Ticketstumbler (YC Summer 08) launches
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Just kidding. Hi, I'm Dan one of the cofounders of TicketStumbler.com. If you have any suggestions or feedback please leave them here no matter how minor.
If you have scathing criticism and are worried about being down modded, please email me directly - dan [at] ticketstumbler (dot) com.
Just a thought.
Are you hoping to add NBA?
Besides that, congrats.
NBA schedule is released today so we'll be adding the NBA shortly thereafter.
So right now that's a result of the frequency of our crawler runs. We're in the process of ramping that up to provide as close to real time results as possible.
Unfortunately, most of our ticket providers are stuck in the dinosaur age so it's difficult to provide close to real time results (like the airline industry).
I do have one question: how do people get passionate about tickets? I mean, I LOVE the stuff I am working on, I NEED the stuff I am working on for myself, and I would not want to do anything else, but if they asked to me make a startup about tickets with a guaranteed 1 million payout, I'd really have a hard time doing it.
I just cannot imagine myself being passionate about tickets. It's a freakin ticket, I'm not going to devote a good chunk of my life towards making them a bit cheaper.
But other than that, tt's not about the tickets; it's about the events.
I _love_ attending sports and concerts. I probably go to (and will continue to go to) 20-40 sporting events per year and 5-10 concerts per year. Now going to them is a business write off.
What the founders seem most interested in (like their customers, presumably) is not the tickets themselves but the sporting events that they're tickets to.
There's a definite pain point that they're addressing here. They want to save you from devoting a good chunk of your life to getting them cheaper. (And when they're priced like playoff tickets, it's worth it.)
I need sleep.
I'm very passionate about the site, but not because I necessarily want to make my own ticket-buying experience better. I like TS because it's a useful service for other people, presents challenging work, and has been an opportunity to work with very large volumes of data, among other reasons. I may not find tickets or sports exciting, but not once since the start of this project have I thought to myself, "I really wish I was working on something else."
Edit: Once we have concert listings I suppose I can meet the artificial requirement of building something I would use because there's little I'm more passionate about than music.
This is the reason open source software so often sucks - because people want to solve the difficult technical problems (to prove themselves or why, I don't know), and they are not solving the most important problem - which is knowing all the different ways users want to use your site and making sure each and every way is so smooth it's sweet.
That's a core of passion - you create a little baby, and you want that baby to be perfect, so you do the little things - smooth out the icons here, make sure that the window pops up just right, test it 30 different times to see if the flow is smooth and obvious, you ask people what they think of it, and how exactly it can be made better.
It's like when you finish a painting, then you take a step back, look at it to see how a stranger would look at it. Then you squint your eyes to see how the colors look on their own. Then you go up close to see how the shadow on the little corner box looks, then you think what color of frame would properly offset the color on the inside....
That's passion.
Success is when a creation achieves the goal of what it is supposed to be. Being great in what you do is the ability to create something that achieves that goal.
Software applications are like paintings. It's easy to create a mediocre painting, and the difficulty in the magnificent paintings lie in the attention to detail.
If you really think usability is not the CORE of any software application, then you are not just on the wrong path, you are going in the opposite direction.
Similarly, a painting's artist cannot objectively determine how beautiful/emotional/successful the work of art is, because he has an innate sense of what it is trying to convey to the viewers. Just because the artist sees the subtles details, nuances, allusions, etc, does not mean that other viewers will be able to glean the same information.
And to drive the nail home a third time, an engineer could not possibly be an objective judge of how easy a car is to operate (usability), because they already know where everything is and how it works. They need to have a real person sit in the seat to realize that putting the cigarette lighter and cup holders inside the center console is a bad idea and not at all intuitive...
I'm glad you've found some unannounced projects that you have extreme passion for or whatever but you can't really apply that to other individuals' tastes, hobbies and desires. It varies.
Good luck with your projects - nothing is more fulfilling than doing something you enjoy working on all the time (as Tom and I and many of the HN crowd have done).
Cheers dude, Dan
???
TS is "my baby". I want it to be perfect. I have tested it way more than 30 times, probably 3 million, but whatever. We have gotten countless amounts of feedback in writing, in person, over the phone, in every possible way. We ask people to nit-pick. Then, we take what they say, and implement the things that will make us better.
You've assumed that because I don't have a passion for the subject of my work, I therefor do not have passion for my work. You've assumed incorrectly. I take pride in all the projects I create and I strive to make them as good as they can be. I may never use TS to compare and find sports tickets (never mind; hockey season is starting soon), but that doesn't mean I can't be passionate about making such an experience as good as it possibly can be, and better than anyone has done before.
I for one would find ticket sales really interesting. Concerts are probably my favorite thing to do, and sporting events are fun too(prefer to actually play sports, but watching is ok too)...This would be much more interesting than probably every Facebook App and most web apps in existence(which mainly consist of programs to help people waste time, hopefully clicking an ad on occasion)....I think working with large datasets of events, prices, and consumers would be really interesting....
Some of the best days of my life have been at concerts. I'm sure millions feel the same way. How could you not be passionate about helping people have more of these types of experiences?
But back to the issue - if I am passionate about concerts, it's because I like being at concerts. Not because I like selling tickets for concerts. So I would work on something related to actually being in the concert.
I thought I was passionate about some of my past projects, but it was only when I started the latest two that I rediscovered what real passion is. It is when you are already using your own app before it is ready, and when it is crashing and being odd all the time. If you're not doing so, then you have not done the most important bit yet, and that's the wrong way of going about a project.
You sound like Seth Godin. I hope you make as much money as him.
I think everyone would be happier if you weren't a jerk about other people's projects, and no one was to you in return.
Your search model is as good as Intelliverb’s PageScale algorithm if not better, I think we should get in touch and share some tricks. : ) Nice Job guys!
How about flikr.com, scribd.com, tumblr.com and lately karatr.com? Not that bad as compare to all the strange names I’m not going to mention here so I don’t offend anyone.
"Fotolog. Fotolog.com, se escribe como suena." [You spell it the way it sounds; it's phonetic.]
I agree with you that most names are hard to spell, but in Spanish having a phonetic name is important because the language itself is phonetic.
Although we agree that it's not as convenient, we're pretty set on sending our visitors to the actual providers (like Kayak does with airlines). Not doing that carries a lot of wrongly addressed customer service issues and liability exposure we're not prepared to and don't want to, deal with.
We're going to be adding servers soon so our crawls will approach closer and closer to real time. Sorry we didn't have your tickets still available.
The holy grail of seating maps (and what our users have requested many times) is what Stubhub has (interactive, sortable, clickable). This is just really really difficult to implement when we have listings from multiple providers who all call things slightly different names.
We'll get there though.
At least you can still buy your Browns season tickets.
I'm actually a 49ers fan somehow.
You guys have a heck of a fan base.
The guys who consulted with us sell over $1,000,000 (one million - not a typo) of tickets per year on Stubhub. Not sure why you're having problems.
Still don't know how I feel - ebay is crappy even with buy it now.
Front Gate is another growing competitor.
If all you want is a cheap ticket than stubhub seems like the place to go, stubhub is the cheapest on all of the ticketstumbler searches I have done.
However, If you want something rare like courtside at the lakers.. Stubhub might not always have it, but ticketcity or some other place will. Thats where the value of TicketStumbler comes in I think. Its a useful site.
Are you guys really this desperate for visitors and attention? How much do spam commenters cost anyways? Love always and forever, your friends at T-Stumbler.
P.S. Maybe instead of spamming our press coverage you should focus on building a good product. kekekeke