An Interview with Sellout: Building a Ticketing Platform to Fight Scalpers
A little less than three years ago, Joel Martin and Henry Vinson had three main issues with the event ticketing industry: For one, scalping was out of control. Secondly, selling back a ticket involved way too many hoops to jump through. And lastly, ticketing fees were outrageously high.
Sellout aims to solve all three of these problems through its ticket-selling platform, standing behind musicians and their fans while eliminating the middle-man. I interviewed Joel to get his take on starting a business, overcoming challenges, and putting lessons learned into practice.
1. How did you conceive of the initial idea behind your business?
“At first, it just started floating around as this thing, that it would be really great if this idea for a better ticketing platform existed. Eventually, we started getting more and more serious about it. When I told the story of sitting there and refreshing and refreshing the browser and then getting screwed over on ticket prices, everyone who I talked to could resonate with that.
We dove into it head-first and really wanted to solve some of the big problems around ticketing. We had a software team in Missoula and a goal to get the product out within a couple of months — and that’s what we did. By April of that year, we’d partnered with Live from the Divide in Bozeman and started selling tickets for them.
One of the things we hadn’t anticipated from the very beginning was the user experience for our promoters. We wanted to solve all of these big problems, and I think we completely neglected just building a really good ticketing system for our clients, who are the promoters, who are actually putting on these shows. We had almost totally bypassed that, thinking entirely about the customer of the ticket, and so, that realization was a really big moment for us.
We got involved in Early Stage Montana and pivoted our product a bit and decided to raise a seed round of funding. We moved from having a team of contractors who were out in Missoula to hiring some people here in town, putting together our team of four, and starting from scratch.
And so, in January of 2019, we began working on this new product from the ground up. That’s what we released last year, we call it Sellout 2.0, and it’s a product that’s much more user-friendly for both the promoter and the customer. We’re still trying to solve the big problems that we wanted to solve in ticketing, but at a more steady pace, where we’re getting to those problems after we solve some of the simpler issues.
So, going back to your question, it always feels like that ‘moment’ is accumulated over tons of other moments where the idea is slowly morphing and forming in your brain and then all of a sudden, it hits you that it could be something. I think any really good product idea comes from having that problem yourself. If you’re tackling a problem first and you actually have that problem, you can really relate to it.”
2. What’s the best piece of advice you were given when starting out?
“It’s always been really important to us to seek out mentorship in Bozeman. One of the first things we did with this business is to jump into the 406 Labs [an early-stage accelerator] program, which helped us to connect with lots of people, mentors, and other businesses. All of that was super instrumental for us, as we learned how other people ran their businesses.
Advice is really interesting, because when you talk with experienced people who are incredible and who have done all sorts of things, typically they’ll try to help you avoid the mistakes that they made when starting their own businesses. It’s so easy to say ‘don’t do this,’ or ‘don’t do that.’ Every business has its fair share of mistakes that get made along the way — for sure we do. If you’re somebody who wants to become an entrepreneur, nothing is going to save you from falling into certain holes. You’re always going to make mistakes, no matter how much great, wonderful advice you get. You’re gonna end up facing challenges that you didn’t foresee and what really makes or breaks a company is the ability to be resilient and turn those problems into solutions.
If you find yourself in a big issue of your own doing — which you will — figuring out how to get past it is the most important. That’s the best time to reach out to mentors and get advice. That’s where the best lessons get learned, versus trying to play this game where you’re avoiding problems all the time. Just embrace the fact that you’re going to face a ton of problems, and then figure out how to overcome them.”
3. What’s the hardest challenge you have faced while starting up?
“For so long we were using contracted developers for the software. They designed the software, they coded the software, they were pretty much taking almost the entire business out of our hands from the get-go. From the very beginning, my partner and I realized we were out of our depth in the world of software engineering and building, and we would defer all of that work out to contractors.
That was a really big challenge — a really big mistake for us: thinking that we were not capable enough to roll forward with the ideas we had.”
4. Name the biggest overall lesson you’ve learned during the process.
“As soon as we ended up working in-house instead and started hiring people to come in, we started taking on the responsibilities of design. At first, we sucked at it. We were so bad. I keep all of our old designs so that I can look back on them, and they were so hideous. But its this constant evolution of scrapping something there, and building on top of something here, and we got better and better at doing all of these things that we’d left to the experts for a really long time. Now, I’d say we’re finally getting to a level where we’re creating things that are decent.
It’s really easy anytime somebody starts a business to think: I’ve never started a business before, I don’t know anything about this. And there are lots of people out there who want your money — if you have any money at all — who will want you to trust them, to have them do something for you if you compensate them.
It’s important to jump in and to recognize that you are in over your head, and that’s okay. If you’re really into learning, if you embrace your curiosity and have set expectations and recognize that you’re not always going to make the best stuff and things are going to look bad before they look good but it’s all just a process, then you have this amazing opportunity to have the best schooling of your life while you’re building a business that could potentially be successful someday.
For us, that was the big lesson. It’s okay to be inexperienced, it’s okay to be bad. If you’re bad for long enough, you’ll get good eventually. In this age that we live in, with YouTube and open-source software, you can learn to do almost anything on your own.”
5. You’ve heard of celebrity crushes, who’s your entrepreneur crush?
“His name’s Glenn Kreisel, he lives in Missoula. I don’t want to botch his history too much, because I don’t know it perfectly, but he’s basically a self-made entrepreneur. He built some software in the early nineties, and one of the things he built was this platform that allowed people to scan things on a network so you didn’t need to have a scanner plugged into your computer. He and a friend worked on this for years and years, had a few customers here and there, and then all of a sudden some hospital stumbled across this piece of software and found it was exactly what they needed to scan things with one scanner throughout the entire hospital. After that, the business really took off. They found their market fit after years of hard work.
Glenn is this really interesting person in his patience. There’s this idea in startup culture that you have to be the first to market, and you have to get out there before everyone else does, and you have to be better funded than everyone else is. It causes people to race forward and make really stress-based decisions concerning how they’re going to create their company, who they’re going to bring on, and how they’re going to spend their money. From our experience, we wasted a lot of money jumping in too far initially.
Patience is a virtue, even though it doesn’t get talked about a lot in this culture. If you build a good product with really good foundations and you don’t overstretch yourself and you try to make it run off its own resources as soon as possible, you end up with a really amazing thing on your hands — and you get to build it your own way.”
