How to Get a Whole Country to Support Your Startup Idea
When a new startup idea is born, you need someone other than your excited team to believe in you and back your idea up. And, you know what they say — start with three F’s — friends, family and fools. Usually they’re the only ones who will be willing or will feel obliged to support your idea. Usually. However there are some exceptions — like, when a whole country validates your idea.
To explain how it happened, there is a need for a bit of a background story. Here it goes.
Latvia is one of the Baltic States with about 2 million inhabitants, will be celebrating its centenary this year and due to its rather small size is very agile and open to innovations.To support those witty minded entrepreneurs Latvia has invested heavily in fostering a start-up ecosystem — has created a start-up visa for foreign founders and is providing more than €60m in public funds for seed- and growth-stage companies, and €12m towards social entrepreneurship.
One more thing you must know is that Latvians love their traditional heritage. Traditional dances and songs play a big part of most people’s lives here. Either you regularly attend traditional dance classes or sing in a choir, or you know at least 10 other people who do it. It is huge, believe me, or believe The Economist if that feels more reliable. They even had a Singing revolution to protest USSR and reclaim its independence. And the greatest manifestation of this love is Song and Dance Festival which since 1873 takes place every 5 years. This week-long festival which has been included in UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list gathers more than 43,000 participants, and in total around 500,000 event attendees. Some of the events are for free, for some, one must pay. There are two major events — the Great Dance concert (10,000 seats) and Final Closing Song Event (30,000 seats). So, here it goes.
If you are a participant, you will spend at least a couple of years getting ready for the celebration by practicing the dance steps or songs. If you’re just a regular Joe, you will spend at least the same amount of time planning how to get tickets for those final events. One might ask — why? I’ll tell you why. Because everyone wants to get tickets, right, so a lot of people log in the system before the sale goes off. If the system is hosted on something as powerful as your grandmothers old hit-on-to-get-a-picture TV, chances are your ticketing system will get so slow that it will be barely able to process requests at all. And it has been like since, well, it feels like since the first festival in 1873. Every year there is this hustle going on, every year people are getting angry and disappointed, every year organizer promises to improve the system, to put it in the cloud, to do some voodoo there, but nothing. Those wanting to purchase tickets, have two options. Either hope they will get lucky by hitting refresh button of the page for almost 2 hours (and in the end just to get a notification “All tickets are sold out”. ) Those who have lost all hope and trust in the online ticketing service, go the traditional way of queuing up at the box office.
And goodness, it’s almost like another festival. Or rather some kind of an episode of the Survivor. Ticket sales went of on March 3 at 11:00 am. To get first in line, one lady took her place in the queue on MARCH 2 at 4:00 PM! She waited for NINETEEN HOURS at — 14 C (which ironically was one of the coldest nights in March in Latvia). And she was not alone. There were hundreds of other people at several box offices all around the city. In the morning even, the National Guards unit arrived there to provide people with some hot tea and cookies. Can you imagine that? If you can’t, take a look at the pictures.
Then, of course, there is the third option. Buy the tickets on the secondary market, where the prices skyrocket and reach at least 5x the face value. Well that is a greed, I must say, and determination to fight this inhumanly system to get tickets just to sell them afterwards. It is a great concert and just once in five years, come on, I’d rather miss those couple of hundreds of euros and enjoy the show myself.
Either way, it is easy to see how this system is broken and doesn’t work to say the least. Everyone sees that… oh wait, not everyone. Ticketing service manager doesn’t. This situation is completely normal and there is nothing to improve. His words. But Tixico begs to disagree, and not only that, Tixico also offers a solution.
Tixico is a blockchain based ticketing service that scales easily to eliminate system downtime and ensure smooth running of the platform even during the highest customer activity. First problem solved — no hitting refresh button just to see that sad “Sold out” notification. Also, second problem partially solved — if the system runs smoothly, there is no need to go to a physical box office, because you can safely rely on online system. Obviously, no one can stop those who enjoy freezing for long hours and prove that they are suitable candidates for S.E.A.L special forces, but majority of people could easily purchase tickets online.
Third, Tixico offers a solution for the secondary market as well. Here, I just want to note that secondary market is not the Big Evil per se, but the ticket scalpers who do it for profit are. To enable fair secondary market for those who for some reason won’t be able to attend the event after all, Tixico uses the blockchain technology. When purchasing a ticket, the user buys a virtual asset that represents the ticket on the blockchain. This has two benefits. First of all, this type of ticket is protected by the blockchain mechanism, which ensures the continuity of information and eliminates duplicates; these two properties provide a higher level of protection against ticket counterfeiting. Secondly, this unit can be resold on the secondary market. For the user, the advantage is that all tickets available on this secondary market are legitimate, since the ticket asset cannot be falsified. But what this all really mean? Basically, the organizer sets up preferences for the tickets sold in the secondary market. These settings include but are not limited to the number of times a ticket can be resold, earnings from each resale and minimum /maximum price of the ticket. Such preferences attract more potential users and limit unwanted price increase. Say goodbye to eyewatering prices and say hello to… well, pretty much every artist whose concerts you’ll be able to attend for a fair and reasonable price! Yay!
Conclusion
It’s 2018 already. We are way ahead of those times when everyone had to have a server in their storage room to run Microsoft Paint or play Solitaire. There are technologies out there we can use to create a better user experience in basically every area of life. And most definitely there are technologies that can improve and even turn around ticketing services. Not only Latvians with their unconditional love for Song and Dance festival are in need of a better ticketing service. Even the biggest ticketing service providers still struggle with system downtimes, ticket scalpers and thus ruining their reputation and have to invest in better and better PR professionals to clean up the mess.
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