starting early to raise money. I got an inbound email. This guy is like, “I don’t know how [inaudible 00:30:55] or not.” I think he wanted to pick my brain. Then ultimately I was like, “All right, you’re really getting into the weeds here of what’s going on.”
He’s like, “I was thinking about creating a similar company, but I see you guys are doing it. I love what you guys are doing. I’d love to figure out a way to get on board.” We’re starting to raise money. He was going to raise money from his own friends and then kind of took them along and said, “Meet these guys. Let’s invest in this company.” So he was the one who brought in $10,000 of his own money and $90,000 from his friends.
Andrew: So, after Craigslist, what was the next source of good customers for you?
Brett: It was creating a blog. So, Chris, still today to put things in perspective, 2017 launched with two of us in 2011. There are two engineers here now.
Andrew: That’s it?
Brett: That’s it. So we’re–call it 14 people because we have one person who–
Andrew: Who built both iOS and Android apps and the web?
Brett: Chris O’Brien.
Andrew: Really?
Brett: Yeah, everything. The only thing that we’ve ever paid for on a technical design front is when we launched the site, we hired a designer. We spent $4,000 on logo and the homepage back in 2011. The only thing that exists from that is the logo still. That’s the only help that Chris has ever gotten up until we made our first engineer hire in, I guess, the end of 2015. So Chris has built iOS, Droid, front end, back end, everything else in between.
Andrew: Meanwhile, you’re still cranking out blog posts yourself?
Brett: I still do, particularly for an event like the Super Bowl. That blog has over 100,000 visitors since probably this run of the season. Those sales can be $10,000 sales. I think that messaging, it’s crucial. It’s really important. People are spending $10,000, $20,000. We’ve had $50,000 orders.
Andrew: Here’s one from yesterday. You published yesterday “The Best Deals on Super Bowl 2017 Tickets: A Guide to SB LI.” This thing is so monstrously long, it has a table of contents, smartly, right underneath the input your email to get updates on the Super Bowl email box.
Brett: Put your email in. You’ll like our updates. If anyone’s listening and looking for Super Bowl tickets, you’ll be able to do that.
Andrew: I’m going to do that right now. So you wrote this yourself?
Brett: I did. This blog particularly when the Super Bowl was in New York in 2014, I started having so many friends that were going, I started a newsletter around it. It was really like I sent one email and I copied and pasted to different people like, “Okay, guys, sorry. But it’s not going to be us personally. This is going out to 100 people.” Now that has about 10,000 subscribers just for that Super Bowl newsletter itself.
Andrew: Can I tell you? It’s not just the subscription that’s interesting. The placement of it is good. Also, the confirmation page is so good. It’s just so simple, I could see that it’s just a WordPress page. But it’s like we’re going to email you. In the meantime, here’s a list of Super Bowl LI tickets that I could click and go over and take a look at that. I’m paraphrasing what’s on there. But that’s really well done. Aren’t you afraid, aren’t your investors afraid that if Chris gets hit by a bus, the whole iOS team is gone.
Brett: Terrified.
Andrew: Right? Are you guys doing anything about that? Or is that just you’re in bootstrap mode, you’ve got to deal with it.
Brett: We hired one of Chris’ I’d like to say bosses.
Andrew: Are we talking about Michael Brill?
Brett: No. You are good at your research. That was one of our advisors. Danny Chang, he used to work within Nuance Communication, he was junior to him and when Chris and I started and we started thinking about hiring people, which was probably 2014, we made one hire in between, it didn’t work out perfectly and there were two people. He said, “I want to hire this guy, Danny Chang, or another guy.”
It’s funny because at our holiday party, I’m making a speech thanking everyone. Danny goes, “Chris has been begging me for years to go join. I got sick of being begged. I came on board.” So, he started with us about three or four months ago and he’s put the hit by a bus fears at a little bit–it’s dropped it a little bit.
But you look at what we’ve done and you look at the site, the quality. I think it’s equal and better than not just a lot–I know you just had SeatGeek on here recently. StubHub is really good at what they do. I think we’re incredible at what we do, to be honest. I think our product is built specifically for people who are really shopping for tickets. We are transparent, genuine in everything that we’re doing.
Our whole support team is here in the New York office. Every single one of them is college educated. You can always get ahold of them. You want to email me, you could email me. I think everything we’ve done from the bootstrapping to scaling has just been done really well. So, it terrifies me if something happens to Chris, but we do have the infrastructure and everything in place.
Andrew: We talked about the blog and how well structured it is. I could see that it’s created by someone who loves it and also loves the subtle art of good marketing, right? It comes across. The other thing that I see has worked for you is Google search results. Both ad buys, which you spend a lot of money on ads but also on organic, right?
Brett: Yeah.
Andrew: What are you doing on both those platforms, both those approaches?
Brett: It’s interesting. When I tested search in 2013, it failed. I was like, “This is never going to work. Our competitors are making 20% to 25% fees. We’re making 10%. We can’t compete. So I put it to the side for a while and focused on the blog and SEO and social. You get to a certain point where your goal is to grow two times every year. You go, “Okay, I’ve got to try this again.” Certain things, we started to find certain–this is where like I’ll be transparent and I will spend money, but I’m not going to say what works.
We started finding pockets of things that worked really well for us. Then you continue to scale that as much as possible. So, [inaudible 00:37:42], it got to the point where the blog was in a good place. My team kind of took over on it. I would be in AdWords five, six hours a day.
Andrew: Really?
Brett: Maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit.
Andrew: It was that kind of dedication, you figuring it out.
Brett: You get reps from Google that will be on the phones with you. I don’t want to minimize their help sometimes, but if you’re living it and breathing it like I was, you know it better than they are and you’re going to be willing to test it more. Yeah. I was in there–even once we got the systems in place and the budget kind of built up, I still was in there every day for two hours. Last December, it got into a good enough place where I said I need to start spending my time in other places and we hired an agency to take over. The AdWords front has started to work for us.
Andrew: I’m trying to figure out what you guys do. I see that you’re bidding up, not easy, cheap phrases, like “Justin Bieber tix, no fees,” with a link to TickPick.com/BieberTix. That’s not an uncompetitive keyword.
Brett: But you’ve been to TickPick already, right?
Andrew: Let me take a look. Yes, I was. Let me go to Incognito and see what happens when I got there.
Brett: So, you know where I’m getting at with that?
Andrew: Ah, yes. So, the modal pop, is that what you mean? Or am I over simplifying it?
Brett: No. So, you did a search. We already know you’ve been to TickPick. I think there’s a chance I may be able to get you back again.
Andrew: I see. I’m looking at a retargeting ad.
Brett: It’s search, but yes. There are audiences built–AdWords is so incredible. Facebook is incredible in its own self. AdWords is so incredible. I had a call with my Google rep today and we started talking about doing some new audience breakdowns, segmenting people by how long it’s been since you last were at TickPick and then bidding differently on your search results based on that. It’s kind of like obvious.
Andrew: Okay.
Brett: We have different audiences, so I haven’t thought through that entirely and I haven’t created the audiences to do that. That’s how dynamic we get. I can say, “Okay, this guy, Andrew, was at TickPick a week ago. He made it to a checkout page, never bought tickets and it’s been a week. Let’s bid this much more for him right now if he does a certain type of ticket search.”
Andrew: I see. Got it.
Brett: You’re putting in broad rules around that.
Andrew: Okay. Ever since I interviewed the founder of Ranker and I couldn’t understand how he got his traffic, someone in the audience sent me a link to SEMrush. He said, “Look, here, use SEMrush to understand how traffic is going to a site that gets the majority of its traffic from search. I started going through it. I can see it’s definitely helpful.
That and SimilarWeb are really good for me to understand traffic. I know that even those two together are not going to give me deep, deep insight into your process because it’s so proprietary, because it’s so detailed. It’s taken years, literally, to put together. So, how about I just ask for one resource from you. When you were in the do it yourself mode trying to figure things out, what’s one place you went to look and learn about how to do this?
Brett: The most important to me that I could actually control was the blog, so content marketing and then SEO. So, at the time, SEOmoz, Rand, was like–I don’t want to call him god. But him and Matt Cutts from Google were like the two authorities to me, where anything they said, I was reading. So, for our business being transactional, transactional consumer focus, being focused on driving your own traffic through SEO and content marketing was key to knowing how to do that. So SEOmoz, Moz.com now, was huge for me.
Andrew: Okay. And it’s still a fantastic resource. I think SEMrush, I’m so glad that I was reminded of the power of that site for understanding what other people are doing. Let me go and talk about Toptal now. I think it’s important to talk about Toptal because look at how much you were able to do because you had such a freaking phenomenal developer in your cofounder.
The thing is that developers who are really good not only can outthink the founder, the CEO, their non-tech people, they could produce it. They could come up with what needs to be built and actually sit down and produce it. That is not something you could get four good people or a committee of ten to do. We always say good developers are worth like ten bad ones, but the truth is there’s no comparison because ten bad ones are not going to produce something great. They’re going to just confuse each other. Are you looking at Chris right now? Is he in the room?
Brett: I was wishing I could have put the screen on him. He must have just done something good and he goes like this.
Andrew: Does he have earphones on?
Brett: No. I’m in a conference room right now.
Andrew: I see. You’re looking at him in a different room. Yeah. Guys like that are fan-freaking-tastic, which is why Google spends so long interviewing their people. Facebook spends so long actually having people in. I had a guy who wanted to work for Google. He told me about the process.
I think it was Facebook that actually hired a coach to help all of their applicants, all their developers learn how to go through the interview process at any company that they want because they wanted to spend so much time recruiting the best of the best and they didn’t want bad interviewing skills to let them down. We’re talking about they spent money on people that they were not necessarily going to hire just because hiring the right people is so important to them. They wanted to get at it from every direction.
So all these companies value it. Obviously TickPick has done phenomenal because of the two developers that are there. If you’re listening to me and you need great developers, you’ve got to check out Toptal. What their thesis was was this. They said in Silicon Valley, there are these great companies and fantastic developers, but not everyone wants to sit on that Google bus for an hour and a hour and a half going down to work at a job where yeah, you could bring your dog and yes, there are a lot of snacks, but in reality, there’s not necessarily a lot of fulfillment in that kind of a life.
Some developers are that good, but actually would prefer to live in someplace a little more tropical or maybe back home in Eastern Europe instead of hoping that the US will let them in on some kind of visa and potentially kick them out. Some people just want a better life. Those developers are not any worse because they want that.
Toptal said we’re going to put together a database of these phenomenal people. When an entrepreneur, when a business owner, when a CTO wants to hire great developers, they come to us. We’ll go through our database. We’ll find the right person for them and we’ll match them up and if they want to hire them, they can do it often within a matter of days, they can get started. That’s the idea behind Toptal.
I hired from them. I freaking loved it. I was so amazed by how well they did. They actually ended up costing me less because the guy said it would take him a couple weeks to get it done. It took him a few days to get it done and I love the results. You can see it now. Our search today is so much better than our search was before we hired Toptal.
If you want to hire great developers, you should go check out Toptal.com/Mixergy. Top as in top of the mountain, tal as in talent, Toptal.com/Mixergy. The first thing that they’re going to do is try to get you on the phone so they can understand what you need. If you ever have a problem with Toptal, I stand by them so solidly. If you ever have a problem, you can do two things. One, email me. My personal email is Andrew@Mixergy.com. That goes for any sponsor. I want no assholes here. If they’re not treating you great, I don’t want their money.
So, if you’re not getting fantastic results from Toptal or any other sponsor, you could do that or I’m not hiding anywhere, my office is right here, 201 Mission Street. We can talk in private right here in the heart of San Francisco, 12th floor, 201 Mission, 12th floor. I’m saying that because I stand behind my sponsors and urge you to go at least check out Toptal–Toptal.com/Mixergy.
All right. That really is very important to me.
Brett: The way you work is similar, right? I listened to some of your interviews, so I know how you handle your emails, which is amazing. I do the same thing. My email is out there, Brett@TickPick.com. Someone wants to email me, I’ll respond.
Andrew: What is your email address?
Brett: Brett@TickPick.com.
Andrew: What have you gotten from putting your email out? Give me an example of how your business has benefitted form that?
Brett: The type of emails I get from the blogs that you’re talking about, it’s not like I don’t have it. I used to have it literally at the end of every blog. My cellphone number was out there. I’ve taken my cellphone number off because that was–I just don’t pick up my phone, to be honest. I’ll email and respond within ten minutes, probably. But if you call me and I don’t have your number, I’m not picking up because I get so much.
But I get a lot of people that are spending a good amount of money that are trying to get help figuring out which tickets to buy. I think that Chris brings so much to the table. Mine is really–it’s not the user experience because I used to spend a lot of time on the user experience, but it’s really being a fan and a consumer and that’s kind of like me. That’s like my first job here is to be a fan and to be a user of TickPick. When I look at our top purchasers, I am in that top purchase group.
Andrew: Really? You’re still buying a lot of tickets?
Brett: Yeah.
Andrew: I’ll tell you what I got from putting my email out there, speaking specifically about sponsors. Toptal wants to talk to customers on the phone. I thought, “That’s great. Everything is super smooth with that.”
And then because people have my email address and they know they can complain to me about anything, I got emails from people who were living–I think it was one guy specifically in Singapore who opened my eyes to this. He said, “I understand that Toptal wants to get on the phone. Why do they want me on the phone at 2:00 a.m.? Why can’t they be a little bit more understanding?”
Then I realized, “Oh, Toptal is thinking all my audience is in the U.S. They have a calendar where you can book.” So, now I solved that problem. It’s not like Toptal wants to be jerks, it’s just that they’re not aware of the fact that a lot of people at Mixergy are outside the U.S. Little things like that I can’t get because who’s going to–how else am I going to find out.
Who’s going to complain to customer service from Mixergy about a problem with Toptal unless I say, “Here’s my email address, complain to me. Here’s where you can have scotch with me and complain on anything.” That kind of thing is really invaluable. It takes a lot of effort, but it’s worth it.
Brett: I sent this a very similar email to my whole support team. The support team is Chris, Danny, myself and then we have Gina, who kind of does everything–seating charts, blogs, accounting. And then everyone else is a support person with another type of role. So, someone runs social, someone runs broker relations. Someone runs the office for us and our events internally. I sent an email to them. I don’t see that many inbound customer situations that much unless I need to get involved and I happily will.
But I saw one and I was like, “Guys, you guys are in the forefront? Chris and I literally used to pick up the phones. We used to know what was going and what were the common problems. They know this, but they need to be reminded. We’re not going to know the issues unless you tell us and you need to give us the feedback of if the FAQ needs an update. That’s very simple. So, it’s just empowering them also to speak of what are happening frequently that we can address in an easy way.
Andrew: What software do you guys use for helpdesk?
Brett: Zendesk.
Andrew: So, Chris is on Zendesk too?
Brett: His email is in there, so if someone needs to sign something to him, they can. The integration of Zendesk is pretty good because it’s integrated with our backend database. Everything is integrated with Zendesk. So, he spends time on that, but he’s not really in there.
Andrew: I see. You told our producer that one of the big milestones for you happened in 2014 when you guys broke $1 million in sales per month. What got you to that? What was it that had to change about your business to go from a guy who was getting one customer a day and really happy about it to suddenly doing $1 million a month?
Brett: So what was your question there?
Andrew: What got you to that growth? What was it that allowed you to get so big?
Brett: A lot of it was besides all the marketing, it’s what everyone says, which is like treating your customers right. I remember there were a couple situations early on, like there was a good chance that I probably knew the person that was buying the tickets from us. We didn’t have like money to really solve customer support issues at that point. So, if someone bought $100 tickets and they had–there are issues that are clearly our fault and we’ll go over and above.
Then there were issues that were like the event time was changed. That one we have now addressed. But at the time, we didn’t really have a system to notify you if an event time was changed. So I remember like one friend, he couldn’t even get in or he got there early and was upset that he didn’t get notified about it.
Andrew: So, your friend complained to you?
Brett: It was a friend of a friend, but I knew him. He wanted the tickets for free. I was like, “I can’t do that.” Now at this point, if it got to me for that, like $100–so, my rule of thumb early on was $50 or less customer support issue, do it in the blink of an eye. That’s like real issues. You’re not just giving away $50, otherwise that would hurt. But I think that mentality of really doing what’s right for the consumer has really got us to this place. There’s not a tone of virality to buying tickets.
Andrew: I hear some ticket company say there is. They say you buy a ticket for a friend and the friend is going to ask you, “Where’d you get the tickets?” Then the friend ends up buying. The truth is what they’re doing is hiding. You’re shaking your head. They’re hiding where they’re really getting their traffic and I never ask where did you get the tickets and then go buy it next time.
Brett: Never. I’m in the industry. So I ask that question. But I’ve never been with a group of people and we’ve got four tickets and people obviously are going to know it’s me, but you’re right. You just don’t. You don’t care. You got the tickets, great. Let’s go. The event is the event. It’s not the buying of the tickets. This is where TickPick, what we spent the last three months on, actually, is being more of that event because we know it. You come to us before the event to buy the tickets. You print out your tickets or you use our app to get in and then it’s done.
So we’ve been, really for the last year, trying to figure out how to be more central in that. So, a year ago, when it used to be a thing to deep link into Uber, we created that deep linking, so you’re about to go to the event, through TickPick, you could order Uber, restaurant recommendations in the area, we started doing a lot of that. You’re going–I’m not sure, are you married?
Andrew: Yeah.
Brett: You’re going to an event with your wife. You’re meeting there. You’re running late. You don’t want her to wait outside for you. So you could send her a deep link into our app which will give her her ticket. These are great things. We’re going one step further and we said, “When people are at events, people love to share things.” I don’t think we’re going to replace and we’re not trying to replace any of the social platforms. But we are trying to make TickPick more social. So, now we know you bought tickets for an event, we’re going to let you post pictures and videos while you’re at the event.
What we can do with that information over time, start to compile that data. We know you sat in section 306, row 8 and we got a picture from you at that exact seat. We have pictures per section for almost every sporting event, but we don’t have it down to the row. We don’t have certain feedback that you gave in a post. One of the things I love to do is I’m going to Eric Church at Barclays Center next week. My wife says, “I need to know what time to get the babysitter.” I’m like, “All right, give me some time. It takes some research to find out when he’s going to come on.”
That’s the type of information. If we start to get people social enough, they’ll post pictures when Eric Church first goes on, then for the rest of the concert, we could say, “By the way, concert calls for doors opening at 8:00, you can expect Eric Church to go on at 8:30.”
Andrew: That’s cool. That’s great. How did you know to even do that? I always want to know stuff like that.
Brett: I think that’s the one piece of information, like from the blogging, what I used to do when I would think about, “What am I going to blog about?” It would be provide information that other people are not going to know and that I have more knowledge about. It was always about seating charts, seat views, how to get tickets, get the best deals.
This is the one other piece of content that everyone wants for concerts, even for some sporting events. Most of the time they’re going to be pretty accurate. If they call a 7:30 tip off, it’s a 7:30 tip off for the most part. But for concerts, you never know. The artists aren’t–I don’t know why they’re not transparent about it. So, what I do is like I’ll go stalk Instagram or Twitter to look at prior concerts and see when are people first posting pictures.
Andrew: So, you’ll know when the show started because that’s publicly available and you’ll look to see when people are posting pictures by the minute. But how did you know that was a problem for people? I wouldn’t expect that would be an issue that I would notice.
Brett: That’s a good question. I don’t remember the aha moment. But I know it’s a problem that I personally experience.
Andrew: I do too because often there will be like two acts before the headliner and sometimes it’s the second one I really want to watch or I don’t care about either one of them. I just want to know the guy who I care about, when is he coming on? Don’t waste my time with the other stuff.
Brett: I went to Adele with my wife. Tickets call for 8:00. There’s no opener. These were probably the most expensive concert tickets I’ve ever spent. We’re not missing any of her performance. I went through hundreds and hundreds of pictures. I got it down to a tee across every concert. I’m like, “She goes on between 8:15 and 8:20.”
Andrew: And you don’t show up whenever it says on the ticket because you don’t want to sit around?
Brett: I’ve done that for like a Rihanna concert and I waited three hours. I was like, “Okay, I’m never doing that.”
Andrew: I see. You said the product evolved, but you thought initially it was going to be a full on marketplace where people could bid. Now from what I understand, it’s I see the price, but if there are no tickets like that Justin Bieber example that I looked at, there were no tickets available, it says you go into the bidding process. What was that thought and decision making process internally to go from this thing that was the heart of your business, which was like the eBay of tickets to something that is more of a combination of what was there before and what your idea was.
Brett: I got some relief from the way Priceline does their business because we’re very similar in that sense. I thought like, “Jeez, Priceline, everyone knows it for name your price or negotiate or whatever their slogan is.” But I don’t know anyone that’s actually named their price on Priceline. So I got comfortable and–
Andrew: I have.
Brett: Okay. Well, you have. I did it once for hotels in Vegas and it worked out and it was a good experience.
Andrew: But you’re right. For the most part, now I’m done with that.
Brett: Right. That’s where I got comfortable, which was okay, we can really be similar to Priceline in that we’re going to have this more niche product, but ultimately we’re trying to–if you want to buy tickets, we want to help you buy tickets. The bidding process, as simple as we’ve made it, we’ve moved–and I think our timing was probably good because from 2011 to now, people have gotten even more instant gratification. You don’t want to place a bid–some people don’t want to place a bid today and not find out for a week if it’s going to get hit or not.
Andrew: Was it a tough decision internally to say, “Look, Chris, I know this is what we banked on. I know this is what our angel investor came on because of. I’ve got to let it go.” “No, we can’t let it go. They just don’t understand yet. Let’s change the design.” Was any of that going on?
Brett: It’s funny because I’m smiling because I laugh in my head occasionally where it’s like I convinced Chris to quit his job on this bidding platform.
Andrew: Right.
Brett: It’s such a small piece of our business now. It does help from a marketing, from a messaging, from a PR, from a differentiator. So there are pieces besides just the transactional revenue aspect of it, where I think it gives a little bit more of a lasting memory to people and understands like, “Okay, this is different.” Like you said, it is a very competitive market. So, anything you can do to help make you stand out to consumers, help them remember you is powerful.
Andrew: Let me close out with this. I started out the interview by saying, “How do you survive in a market where there are so many other competitors, were before you started, are afterwards?” It seemed at first that the way you were going to survive was you had this patent on a process for bidding that nobody else had and no one else was competing in that space, so you’re a brand new product. Today you’re not that. Why are you guys still around and growing, really doubled your business from 2015 to 2016, more than that? How are you still doing that with all these competitors?
Brett: Early on it was very easy to be top class, first one to be doing things. We weren’t always first, but we were probably number one or number two. When we came out with our app and I remember going through iterations, it was in 2014 where to me, our app surpassed our desktop experience. When you figure out the whole big screen and you figure out how to get into small screen and you get it right, you’ve simplified it so much where to me, it’s easier almost to buy tickets on our mobile app than on desktop, which is crazy, but that’s how I feel.
I think that’s kind of an example. It’s one, having Chris, his abilities, and then just continuing to push forward. I think what we just saw with the last app update, where people can take videos, post pictures, I wouldn’t be surprised if you start to see the other marketplaces do that too. They go, “Yeah, why not do that?”
Andrew: So it’s that you’ve got a few features that they don’t have and every time you have a feature they don’t have, it gives you another reason for somebody to discover you and then they discover the app is also good or you have these other features. Is that it?
Brett: Not to mention–the easiest selling point to consumers is our tickets are cheaper. It’s like that simple. We’re the only ones who only mark up or take a 10% commission. So StubHub is making 20% to 25%. It doesn’t take much for someone–if you trust us, which you should because if you don’t, you could email me, we’re going to stand by and make sure you’re going to have a good experience. I think across the board if you look at all our reviews anywhere, you’re going to see we have the best reviews across the board. So pricing is first at how people discover us. Then it’s the product and customer support.
Andrew: I see. Before we started, I told you that I got the bio line about what TickPick is from Inc. You hesitated for a little bit because it was, “Offers a no-fee ticket marketplace to buy, bid and sell tickets.” You said, “Actually, I want to be clear. There’s a fee somewhere. We do make money. We make money by charging 10% to the seller.” That’s the part that is less than your competition. That’s what allows you guys to still get customers even though your competition has better name recognition.
Brett: When we started TickPick and we were thinking through how to do the pricing and how to display it, I remember even talking with the SeatGeek guys. It was probably a Quora thread of what was the best way to do it. The way I thought about it was, “Why don’t we just follow what Amazon does? What is Amazon doing? Let’s follow them.” You don’t get to an Amazon checkout and then there’s some added hidden fee. Yeah, there are taxes. We don’t have taxes. No one in the ticket space has taxes added on.
But Amazon, the price you see is the price you’re going to pay in the checkout. We follow that same methodology. It was a little bit disappointing when StubHub went all in pricing as well. So they still had 20% to 25% fees, but they still do all in. They got crushed when they did it because you were one thing and then you’re another and people aren’t aware, so they still were thinking you’re adding those fees.
Andrew: So they saw their prices go up and they assumed that on top of these increased prices, there were also going to be fees. So that was confusing, you’re saying?
Brett: And other marketplaces were able to take advantage of it. If you’re in these funnels of these other marketplaces, you get in the funnel and you get to the checkout, you may have spent ten minutes, maybe like an hour you spent searching for those tickets and finding it and you take a credit card and finish the purchase. For us at this point, we are the only marketplace that shows all in pricing, up front, every time, no games. We’re never going to change that.
Andrew: I wonder if people even notice that. By the time they get to the–well, here’s why I wonder. I’m looking at a Quora question of someone who says, “Here are all the places I buy tickets. Tell me which is the lowest one.” There are people in here who really care a lot about this who are still arguing about who has the lowest price. It’s not as easy as, “It’s Amazon versus Walmart.”
Brett: It’s so crazy because exactly what you’re saying. I will point it out to people–I used to very involved in the comments and all that. People are like, “BS, you guys are doing the same thing everyone else is doing.” I would literally go get two of the exact same tickets on StubHub, on TickPick, show you a checkout and go, “This is exactly what’s going on. This is how much you’re going to pay on StubHub. This is what you’re paying on TickPick.” There are a couple cases where there may be a ticket on StubHub that we don’t have. So, someone may go, “Look at this ticket,” and price shop and compare two different tickets. So, I can’t control that.
Andrew: But that’s the thing. It took you so long to even find it. If I were to try to figure out who has the cheapest price for the Apple Watch, it’s one product, one thing. I could go to Amazon. I could go to Walmart. I could go to Apple and see Best Buy is offering a $10 card back. So, Best Buy is the place I would buy it from. It’s not the same thing with tickets. I wonder if this is part of the answer.
All these things you told me are differentiators like no fees, that stands out, bid, that stands out–all these different things are differentiators. It’s a big enough market that if you could differentiate yourself a little bit, you get a small slice of it and then you keep finding ways to keep increasing that slice. Is that it? That it’s such a big market, as long as you have some differentiators for getting attention, that’s what gets you customers?
Brett: Yeah. Even this last app update we did–it’s the most amount of time I’ve seen Chris spend on anything–he still said, “I don’t expect this to be a game-changer.” I think that was one of the lessons we learned early on, like nothing we’re going to do is going to be a game-changer. We’re willing to fail and test things, but we don’t believe any one thing is going to just completely change the game for us.
So you’re right. It’s all these small wins, all these small product updates, additional inventory that you don’t even know, additional automation on the back end. So, it’s just moving everything.
Andrew: Tons of it. Links from CountryMusicNewsBlog.com–you own that?
Brett: No.
Andrew: So that’s sending you some traffic, like these random places all adding up to something that keeps growing and growing.
Brett: That’s right.
Andrew: All right. Well, thank you so much for doing this interview. Congratulations on your success. What’s it like now having listened to all these interviews to be on the receiving end of all these questions?
Brett: I’m not going to lie. I’ve had some pretty good interviews. One of my best emails I got was from the Ticketmaster CEO a while ago. But the next one after that was like when I got the inbound from you guys, I was just so stoked. I was like, “Wow, we’re really making it. This is amazing.”
Andrew: I’m so proud to have you on here. Congratulations. The website is especially if you’re looking for Super Bowl tickets, but if you’re looking for anything, you’ve got to go check out TickPick.com.
And of course, my two sponsors, the company that will help you close sales. We use it at Mixergy, have for years, use it religiously every single day. It’s called Pipedrive. Go check out Pipedrive.com/Mixergy. You’ll get to use it for free for a long period of time. If you want a great developer, designer, now a great MBA, Toptal is the place where they really screen their people right. Go check out Toptal.com/Mixergy.
I’ll close it out with just TickPick, really. Go check out TickPick, see what we’ve been talking about. Thanks so much for doing this.
Brett: Thanks for having me.
Andrew: Bye, everyone.
