Having the GUTS to go abroad — Our International Ambitions
In this short blog we’ll give an overview of our plans and efforts to take our fully operational and blockchain powered solution to ticketing fraud and ticket scalping all over the globe. Before I get into our efforts to take this rocket of a concept state-side, allow me to sketch an overview of where we are product and business development wise.
After all, realizing where we are on the map of execution and adoption helps in determining where we are heading.
We know a thing or two about selling smart tickets
Last Friday more than 380 000 people visited our ticketing application at the same time. We sold 18.840 tickets in less than two hours for 20 differently seated theater shows. More specifics and the learned lessons about this milestone will be shared in the blog published soon. In this blog I want to describe why this ticket sale isn’t ‘more of the same’, but actually part of a progressing and continuous effort of challenging and improving the tech-stack of our smart ticketing application.
Read more about how we go about building our scalable and user-friendly smart ticketing application in this blog of Product Owner Frans Twisk.
Working product ≠ scalable product ≠ mature concept
The reasons why we haven’t announced any international event yet is not because we lack the drive or ambition to go over the border, nor is the reason a lack of foreign interest by ticketing companies (on the contrary actually, but allow me to boast about this attention later on).
The main reason we haven’t conducted any ticketing abroad is because even though we have a working product, we don’t have a mature product. The difference? A mature product is able to handle the wide array of edge cases thrown at any ticketing use case in the real world. These edge cases for example are a consumer having no smart phone that still wants to buy a smart ticket. Such cases are now handled on a case-by-case basis by our support staff. This means a support session per edge case (meaning we have to chat/email with these people and figure out how they will be able to attend their event). Such assistance is called ‘support overhead’ and it basically just costs money.
While offering support is not a problem at its core (you can price the costs into the service charge of the tickets) it is pretty logical to conclude that your product should work in such a way that it minimizes the need for such support. All in all: we want to minimize support overhead. Why? Competitive pricing. Offering personal support is quite expensive and becomes a really complex/expensive endeavor when you have to support events all over the globe (different currencies, times zones, languages, cultures, laws etc.).
So what am I trying to say? Well, currently we have a relatively large support overhead on a event basis (not in comparison with other ticketing companies, I wouldn’t know). Just based on own experience and our drive to make the experience of buying a smart ticket as frictionless as possible, we conclude we have room to improve. We are improving a lot overhead wise but there is still room to be more efficient, smoother and more fair and transparent.
Should we go abroad because we can? Because marketing?
Could we ticket a festival in the US? Or Asia? Certainly, no problem at all. Would we learn from it? For sure. But would we learn from it more than from ticketing a Dutch festival or theater show? No, not in this stage of our product development. Actually we would learn less from an event so far away from Amsterdam HQ as we cannot directly interact/observe the reaction and feedback of the actors during the event. At this point we need to keep our finger on the pulse of the actors/consumers to improve our product and thus reduce the support overhead and overall experience.
Slowly we are getting at a point where we are comfortable and can handle larger and larger events without breaking a sweat. Where we boasted to you last year on this exact blog we conducted a sale of 2 000 tickets in a single day [pilot 1, pilot 2], last Friday we sold 18 000+ tickets in a half hour. Next stop; in Q3 of this year we are going to sell 40 000 tickets in one sesh and in the final Q4 of ‘18 we have around 100 000 tickets scheduled to be sold. You see where this is heading or should I make a plot?
TLDR: We are scaling up fast. Strap in.
Adding functionalities while keeping our core promise in place
We sell honest tickets. That is why we exist. That is our promise. Most functionalities needed to solve edge cases like; gifting of tickets, transfer to relatives, splitting tickets because somebody is running late, a changed phone number due to work issues by a ticket holder etc. These are all cases we need to facilitate in some way. Most edge cases can be solved by developing app functionalities and testing if these actually lower the support overhead. This is an iterative process of building, testing and collecting feedback. It takes time.
Crucial is that while we add these functionalities we should keep our eye focused on the reason why we exist: Honest tickets. Always. Scalpers are looking for the weak spot in our armor 24/7. Like my boxing instructor always says;
‘Don’t drop your cover while you’re punching or you’ll end up punching the floor’.
This means that while some functionalities are easily built conceptually, correct implementation and testing is needed to ensure we don’t compromise on the core promise. Guaranteed honest tickets.
Its more than a QR code you know
The general point here is that this smart ticketing application is a lot more than just a changing QR code (which isn’t even computed on the blockchain, this isn’t possible; too expensive and slow and what’s the problem solved doing that logic on the blockchain?).
The organizer expects a dashboard giving them insights into an events sale, remember these are the clients picking up the tab, convincing them is key. These organizers are used to data insights and a privilege management system currently offered by our competitors. Allowing these organizers and artists to add, edit and manage an event without our personal attention or monitoring is key here. Again; cutting down on the support overhead. Sure we have some runway due to the ICO and can afford a few years of reddish numbers. That being said, we need to converge to a point where these numbers become black.
Roughly sketched out you could summarize our development and business focus as follows:
2017 Concept validation, festival and theater pilots. Testing the product in real life, designing the blockchain protocol. Conduct ICO. Check out blogs from 2017 to see how this all went down.
Total smart tickets sold in ‘17: 20 000.
2018 Focus on scale and reducing support overhead. Dashboard for event creating, management and data insights for EO. Conducting several scaling tests. Main-net launch of blockchain based GET Protocol in Q3 of 2018. Total smart tickets sold to date (as of June 4th): 40 000.
Projected for 2018: 200 000.
2019 Start sales cycle festival market domestically and abroad. Consolidate domestic market share in venues/stadiums. On-board ticketing companies on a mature and stress-tested blockchain protocol/ecosystem. Scale scale scale.
Projected for 2019: 1000 000+.
You raised +10k ETH right for a protocol right? Not to fund your ticketing company!!
Easy tiger. I get your point, when we conducted the ICO we did so on the premise of building a frictionless blockchain protocol for ticketing companies worldwide. Standardizing and creating a transparent value flow of the whole business model of tickets. If we weren’t up for this challenge we shouldn’t have conducted an ICO. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver right? I agree.
But for building a protocol the same point about edge cases made earlier applies. A decentralized blockchain protocol only works if it supports all edge cases encountered in ticket ownership transfers. At the end of the day a product used by an end-user like my mother should just work. Always. If some function runs out of gas or if a Solidity modifier restricts some state change it will cause data corruption at its best (if this is the case then the app is not truly decentralized) and a terrible user-experience (app is stuck) at its worst. People expect a ticketing app to just work, for them a ticket is a means to an end. We don’t want to forcefully introduce consumers to crypto and things like varying Gwei prices due to some cat game going viral in Japan. The same way your internet provider doesn’t force you to understand how your emails are being routed and what server ports you should choose to make sure your email reach its destination.
Contemporary ticketing works. Smart ticketing should work better, not worse.
I understand it Kasper, but when are you finally ready to take this cool stuff abroad?
We have been building our launch pad to foreign markets since mid 2017. After all, it is never too early to start laying down the ramp to international ticketing. To quote my main man Reid Hoffman:
What is an entrepreneur? Someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.
It’s true, staying in a comfort zone albeit it scale wise or geographically is the easy thing to do. While I know for a fact everybody here at the office would disagree that we are keeping it in the comfort zone development/tech wise. After all we are building features like personalized predictive waiting time indicators based on event location preference indicated by each user, dynamic pricing mechanisms, creating on-chain state-machines for tickets and publishing mathematical proofs of honesty in margins (without compromising on user protection privacy data laws, GDPR all-the-way baby!).
A lot is going on. Trust me. We are jumping out of several planes simultaneously all over the globe.
But lets get somewhat concrete here.
What we have planned
We never liked the crypto tradition of firing off empty marketing shells as actual adoption progress. I strongly believe that keeping communication to what you know you will deliver on is key to build and regain trust of our community of ambassadors. Due to this ‘partnership’ silence it can give the impression we are sitting ducks doing nothing else but selling tickets for artists you never heard of, in cities you didn’t even know existed for theaters/venues you don’t really care about.
When festival? When Tomorrowland? When Asia marketing? When marketing? When [placeholder]?
What we are up to:
- We are collaborating with several large crypto projects that actually add direct value to our product (selling honest tickets). As always we will only announce these partnerships as soon as we can concretely point out when, how and why we are using their tech, token or platform and how this will increase the amount of tickets transferred over the GET Protocol. No empty shells will be fired.
- Expanding in Europe, Asia and North America is something that has been on our roadmap since the company was born. We are still on track. Remember GUTS Tickets has venture investors, these guys are all about replication as soon as we are able to prove a mature concept. They have been laying pipes for almost two years now, so yeah that will happen when we are done improving. Yes, we will use the GET Protocol. We are your blockchain squad after all. If I need to sign a transaction from an address created in early 2012 hit me up, your bro can show how nerd-cool he is anytime of the day.
- We realized soon enough that expanding in Asia is perfect as there are several extremely crypto friendly hubs in that region. We are in contact with several ticketing companies that are interested in our smart ticketing API. In fact I’ll be off to Asia in a few weeks to shake some hands and close some deals.
- E-sports is an area we believe our identity bound tickets are perfect for, as it is a strongly growing industry with user interaction at its core. We have several strong leads and are planning our first steps in this area. Make sure to follow us on all channels and you won’t miss out on these updates.
- EURO2020. needisaymore?*
- And many, many more. But I’ll keep it at this.
*My apologies, I clearly do need to say more (after initial posting of the blog this brief mention took a flight of its own and that was not my intention). We are currently in talks with the decision makers for the Dutch stadiums participating in EURO2020. Their particular interest is mainly fueled by the fact that our tickets are identity bound and smart/self-aware (meaning they are able to communicate with the holder through the smart phone based on location/ticket-status data). Due to this we are especially well able to facilitate certain crowd control mechanisms extremely relevant for events like these. Making it able to reduce riot risks, improving entry and exit flows, improving overall security. This is not set in stone and was just meant as an actual example of a business development angle we are on (and a very serious one in this case). This specific opportunity for application of GET smart ticketing technology is in what I would call a rather advanced state of exploration, while we are still several crucial steps removed from the moment inkt will dry on the line that is dotted, the process is at a point where concrete and practical details are being considered and discussed. TLDR: Exciting stuff!
We are looking very seriously at applications of our ticketing system in a wide array of industries and geographic areas.
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, or get yourself a smart event ticket in our sandbox environment.
