The Ticket Fairy was born from personal experiences in working in ad tech and digital marketing, as well as throwing underground electronic music events.
The difficulties of struggling to break even on costs or make any money as an event promoter became apparent very quickly. One event would be sold out and make money, the next would bleed money and wipe out the previous event’s success.
Most people don’t realise that events companies, venues and festivals run at a loss for between 3 and 5 years. You have to find a way to last long enough to eventually become profitable.
Events are Terrible Businesses, Until They Aren’t
Event production is a passion-driven industry where people truly believe in the experiences/events they are creating, just like startup founders.
However, they are INCREDIBLY risky businesses. Event promoters have to pay the artists/talent and vendors regardless of whether they sell enough tickets to cover those costs or not.
Your reputation is on the line if you don’t pay your bills and people won’t work with you again if they don’t get paid. They don’t see it as their problem that you didn’t generate enough revenue, which is understandable as they would’ve given up other opportunities to work for you.
It is not uncommon for promoters/event organisers to refinance their houses or use other assets as collateral to keep their dreams alive when they lose money in the early years. Just like most startups, promoters and organisers are always on the edge of their financial runway in terms of funding and are struggling to stay alive.
The Birth of Ticket Fairy – Growth Hacking for Events
My brother Jigar and I created Ticket Fairy to apply the same growth marketing hacks that work for technology startups to drive sales and marketing for ticketing and events.
We took the psychology behind startup marketing and consumer behaviour, and applied these principles to create a platform that drives revenue for the event while simultaneously engaging with and rewarding fans, creating a win-win experience for the entertainment industry.
Ticket Fairy allows organisers of live events to use one single platform to execute their event strategy and own their customer relationships, creating and tracking customer LTVs for their business. The platform offers best practices digital marketing and CRM functionality. Analytics and operational functions of selling and distributing tickets are streamlined, with social amplification tools to engage and excite customers.
In our experience, Ticket Fairy creates a minimum of 15% to 20% uplift in top line revenue, and it controls the secondary market to create safety for fans and more revenue for the event and venue, rather than benefiting the existing toxic scalper-heavy secondary ticketing ecosystem.
Helping Everyone to Eat
In today’s entertainment industry, artists and entertainers make most of their revenue through live events. However, these live events don’t just feed artists, a large portion of the benefit is also the uplift that fans and ticket-goers bring to the local economy through tourism and hospitality spend.
This win-win, circular economy is Ticket Fairy’s mission, to make sure everyone eats. If we can help promoters and venues sell more tickets, we ensure that artists and performers get paid, and that the local community can benefit from the income and money that those customers bring.
Ticket Fairy is designed to be front of house as well as the operational back end for promoters and venues when it comes to having a single source of truth for sales/marketing and targeted sponsorship, much like SalesForce is for corporates.
Web 2.5: Product-Market Fit
There has been a lot of hype around using blockchain technology to create better experiences in ticketing. However, without better UX, consumers are not going to use the technology in its current form, because they want ease of use and convenience.
99% of the time you don’t even need blockchain technology in startups – if you do use it, it needs to be transparent to the end user. The general public doesn’t need to (or care to) know that HTTPS and TCP/IP power the internet, so why would they care about the protocol layer for blockchain-based products?
Ticket Fairy currently sits squarely between Web2 and Web3.
We brought a seamless, self-service token-gated ticketing solution to the industry in 2021. Our new product allows events to adopt Web3 transparently in a Web2 experience, without any blockchain knowledge, making it possible to issue digital assets to event attendees. This then allows loyalty to be rewarded in a decentralised ecosystem. We believe this is the way we will all win – don’t change consumer behaviour, but give them the benefits of Web3.
Many people ask why Ticket Fairy is competing against big incumbents like Ticketmaster and Live Nation. The truth is that we don’t need to, nor do we aim to. Our primary goal is to keep independent companies in the events ecosystem alive, in the face of growing competition and the challenges of the cost of living crisis.
We are passionate about our clients and their customers, both the fans and the entertainers. In the end, the fans pay everyone’s bills. Because of this, it is crucial to think about delivering incredible customer value, and making them want to become loyal fans forever.
This article is originally by Ritesh Patel CEO and co-founder of Ticket Fairy on The Periphery.
