Update July ‘19
Less is more, but more is also more!
Welcome back! Before we start, a fair warning: The following blog contains the word ‘ticket’ 146 times. That’s because we are going to talk about tickets a lot. Amongst other things, we will talk about the selling of tickets, the horrible business conduct in the world of ticketing, and we’re going to show you something cool about our processing of tickets. Just so you know.
Here’s a sense of the topics we’re going to cover this time, see you on the other side!
̛Index:
1.) Media Mentions
Responses to a sale in a new sector, books, blogs, pods.2.) A note on the financial continuity of the organisation
CEO Maarten shares some insights into the operational runway.3.) News from the world of ticketing
An eventful month in the world of ticketing; F1, Google bans, viral videos and more.4.) Speaking Korean
Business developer Sander about reaching Korean prospects.5.) Life at GUTS
A new platform for new hires — and a new hire!6.) Community Meetup
It’s a matter of weeks! This is not a drill.7.) Product Update
Product Designer Frans takes us into the new GET Ticket Scanner app!
Media & Mentions
Audio Obscura ADE Sale
On July 10th the first sale for GUTS Tickets’ newest client Audio Obscura went live. Prior to the sale, the partnership was announced on the AO facebook page:
As written in the first announcement of this partnership, we are very excited and proud to work together with such a progressive and creative team, and look forward to providing the attendees of these top-notch events with the ticketing experience they deserve.
The sale was for three events, all during Amsterdam Dance Event, in October of this year. Here are the line-up and the facebook events with more information:
October 17th Audio Obscura x Spectrum at Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ
October 18th Audio Obscura at Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ w/ Len Faki, Blawan, ROD
October 19th Audio Obscura & Adriatique presents: X at Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ
Besides the original and innovative events, another reason why Audio Obscura is an interesting client is the variety in fans and their backgrounds. Unlike with most other events, where you can usually find a common denominator that ties together a fanbase or at least a general sense of cohesion, the AO following is, quite literally, all over the place. Such a wiiiide variety of nationalities and backgrounds is a great way to expose our system to people from all over the world.
Fun fact: Dance lovers from 24 different countries have gotten their hands on Audio Obscura tickets for the three upcoming events during ADE 2019. Just like music, ticketing knows no borders.
The sale went smoothly and the positive responses were great to see.
A great start to the partnership, and we look forward to the events and future sales!
Itix announces GET Protocol partnership
The second company to start using GET Protocol, Itix, sent out a mailing this month to announce the news to their following. Just thought I’d share:
Translation:
In an earlier newsletter we already announced that we were looking for ways to make the sale of tickets more honest and personal, while stopping unwanted reselling. After a few very interesting initial talks, ticketing platform GET Protocol and Itix have agreed to a partnership.
The initiator and first user of GET Protocol is GUTS Tickets, that successfully uses the underlying technology to prevent scalping and fraud.
By integrating this solution, Itix and ticketingplatform GET Protocol are bridging the gap between the unwanted reselling of tickets at dishonest prices on one side, and the retention and application of valuable data points on the other side.
Within Itix, this will be offered as an applicable ticket type per show. Currently, the technical development is being finalized. After that, thorough testing will be conducted, before being made available to everyone.
Liquid Love
The team over at Liquid released a blog titled ‘Five crypto projects to watch in 2019’, which included GET. From the blog:
‘Any investment requires thorough due diligence, but analyzing a project isn’t always easy. Crypto investors have to assess projects based on the core fundamentals that are available, such as the team, the target market and progress being made.
At Liquid, we are ecstatic to work with crypto startups that are flying high in 2019 and exceeding expectations.
(…)The GET Protocol team continues to move forward, with consistent technology, partnership and other news being released on their Medium every month.’
We are of course very honoured to be mentioned by our friends at Liquid in this context, if you want to read the full blog you can do so here:
Want to fill up your venue? Use GUTS!
GUTS Tickets is named in the new management book: ‘Full Venues — The best strategy for a sold out event’. GUTS is mentioned as one of the innovations currently popping up in the cultural sector, as you can see below.
The book is aimed at event organizers in all areas, and is full of advice on how to optimize the attendance and experience of visitors all around. If this sounds interesting to you, the book is available here.
Podcastinatin’
Roel, friend of GET Protocol and Nocks founder, went on the (Dutch) Blockchain Realisten podcast, where he talked about a lot of different topics, including GET!
Here’s the link if you wanna check it out, GET is discussed from 24:30 on.
Financial continuity of the organisation
From GET/GUTS CEO Maarten Bloemers.
With the first signs of cryptospring in the air, we thought it would be fitting to provide an update on how we made it through the winter and to give some insight in the continuity and strategy of the organisation. Although we aim to be as transparent as possible, we shall not go into specifics because this could harm our position in the market.
Just before the winter we’ve used a rather large portion of ETH to provide us with 1,5 years of runway. In hindsight we’d rather have used a bit more, but all in all we’re quite pleased with the chosen strategy. Furthermore we’ve mitigated risks by swapping a sizeable amount of ETH to BTC. The organisation as a whole only has ETH & BTC in holding because we believe these to have reached (to some extent) an anti-fragile state.
In short; things are good on the crypto side of things.
After almost 3 years of building, we believe our application is ready to scale. With the functionalities we now offer we’re a player to be reckoned with in the Dutch ticketing market. New additions to our sales team and upcoming functionalities will help grow and consolidate our market share in the Netherlands.
Because of the tight grip ticketing behemoths have over venues, artists and promoters, the most efficient way to grow is by onboarding independent parties and they are scarce if we keep acting locally. To maximize volume in tickets, our goal for next year is to standardize our front and backend, so anybody who wants to create their own primary ticketing company can do so without too much hassle.
Existing ticketing companies can choose to implement our tech with little to no investment, both financially and time-wise, and can start to reap all the benefits of selling truly digital tickets. Our strategy to take down the behemoths can be summarized best by; death by a thousand cuts.
Our burn rate is decreasing steadily due to turnover new clients are bringing in.
Even without any new clients we could keep up the current pace for several years, but we’ve projected that we’ll hit break even well before our means run out.
To achieve that goal we’re hiring new team members every month and will continue to do so. Even without any new clients we could keep up the current pase for several years, but we’ve projected that we’ll hit break even well before our means run out.
TLDR; Continuity of the organisation is guaranteed due to recurring revenue and there is room to invest in further growth for several years.
The news from ticketing land
Ticketing troubles Part 1/4: First turn spin-out
The return of Formula 1 racing to Holland led to a massive hype, followed by a million Dutch people who registered for the 100K tickets available. With such a high demand, it was going to be interesting to see how the organisation was going to deal with the potential of reselling and fraud.
It turns out, not great.
Within 30 minutes of the tickets being allocated to the randomly drawn winners, there were already dozens of tickets up for sale at incredible mark-ups.
The organisation behind the event has made statements saying that the reselling of tickets is allowed, however it is not allowed to make a profit off of the sale.
How this is regulated or checked exactly is not clear, and meanwhile hundreds if not thousands of offers and transactions have already taken place.
Another element that complicates things for consumers is that the tickets will be sent to consumers somewhere in 2020. This means that in a lot of cases, people who have purchased tickets from someone else through secondary platforms such as Marktplaats, will still need that person to transfer the tickets to them next year.
That’s a lot of trust to place in someone you don’t know.
Meanwhile CM, the ticketing company behind this event, has announced that they will be releasing their own secondary ticketing platform next year, to facilitate the resale of these tickets. Why this is only happening next year while hundreds of racing fans are already being overcharged and quite possibly scammed due to the vague specifics of the sale, I don’t know.
What I do know is that there can never be enough secondary ticketing platforms, right? Definitely not another calculated moneygrab, right? Riiiight? We’ll see… But we know.
Meanwhile media platform RTL Z started digging around and asked a spokesperson for the Marktplaats platform exactly how the Dutch GP was going to track down scalpers and those committing ticket fraud, to which they respond:
“Marktplaats connects a buyer to a seller, but we don’t monitor transactions. We also don’t provide user information to the Dutch GP. (…) We can’t go and block the reselling of Formula 1 tickets. That would negatively effect sellers who sell for the allowed price.”
The article rightly clarifies that while Marktplaats is not obligated to prevent reselling taking place, Dutch GP still reserves the right to take action and invalidate tickets at a later point. They have threatened to do so, but have yet to clarify how this would be done and under which conditions.
This leaves a looooot of grey area and — as can be deducted from the quote from Marktplaats — is likely to be a bluff. If not, it is likely that fans are going to suffer from randomly imposed sanctions. Either way: bad news.
All of this drama can instantly be prevented by our merged primary and secondary markets. Fans buy and sell their tickets in one place, with clearly defined rules that apply to everyone. This is no theoretical dream by the way, this is how GUTS Tickets works.
On a more positive note, the sale and subsequent reselling sparked some obvious outrage, which also consisted of a lot of mentions of GUTS as a viable solution to the issues:
This was fantastic to see, and a valuable contribution in public awareness and negotiating position in general of GUTS. When the business side of events or organisations can be unwilling to change, the public opinion and visible demand for innovation can make a lot of difference. So, thank you!
Ticketing news part 2/4: Viral festival lifehack
The popular Youtube channel ‘Gierige Gasten’, where two guys try to live life without spending any money, dedicated an episode to getting into festivals without paying.
Their idea was to mess with the scanner system of several festivals by copying the same ticket and have it be checked in at roughly the same time by two different people. Sounds like one of those ‘what if’-stoner ideas, except it actually worked. Here’s the full video if you want to see it happen:
To give some technical context, here’s our Backend Software Developer Santos with some insight:
As seen in the video, other ticketing systems experience issues when the same ticket code is scanned in multiple devices at the same time (or within a very small time frame, a few seconds).
When the scanning network is subject to communication delays between the devices, each scanner is not fully aware of all other tickets scanned at that exact moment, at least until it re-synchronizes with the network and retrieves the full overview of all other scanned tickets.
Eventually, the ticketing company will realize the scanning incident, it just so happens that by then it will already be too late to deny entrance to the duplicate ticket holder.
GUTS employs several techniques that guarantee the integrity of the scanning process. Starting with the GUTS mobile wallets, tickets are only seen by their rightful owner or his friends if he so choses to share his tickets.
These tickets are presented in the form of dynamic QR codes that get updated regularly in the mobile wallet. This means that when scanning time arrives, ticket holders will always have the correct version of their ticket ready to be scanned. When the scanning of an event starts, a central database acts as the real time source of truth for all valid tickets, guaranteeing that those pesky double scanning attempts are quickly detected and disallowed.
Part 3/4: Google drops Viagogo as advertiser
Arguably the biggest ticketing global ticketing news this past month was the instantly applied ban of all Viagogo’s advertising on Google.
This may not seem like a huge defeat, but Google advertising is a maaaajor part of Viagogo’s business model.
The insanely high margins and fees they charge for every ticket sold, allows them to spend equally insanely high amounts of money on the advertisement of these tickets.
Viagogo spends all of this money in order to ensure they are the first to be shown as the first option when your grandma Googles ‘Elton John Tickets Where Buy Help Me Rocketman’.
By immediately being shown the Viagogo link, along with words like ‘official’ and ‘tickets available now’, a fair mount of people assume that Viagogo is the original or even only point of sale for tickets.
Fun fact: even if you googled ‘GUTS Tickets’, the Viagogo Google ads used to lead you to tickets for a French rapgroup named ‘GUTS’. Here’s what it looked like:
In recent months, there has been a growing outrage over the way Viagogo conducts its business. This is for a variety of reasons, each more evil than the last. A few examples:
There was the selling of tickets before they were even publicly available…
Then there were the members of British Parliament who ‘issued a warning to the public against using secondary ticketing website Viagogo until it ‘fully complies with consumer law’. The report further claims that Viagogo has ‘caused distress for too many music fans for too long’.’
And the federal court in Australia that firmly decided that Viagogo has misled consumers. From the article:
‘The Federal Court has found Viagogo engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct through its Google advertisements, claims about the scarcity of tickets and added fees.
Common complaints on online review sites and dedicated Facebook groups are that customers believed it to be the official ticket seller due to its top position in Google search results, felt rushed to purchase for fear of missing out on the tickets, and only later realised they may have paid well above the original ticket price.
The court found that from May 1, 2017 to June 26, 2017, Viagogo misled consumers by using the word “official” in its Google advertisements.’
The Google ban is an important battle to win, but the war is far from over…
Ticket troubles part 4/4: The admission (price) of guilt
News broke this month that Live Nation has in the past sold tickets directly on the secondary marketplaces instead of through primary channels at face value. The news was originally broken by Billboard:
And quickly picked up by ticketing outlets…
…To be picked up by mainstream news.
Here’s a summary from TicketingBusiness:
Billboard said it had obtained a secret recording of Bob Roux, Live Nation’s president of US concerts, discussing how the company could assist someone claiming to represent Metallica in redirecting 88,000 tickets to resale sites like StubHub rather than selling them at face value via normal channels.
The conversation reportedly took place in February 2017 ahead of Metallica’s WorldWired North American stadium tour. Billboard reports that Roux was speaking to an event promoter who had been tasked by an associate of the band to switch the tickets to resale sites.
In the recording Roux suggests either a Live Nation employee or a venue box office could place the tickets into a singular account and then list them on secondary sites. He says that the action must be concealed.
In a statement Live Nation admitted it had assisted artists with such requests in the past but new technology and products meant it was no longer an issue.
This news confirmed the widespread suspicion that big ticketing companies have been making insane profits by circumventing primary sales routes and opting for the unlimited secondary option. It’s not hard to guess why these companies have always been very eager to provide secondary platforms of their own…
Conclusion: The current mainstream ticketing industry is rotten. In other news: water is wet, popes and polar bears do shady stuff in the woods together, etcetera, etcetera. We’re working on it.
Wanna join the fight for a better (ticketing) world? Keep reading..
Speaking Korean
A brief note from Business Developer Sander.
We continue to experience interest in our radically new way of ticketing from many corners of the world. As was pointed out in last months update blog, the Korean market specifically seems a perfect fit for our innovative way of ticketing. A few reasons for this are the high smartphone penetration and that ticketing scalping issues are very big. In order to boost our potential in the land where K-Pop was born, all of the GUTS Tickets products support the Korean language from now on!
Life at GUTS
This month we started a new blog series, titled ‘Life @ GUTS’. The diehard GET and GUTS followers will recognize most of the content, as it partly contains segments from other blogs, meant to provide insights into the life behind the scenes and screens of GUTS Tickets. You can read the blog here.
The blog will be hosted on the new GUTS recruitment page, which you can check out by clicking on the image below.
In the future, more blogs will be added to give potential new employees a sense of what working at GUTS is like.
As a sidenote, there are currently three job openings that you can apply for. Click on the link below to read the descriptions and application requirements:
Scansupport (Note: must speak Dutch)
Feel free to get in touch if you have questions about the job openings or if you know just the right person! This past month we were glad to have software developer Thibault join us, who was promptly given a warm welcome gift:
COMMUNITY MEETUP #2 is coming up!
Another way to get a sense of what it’s like at the GUTS/GET office is to actually be here! Come drink our drinks, breathe our oxygen (what, too weird?) and hang out on August 30th. Everybody’s more than welcome, whether you are a GET holder, crypto enthusiast or just curious about digital ticketing.
Here’s a short impression of the first one:
Tickets: We wouldn’t wanna let this chance go by to show you how our ticketing system works first-hand, so be sure to RSVP by getting your tickets for the event: GET YOUR TICKET.
Just a heads up: There is a limited capacity at our office, so we have capped the amount of tickets that are available. Please get yours in time.
For people visiting from outside The Netherlands, be sure to add your country code in front of your phone number when registering.
Schedule:
17.00–19.00 Welcome drinks & bites, casual chats & ping-pong games
19.00–19.30 Speech by team member(s)
19.30–23.00 More substantial drinks, bites & chats
23.00 The end — spontaneous afterparty at other location optional
Address: Piet Heinkade 181-H, 1019 HC Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Note: Enter the door on the right and walk past the desk to the door all the way in the back, and take that elevator up the top floor (number 6). Don’t take the stairs or you will spend all night trapped in the building at one of the many offices of Dutch start-ups in the building. According to Dutch law, you will then have to complete a six month internship at said start-up before you can go home.
Time: From 5PM until the police shut it down (or, probably like 11PM).
What to bring: Your best mood and appetite.
Who’s welcome: You, your friends, your (grand)parents and anyone who might be interested in disrupting the world of ticketing. Just make sure everyone GETs a ticket!
The first 25 people to show up will get a special something, so make sure you’re there nice and early!
Product Update: GET Protocol Ticket Scanner
From Product Designer Frans Twisk.
Although we have had a dedicated scanning app since the very beginning of GUTS (and therefor GET), it is finally time to release this publicly! GUTS Tickets has more and more clients who want to use different types of phones for ticket validation and GET Protocol has its second ticketeer Itix, which is also able to use it for validating their issued tickets through GET Protocol. Bringing the GET Protocol Ticket Scanner, or ‘GET In’ for short, to the app stores will make it easier to distribute, use it standalone and allows for easier updating of the app, which can be used anywhere, a breeze.
Let’s dive a bit into the details of the app. It’s been designed and built to do one task, and one task only (for now): validating tickets and their owners as simple and fast as possible.
You start by loging in to your organisations’ account by entering OR scanning a special access-code. You can immediately start scanning. This simple code makes it easy to distribute access to multiple scanners, while giving them limited access to your event details (e.g. only using the app is allowed, not dashboard access, etc). One phone can even let another phone login, creating a chain reaction useful for big scan teams.
Scanning itself can be done by turning the camera into “always on” mode, or press and hold the screen to scan, saving battery life and useful for less crowded lines. Saving battery life is also one of the requirements (duh) and one of the reasons we chose a mostly dark UI, which can save battery life on phones with an OLED screen.
When a QR code is recognised, the app will immediately also get the account linked, and check if it has any valid tickets for the event your organisation is running at that moment. If no valid tickets are found, we show explanatory messages saying what might have caused this (maybe the visitor has tickets for a different date, maybe the QR is a screenshot and therefore timed-out, the QR is simply not valid at all, etcetera). This all happens in well under half a second.
With valid tickets the check-in screen appears with all tickets for that account preselected and ready to be checked in with a single tap. This means that a whole group can be checked in at once. It support multiple ticket types, which can all be lowered individually (if someone comes in later), and it shows extra information like for instance the section, entrance and seats that a visitor has assigned.
Check-in happens real-time, using a buffer to write this to a central database, and it’s therefore impossible to check-in the same tickets again, even if this would happen almost instantaneously (e.g. one would always be faster than the other, even if only a few milliseconds) — See Santos’ comments on the viral video above.
After checking in, the app returns to the scanner screen ready to scan the next (batch of) tickets.
That’s all there is to it! For this release we have rebuilt the scanning app from the ground up, and we are planning on adding a few features to it in the near future, such as:
- Real time statistics of progress.
- Only allow check-in in certain tickets on certain phones, useful for checking in at venues with different entrances for instance.
- Offline scanning through a local distributed network.
- Browsing through attendees and guest lists and manual check-ins.
The GET Protocol Ticket Scanner is currently being reviewed one last time and will be released in the app stores for both iOS and Android somewhere in the upcoming days. Happy scanning!
More about the GET Protocol
Any questions or want to know more about what we do? Join our active Telegram community for any questions you might have, read our whitepaper, visit the website, join the discussion on the GET Protocol Reddit. Or get yourself a smart event ticket in our sandbox environment. Download the GUTS Tickets app on iOS or Android.
