Co-founders wanted for TicketMaster killer. | Hacker News Reader

Co-founders wanted for TicketMaster killer.

zaptix.blogspot.com

This is Bryan, of the YC-backed startup Pairwise. I highly recommend this opportunity.

Christian is my roommate, so I have some insider info about ZapTix.com that I figured I should share here.

Christian is non-technical, which is why he's looking for a technical co-founder. But the sales and marketing skills that he brings to the table are immense and vital for this business.

The current site was built by an offshore team, which for better or worse, is not working out very well for him nor handling his upward growth. Based on suggestions from myself and his technical friends, he's now looking for a technical co-founder to join his team.

If I know one thing about Christian, it's that he's a hardworking entrepreneur who also maintains an admirable work-life balance. He's also a people guy. Within a month of moving to SF, he started the most popular tech event in the city - SFbeta, along with well-paying sponsors! He's well liked by all that know him and would be a great person with which to work.

I also know first-hand that the company is currently profitable, with several big-name clients, and imho has a ton of room to grow. If I weren't already tied to my current project, I would work with him.

I concur with all this stuff Bryan is saying.

I once talked to a TicketMaster recruiter at a job fair. When he realized I was getting a little bored, he told me that besides the positions they were advertising, they also needed somebody who could help them speed up their main database system, which, if I recall correctly, was written in MACRO-32 and ran on a VAX until they moved it to Linux boxen running a proprietary emulator. If you search around the web for "ticketmaster vax" you can maybe find out how far they have gotten with their project to scrap the VAXen.

dude, that's like punchcards, right? :)

I'd also like to vouch for Christian. He has friends every where, and I'm happy to be counted among them. Christian is best known for running the largest web 2.0 schmooze fests in San Francisco, and has been very successful in getting clients for Zaptix over the past two years as a single founder.

Christian is a great networker and plugged into the social web scene in SF.

--Justin.tv

This guy Christian Perry is a good friend of mine, and I'm sure he'd be pretty cool to work with. Zaptix also has a lot of potential, I've bought tickets on there and it was very easy.

Good luck. I freaking hate TicketMaster. Aren't they supposed to be a legalized gang of mobsters?

it cost me $4 for a $30 ticket. That's a service fee of ~13% for an automated process!

Nice business they've built for themselves, isn't it?

On the other hand, you aren't counting all the raw meat they have to feed the goons they use to keep acts and venues from straying.

I've seen $7 on a $25 ticket, and that was a week in advance. Closer to 30% service fee. Needless to say, I went and bought it at the venue.

Good luck. I'd love if it worked out. Ticketmaster probably has contracts with individual locations that bands play at, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster has some info on the industry, contracts, etc

For all intents and purposes, ZapTix is working on growing outside of ticketmaster's monopoly, targeting the untapped but very willing niche of school and university theaters.

Indeed -- fewer than 10% of colleges work with TicketMaster, or for that matter, any ticketing service at all.

http://www.jimdero.com/News2003/Sept14Ticketmaster.htm

the part about pearl jam is what should interest you. It talks about why it is so hard to move away from ticketmaster for an artist. And you can assume the same for a venue if they decided to host a non ticketmaster or livenation show. Those companies may in turn refuse to host future higher paying shows at that venue. Unethical but it has allegedly taken place. Just for reference, but I agree there needs to be a change.

I don't know much about college venues but that seems like a promising idea to focus on.

"Ticketmaster says that it is merely bending to the will of the marketplace--because some people are willing to pay more for good seats--and that it is trying to usurp the role of the scalpers and ticket brokers. But the company is really just angling to be the biggest and baddest scalper of them all."

I don't see what the problem with scalping is. The scalper pays for the ticket, and then provides the very useful service of making the ticket available at the last minute. The scalper also takes on a risk that no one will want the ticket,

I can see that the band/venue/ticketing agency wouldn't like it as they don't get a piece of the action. But that doesn't make it immoral.

If tickets are auctioned online by the ticket seller then presumably the band and venue will make more money which will lead to more tours/albums/better venues etc.

Auctioning would probably work both ways too in that worse seats would be available for less than they currently are now.

It's not just the venues that hate scalping, it seems that most people do too.

For me at least, scalping seems "evil" because it's charging a lot for something of little inherent value -- if I had just logged in 10 minutes earlier than you, I could have had your ticket for 1/10 the price.

A better system in my mind (one that ticketmaster had the leverage to implement) would be a point system - if I purchase a ticket for a sold-out concert, and it turns out that I can't go, I should be able to get my money back AND nab a spot in the pre-sale queue for the next popular concert coming to town.

That way, I still get my great ticket, but I'm not setting an arbitrary value based on demand.

There's no inherent value for tickets (or anything). Their value subjective - what people will pay for them. There's nothing more "right" about the price the ticketing office charges than the price the scalper charges.

It's not only a 10 minute difference, a scalper will allow you to buy a ticket 1 minute before the show starts - that's worth something.

There is, indeed, no such thing as inherent value, but people nonetheless tend to think in terms of inherent value. This is important to realize when you decide on marketing and pricing schemes. For instance, restaurants are more likely to offer a discount on quiet days than charge a surcharge on busy days, and they make those sorts of decisions for a reason (restaurants can be a very competitive business, after all.)

David Friedman wrote a neat paper about the psychology of inherent prices and some related topics:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/econ_and_evol_psych/economics_and_evol_psych.html

xtian

The closest thing to a competitor that I know of (at least in the uni and arts market) is Paciolan; and after talking to them a bit about their architecture a few years ago - I don't think they pose much of a threat.

TicketMaster on the other hand... they're just scary (for many many reasons).

Yeah, there are other companies going after the college market, too, but so far none of them have made a major impact.

Hey, I'd consider it, but I'd just wind up replacing your PHP with the full J2EE stack. :P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com