It’s Gametime (literally!)

The startup that’s changing the way you buy last-minute tickets

This story is now published on 🦄 Babyunicorns.com 🦄 at https://www.babyunicorns.com/articles/it-s-gametime-literally

Picture this: your favorite baseball team is playing in the National League Championship game, just one game away from the Word Series, and youscored tickets to watch them play.

You get to the gate, ready to witness baseball history, but when you reach into your pocket you realize your paper tickets are still sitting back at home!Disheartened, you’re turned away and forced to go re-print your tickets as the start of the game passes by.

That’s exactly what happened in 2012 to Brad Griffith, a senior Google analyst at the time, inspiring him to build a better solution that would eventually become Gametime.

How does Gametime work?

The first thing you notice when you navigate to Gametime’s website is its sleek and simple user interface. The site automatically picks up your location and matches you with the closest of the 60 major cities that it supports. Then, you can select from “Sports”, “Music”, or “Shows” to see the all the upcoming events in your city along with the lowest possible price at which you can score tickets.

Once you select your event, you’ll be taken to a page with only the lowest ticket prices to secure a seat, alongside a real picture to show off the view from each seat.

Simply click to purchase, and when game time rolls around you can easily access your digital tickets from your smartphone.

So what makes Gametime different from any other ticket marketplace?

Beyond its clean user interface, Gametime masterfully serves an important niche market: last-minute ticket buyers looking for a discount. In order to find the lowest possible prices, Gametime deploys a proprietary algorithm that searches other ticket sites across the web for unsold tickets.

By officially partnering with major sports leagues (like the MLB, NFL, and NBA) and major event venues, along with both primary and third-party ticket sellers, Gametime has access to a wide range of tickets, and is able to offer discounts as tickets remain unsold closer to the start time of the event.

In a market where users are looking for the quickest possible solution to save a buck, the key to Gametime’s success is the startup’s combination of unbeatable ticket prices with a website that cuts out all the clutter of unnecessary information.

Who’s on the roster?

Since its first seed round raise of just under $1M, Gametime has had support from prominent figures in the industry.

Part of the initial investor team were the founders of HotelTonight, a similar startup for booking last-minute vacant hotel rooms for a hefty discount. With a massive user base and over $117M in venture funding, HotelTonight’s founders are the perfect partners to help Gametime navigate the challenges of the last-minute discount business.

Another key partnership for Gametime is with professional sports teams. Both the San Francisco Giants and Sacramento Kings franchises placed an early vote of confidence in the startup when they invested alongside HotelTonight’s founders in Gametime’s seed round.

Since then, Gametime has continued to impress with its major partnerships which include Ticketmaster (a major ticket outlet selling over 142M tickets per year) and Bleacher Report (an industry-leading sports news company).

With support from all these major players, Gametime is poised to disrupt the event tickets market and finally give ticket-buyers the effortless marketplace experience that they’ve been craving.

What makes Gametime a baby unicorn?

• Strong leadership team with experience from Google and StubHub
• Powerful strategic partnerships with major sports leagues and ticket distributors
• Named the fastest-growing consumer products company in the U.S. by Inc. Magazine
• Raised over $40M from top venture capital funds including Accel and the Stanford Start-X Fund

What’s in the tech stack?

• On the frontend, Gametime primarily uses Javascript (React and Redux) along with AWS deployment.
• For their mobile app, developers work with a combination of Swift and Objective C.
• The infrastructure is built in Go, with microservices architecture in AWS.

Know someone looking?

Gametime is a startup with the benefits of a major tech company, including catered lunches and free tickets from the website. They’re currently looking to bolster their San Francisco headquarters with frontend, iOS, and full stack software engineers.

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