January ’19 update
It’s nearly February, which means that the new year’s resolutions have been forgotten and there is a nice monthly update blog for you to feast your eyes on. This time we have lots of real-world ticket action, some industry shoulder rubbing and a juicy technological update.
Media coverage
English:
GUTS Tickets: Use dynamic pricing to raise funds for charity
The Ultimate Guide to Small Market Cap Cryptocurrencies.
Dutch:
Jochem Myjer tickets zonder woekerprijzen dankzij blockchainplatform GUTS
Wilminktheater past kaartverkoop Jochem Myjer aan.
Korean:
암표 문제를 해결하는 티켓팅 플랫폼 ‘GUTS(굿츠)’.
Italian:
Vendere I Biglietti Dei Concerti Legalmente con GUTS Tickets.
Recent events:
Feedback from the field
This month, Jochem Myjer started performing his enormous batch of shows at the Royal Theater Carré. The same batch of shows for which tickets were sold during the big sale of 50.000+ tickets in September ‘18.
After all of the build-up to these events, it was good to get underway and actually process the tickets that had been sold. (By the way, you can always monitor tickets being sold and resold on the blockchain on Etherscan here.) Carré is a prestigious theater with lots of seats and frequent visitors that demand an excellent experience. In other words; pressure!
Things went well! The scanning of tickets went smoothly (nearly all people had their phones with the QR codes out upon arrival), lines moved quickly and the responses were positive.
One thing that really stuck out was a response from someone working at the venue, who remarked that visitors were very easily finding their seats. The interpretation given for this, was that since the exact seat numbers are released only a day before the show, people are far more aware of them, which leads to visitors knowing where they need to go and thus speeding up the process of entrance for everyone.
Sometimes, the show must not go on
The last thing anybody wants is of course for a show to get cancelled — especially at the last minute. Unfortunately, life doesn’t give a shit about what anybody wants. Things happen and you must react accordingly.
As anyone with a family member who claims to hold supernatural powers can tell you, bad things always come in threes. That explains why this month not one or two, but three shows had to be cancelled at the very last minute, due to health issues of the performers.
That’s life, and what’s also life is the fact that there are then hundreds of people who have tickets for these events that need to be notified. In the latest of the three, the show was cancelled two hours before the doors were supposed to open.
With traditional ticketing, this would have meant a lot of chaos. With traditional (static) tickets, you are unsure whether the person who bought the ticket is actually still in possession of it, or if he/she has resold it or passed it along. Therefore, reaching all of the actual ticket holders before they make the trip to the venue is next to impossible. Sending out e-mails doesn’t guarantee that they will be read on such a short basis, and again, there is no way to know if you even reach the right person. This results in lots of disappointed people at your venue.
Luckily, the protocol allows an event organizer to directly view who is in possession of smart tickets for every specific show, along with their mobile phone numbers. That’s why we were able to send out text messages informing these ticket holders that the show was not going to be happening that night.
While of course an unfortunate situation, this feature prevented a huge amount of additional disappointment and frustration from visitors traveling from far and wide and actually showing up to a closed door. The shows were rescheduled, for which the existing tickets were automatically transferred. People who couldn’t attend on the new date could easily put their ticket up for sale, although over 90% of the people kept their tickets. This process meant a lot less hassle for both visitor and event organizers (no tickets needed to be refunded and less costs had to be made.
In other words, a good chance to show how smart ticketing can improve an event in a lot of different ways. Even when it doesn’t end up taking place.
Random acts of kindness
Twitter can be somewhat of a soul-sucking playground, designed for succubuses and demagogues alike to run free and ruin all hope for humanity. But, just sometimes, it’s actually kind of nice. Especially when tweets like these pop up:
Translation: ‘Since I’ve sold my tickets through GUTS Tickets, not a single one of my tickets is being resold for a profit by touts. That makes me extremely happy! It took some doing to get it done, but we’ve succeeded. Fuck the frauds!’
That is of course one of Holland’s most popular comedians, Jochem Myjer, sharing the great news that since working with GUTS Tickets, none of his tickets have been scalped. Not only did he tweet this, he also shared it on Instagram and Facebook, to a total of 2 million followers.
As if that in itself isn’t enough, we were amazed by the hundreds of positive responses from Jochem’s fans. Not to toot our own horn too much, but we really want to share a few of our favorites with you:
This is of course the most ideal type of publicity and it has already caused a heap of new interest, from artists and venues. It’s also great to see that fans and those on the organising side of things now clearly understand the benefits of working with GUTS & GET Protocol.
Of course we will do everything in our power to make Jochem an even happier man, along with everyone else who makes the choice to go for honest ticketing.
Benchmarking, stadium style
On February 12th, GUTS will process the ticketing at the largest venue to date, AFAS Live. French superstar ZAZ will be taking the stage, but not before thousands of people will have shown their tickets to enter the venue. That’s where things get really interesting.
As you may or may not recall, this event is ticketed by both GUTS Tickets and this other little company called TicketMaster. This side-by-side selling offers some interesting opportunities in terms of comparison.
On the one hand you’ve got a heartless beast that will screw over anyone in its path to make an extra dollar, and on the other hand there’s a more noble party. (Not saying who’s who in this example, which makes me personally untouchable lawsuit-wise, I’m fairly certain.)
The first noticeable difference was already in full swing months ahead of the show. While it is of course technically impossible for tickets sold by GUTS to be sold outside of the protected ecosystem, that is unfortunately not the case for TicketMaster’s tickets. This lead to an instant availability of overpriced tickets on the websites of the usual suspects (say it with me) Viagogo & TopTicketShop. The original price was €40, as you can see here. Have a look at what happens when bots & scalpers get involved:
Viagogo
Note the buy pressure with the red buttons. By the way the ‘1 section is already sold out’ is complete nonsense. There is only general admission at this show. On the bottom right you can see the total: €105. That’s 262% of the original price.
TopTicketShop
TopTicketShop also never disappoints; what looks to be an uncharacteristically modest price hike of only nearly 75% is put over the top when the service fees of €12,50 are added, leading to a grand total of €81,50, or a little over 200% of the original price.
Of course the scalpability and ticket price aren’t the only things we can measure at this event. Plenty more interesting comparisons can probably be made; crowd control being one of them. But more on that in next month’s blog!
Business update
From Business Developer Sander Regtuijt.
Against the backdrop of the city Groningen in the north of the Netherlands one of the most buzzing and thrilling music conferences in Europe takes place every year. Its name: Eurosonic Noorderslag. For the third year in a row we were present and after winning the Buma meets Tech Award in 2017, expanding our name in 2018, this year we really felt we established a foothold in the ticketing space. For the first time, many of the attendees had a clue about who we are and what we are here for: creating a worldwide honest ticketing marketplace.
To advocate that mission, we were invited to join a few panels. From a technology and innovation perspective Tom was to be found at the roundtable together with a few other companies disrupting the music business.
Eurosonic is all about networking in an informal way. During the day there are many panels and presentations on all kinds of topics, while bands play in the venues all over the city. Adding to the informal atmosphere, beer starts to flood around mid-afternoon. It’s then when it’s getting fun and you go from one introduction to another into the dark of the night.
After some well spent sleeping hours first thing next morning was checking if all our GUTS branding was still in place.
They were. We brought dozens of them and kept holding on to their positions until the bitter end.
Thursday pretty much all the big stakeholders in the industry had a meeting behind closed doors, discussing secondary ticketing. Among them big and amazing festivals, the usual big ticketing companies and various well-known artist managements.
It would not make sense to simply do some namedropping here about who we met and what was discussed, but we had several meetings with industry leaders from Europe and beyond. Now, it’s our task to build these connections into partnerships. We’re on it.
As always, if you have any leads, ideas or contacts that you think might be relevant, feel free to send and e-mail to sander@guts.tickets to help out. We are always open to new angles and suggestions.
Technical update
From Product Designer & Co-Founder Frans Twisk.
On the 9th of May 2018, we released the first version of our mobile ticket wallet app. We couldn’t get closer to a minimum viable product: you can log in with your mobile number and sms code and get the QR code of your first upcoming event. That’s it.
To be honest, we initially didn’t want to release a true native app. App installs are declining while the web, progressive web-apps & browsers are capable of similar functionalities like offline support, launch from homescreen, camera access, etcetera. And we believe in the web!
What changed our mind? Our users did! We found people were having a hard time finding their tickets, because they bought them months ago and were struggling to find them in their mailbox. Even more troubling: we found that some of our users got caught in an infinite login-loop, because the web-app would open in an in-app browser, without the ability to switch apps and read their verification-code. We can’t control which (in-app) browser opens when a user taps a link…
Always having direct access to your tickets with a single tap, and being in full control of how we can display this, are both must-haves in our opinion. The first version of our mobile app solved this, but it’s time to bring more features to our mobile app.
Fun fact: Roughly 18.000 people have the GUTS Tickets app on their Android phone or iPhone.
Introducing GUTS Tickets Wallet V2.0
Everything you can do with all your tickets in one place! We have brought all the features we offer on the web-app to the mobile app, but in a completely redesigned and improved way:
- Completely rewritten codebase offering speed-improvements and overall improved experience;
- A beautiful overview of all your upcoming events;
- See when your tickets will unlock and when your seat numbers become available (if applicable);
- List your tickets and put one or more up for sale or return them, straight from the app;
- See detailed information of all your seats for a specific seated event, including the section and entrance within the venue;
- Event information: including doors open/start/end times, location and directions using your favourite maps app;
- Share the events you are attending, using built-in sharing dialogue, meaning it works with any (social) app you have installed;
- Added support for country codes and improved phone-number validation, which makes the app usable in every country in the world!
This release paves the way for a couple of new features we’re already working on, and we are currently alpha-testing an important one: Ticket sharing! This feature will be added to V2.1 which you can expect end of February. More about this in the next monthly blog!
We expect to release this V2.0 to the public the first week of February (so that it can already be used for ZAZ’s event), but if you can’t wait, you can subscribe to this and future public betas really easy.
iPhone Beta access
Visit this link and follow the steps.
Android Beta Access
Look for the app by searching for “GUTS Tickets” in the Play Store or open this link on your phone. Scroll down to the section “Become a beta tester” and tap “Join now”.
Let’s get visual
Behind the scenes we have been working on video content that will help explain the workings of GET Protocol & GUTS, while also giving insights into the way our team works. This will ultimately be a funnel to help newcomers understand what we are about, where the utility of the protocol and token come into play, and many more interesting topics. Videos will be released every few weeks, and we kick off with a basic one. Be sure to subscribe to our Youtube channel, to be the first to know when new videos are released!
Show some GUTS for GET!
It’s been floated in our Telegram before, but here it is again, with a bit more body and specifics. As you will have seen and read, we launched a new dynamic pricing feature late in December by the catchy name of ‘Sell Tickets, Cure Cancer’ (Or Save The World In A Different Way).
This feature allows participating artists and event organizers to leverage their popularity into fair ticketing and a donation to a charity of their choosing.
We believe this transparent and fan-friendly version of dynamic pricing can be a competitive advantage when it comes to approaching and on-boarding new artists, venues and event organizers.
To give this release an extra boost, we are offering rewards to 10 community members, who spread the word about this feature in a creative, effective or original way. It can be a tweet, a tattoo, a song, a billboard, anything.
These 10 people will receive a GUTS shirt and 150 $GET each. Winners to be determined by GUTS, and will be announced in next month’s blog.
To enter, PM a link or proof of your submission to @OlivierBiggs on Telegram before February 20th.
Stay in touch!
More about GUTS Tickets
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.
