Hungry start-ups (Anyvite & TicketStumbler) on a drastic diet | Hacker News Reader

Hungry start-ups (Anyvite & TicketStumbler) on a drastic diet

ft.com

86 pointsfallentimes56 comments

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It's making some people register; here's a link to text only:

http://tinypaste.com/pre.php?id=ddb2e

Might not work for everyone, but removing ?nclick_check=1 from the URL made it work for me:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/59d78f42-e713-11dd-8407-0000779fd2...

Thanks. I was going to skip this article.

Thanks for that. I'll never register at one of these news sites just to read an article... Amazing they try to force people to.

Living outside of the Bay area fit into our calculations when my co-founder and I started TrailBehind.com too. We moved to a 3-bedroom cabin in Truckee, which costs us about as much as sharing a single room in a 3-bedroom apartment in SF.

That actually sounds really sweet. Working in the mountains on your startup with decently close proximity to the Bay Area if you want to come into the city for events. Great plan!

Yeah, we really like it. Here are the offices at TrailBehind HQ: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33766454@N02/3146045372/in/set-...

We're going to be putting a third workspace in there this month.

yeah, it's only 30 minutes from Reno, which has most big city creature comforts. Amtrak goes straight through town too. Might be hard to find new hires here, but perfect for buckling down to get it off the ground.

Especially if the ski season continues to suck!

I always thought it would be kind of not smart to take out a loan (get lots of VC)just to pay rent in the Bay area. It's an okay place, but hardly worth the extraordinary cost of living, if you're just wanting to build a web site.

It especially makes sense since trailbehind is focused on hiking/camping/etc and there's a lot more outdoors near Tahoe than there is near SF.

I live in the "bay area" up in Sonoma County. There is tons of stuff to do up here. I live 15 minutes from a redwood forest and 45 minutes from the coast, which has good bouldering. Mount St. Helena is 45 minutes in the other direction, with great top-roping.

I actually don't know much about the south bay or east bay, but the north bay has tons of good outdoor possibilities.

yeah, expect particularly good maps of the Tahoe area!

I find it interesting that ticketstumbler is theoretically a utility that allows the savings of time at the cost of money and the article focuses on the savings of money at the expense of time.

Actually, since over 50% of events don't sell out, you can often find below face value tickets on TicketStumbler. The ticketmaster fees are comparable to the ones charged by our ticket providers.

This is even more true now that we're in a recession. NBA tickets are at all time lows. Expect similar deals for baseball season.

I said "theoretically." Boiled down, you're collecting commissions to aggregate ticket inventory and find the lowest prices for buyers. If every buyer spent the time to find the lowest price (including spending the time to develop the knowledge you guys have of pricing, etc), those commissions would disappear.

Well of course if everybody spent all that time to find the lowest prices and developed knowledge of pricing we'd stop making money. But they're not going to do that, just like everybody isn't going to randomly decide to learn the way air travel works and put Orbitz et. al. out of business.

Even if it cost 10% more to buy a ticket through TicketStumbler, which it doesn't (it costs 0%), it would still be worth it. You have to consider the opportunity cost.

I totally agree and didn't mean it as a criticism in any way. Just that in theory, you're providing a service that lets people convert money (someone's, not sure whose, perhaps completely fanciful) into saved time, and that the article is about you sacrificing time to reduce costs. The vonage example specifically is about that - some slight increase in inconvenience (i.e. lost time) for a cost savings.

Oh, I gotcha. Yeah, we do a number of things to keep costs low in lieu of saving time. This mostly applies to doing certain grunt work that we could pay to have done.

If you think of it like "TicketStumbler is for frugal people" and "TicketStumbler is a frugal company" it makes it less ironic, maybe? ;)

Ah I see. Though with cell phone day time rates being what they are, the slight loss in time is well worth it :).

I'd toss Vonage and go for Skype-out, save $11/month :P If you're only calling out from it, skype-out is $3/month or $30/yr and allows unlimited calling to the US/Canada.

In my experience, Skype hasn't been near as reliable.

Really? That's odd, I've never had problems with Skype. Worked amazingly even when I was on vacation in Jamaica (sharing a DSL connection with the whole hotel) calling back home to Canada.

It all depends on what your hourly rate is. Both the phone and your time. See the now ancient Bill Gates Wealth Page (http://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html):

"Which means that if, on his way into the office, should he see or drop a $1000 bill on the ground, it's just not worth his time to bend over and pick it up. He would make more just heading off to work."

I'm a long ways from that.

Hmm I"m not sure if that would be true since we're paid directly from Stubhub, Razorgator etc. The prices shown on TicketStumbler are the same as those shown on Stubhub (there's no extra fees on our end). Essentially, we try to save people time without costing anything extra.

If the user went to all those sites separately they'd still pay the same amount. What you're saying definitely applies to a place like Expedia that tags on extra fees.

"Every day TicketStumbler.com scours the web for the best deals on roughly $1bn (€750,000, £670,000) worth of concert and sports tickets from secondary sellers."

Okay, so the dollar exchange rate is low, but not that low. I'm guessing they mean $1 million?

Their calculation was wrong. The interview was during the NFL season where we had roughly $1 billion (with a B) worth of tickets. It's a little less than that now since the NFL regular season is over. It'll be over $1 billion again as the MLB season draws near.

Are you guys going to release any of your historical data? What I am most curious about is the tendency for prices to go up or down as it gets closer to showtime -- I'm sure ticket scalpers united would love a widget to play around with those numbers.

This is tricky; since we're a third party it's difficult to know if the tickets were sold or delisted. However, it's certainly something we'll look into.

Wow, good going! $1m seemed a bit on the low side but I wasn't expecting that much!

Honestly, me either.

This is a great piece. Congrats! I couldn't help but laugh at the phone bill comment - I do the same. :)

Dan, would you mind sharing any tips/feedback how the piece came about? Did you pitch the FT?

We did not pitch him. A free lancer we were intro'd to was looking to talk to startups regarding the recession, and how we were coping.

He did an excellent job and was very thorough, but I had no idea it was going to land in the Financial Times until recently. I would have been happy with a mention on the back of a Count Chocula cereal box.

We'll talk to anyone.

And that, my friends, is a winning attitude with the press. You never know when that random writer's going to catch a break and land their piece in the FT.

Change the "false.html" to "true.html" in the URL.

eg - ft.com/cms/s/59d78f42-e713-11dd-8407-0000779fd2ac,Authorised=true.html

(doesn't work if you click on it, you need to manually change it)

edit: this used to work on ft.com for me, but doesn't seem to be working at the moment (at least on FF3/OS X).

Congrats on the coverage. I haven't seen many YC startups in the FT.

Jeff's so dreamy, it's hard to say no.

And just so for the record, so is that other founder of Ticketstumbler:

http://multimedia.heraldinteractive.com/images/f9833f0a6c_ti...

What, no love for me, just because I'm not a YC company? I was still in the FT article.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/23/business/smal... or http://www.fluther.com/404

Okay, now I'm embarrassed.

Hey Ben, totally didn't mean to leave you out! Like Dan said, the pic of Tom (wearing lipstick) is a running joke. You get just as much love as the other YC companies involved!

The Tom thing is a running gag. We <3 you too.

That picture should really be on your "about us" page =)

You can eat a bag of shit. A big bag of shit.

I guess more people need to see Semi Pro.

He'll never out live this will he? :)

He really is, isn't he?

When everyone gets their startup going, you should all just move to North Florida. Admittedly we don't have the resources like the Bay Area, but if this post is about cost savings, then North Florida is your best bet. My rent here is $500 a month and I pay $40 a week for food. No car. When I lived in Santa Clara, my rent was $750 (lived with 7 people) and food was over $120 a week.

How do you get around? One of the things I love about Boston is the public transportation.

The glorious public transit system and my t(rusty) bike. We're nowhere near Boston in transit...or California for that matter. I practically lived on Cal Train when I lived in Santa Clara. In Florida, you just need to be creative. Zipcar also helps.

Congratulations on the FT mention! Can you shed some light on the 'calculations' that go into the decision to live outside the valley? While living outside the bay area does reduce expenses, what kinds of things do you give up on (e.g. easy access to X, Y, Z) and why are they less valuable than the immediate monetary benefits?

Sure. It really wasn't as tough a decision for us as it could be for other startups. We aren't hiring and aren't actively raising money (though we keep in touch with many potential investors just in case). Also, our families are in the midwest. The only thing we "gave up" was that our startup friends almost all moved to San Francisco. But since we're working most of the time, it's not that big of deal.

If and when we have a war chest of cash, we'll likely move to San Francisco; it's a kick ass place but is as expensive as NYC.

u: muellernews p: 50505050

http://www.bugmenot.com/view/ft.com

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

Good job guys.

Congrats!

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