Y Combinator startup TicketStumbler has launched today. The Boston based company is an aggregator for the secondary ticket market, collecting tickets from brokers like Stubhub and Razorgator into one searchable database. Think of a kayak.com for sports tickets. The service essentially aims to spare users the trouble of searching through different secondary ticketing sites to find specific seats and prices. TicketStumbler has landed partnerships with several ticket brokers, and is working to expand their repository. They currently have 1.5 million listings representing 7 million total tickets.
TicketStumbler, founded by Dan Haubert and Tom Davis, is looking to take the forefront of the market by providing precise search options and solid user experience. The company’s main competition comes from Tickex, who also extends their service to concerts, but for the most part the space has relatively few contenders.
When comparing search results between the two sites it is clear that TicketStumbler provides a less cluttered interface without ads, ebay listings, and extraneous add-ons. Search results can also be viewed by seating location, allowing users to navigate through different sections to find the prime combination of price and location.
TicketStumbler hopes that by aggregating ticket listings they will spur competition between brokers and decrease transaction prices. They believe the service can further drop prices by driving traffic to brokers’ web sites, making them more willing to sell cheaper tickets. Depending on the broker, they will be taking 6-15% of the ticket sales that are conducted through their site.
The founders claim that the next steps involve pulling from more brokers and extending the service to cover more professional and college sports, with concerts and other types of events in the distant future. Secondary ticketing is a multi-billion dollar industry, so the revenue source is clearly there. Attracting users may well come down to having the most extensive ticket listings rather than the most user friendly service.
Great! These guys wouldn’t happen to be able to track what happened to those Beijing Olympic tickets that I ordered at a very credible-looking online site last month, would they?
I realize TC is a blog but let’s try to proofread for basic grammar:
…and is working to expand its repository.
The company’s main competition…
Nice site - very easy to use, clean design, ajax - i like it.
How ’bout them cowboys?
Can you try NOT to cover at least ONE of these YC “built to flip” “startups”? They’re ridiculous.
this doesnt seem to be a built to flip (although it cud very much happen). they cud just take the kayak route and get commisions for every ticket, if they support booking.
Built to flip? Hardly. Orbitz, Hotels.com, Expedia, Priceline, Kayak, Farecast… etc. There’s substantial money to be made being the best place to find secondary market tickets. This seems like a truly useful service with a built-in business model of collecting fees from people selling secondary tickets.
They do take commissions: 6-15%, as it says in the post. That’s a real business right there…sorry hater Dave.
Comparing to Orbitz and Amazon? Are you kidding me? At least they go directly to the source. This is effectively a third-party seller. Do a search for tickets. Only StubHub results come up. What a joke. The ticketbrokers have such a sophisticated business model, they will never allow a start-up to take their market. StubHub and RazorGator both SUCK! They do the same thing, without saying they do the same thing. Ticketmaster will throw them a couple hundred thousand… a flyswatter, if you will.
Hi Hugh,
You’re right…due to some problems with the back end of our system, certain providers weren’t fully included. Once we add the rest of our providers and fix the bugs we expect Stubhub listings to represent less than 30% of our listings (they’ll still be the biggest provider though).
We’re still in public beta so there’s definitely some bugs to clear out. Thanks again for your feedback.
This whole “YC startups are built to flip” meme going around is silly. Some of them may be (just as many non-YC startups are), but out of all the YC companies, you chose one with revenue on day one (and likely profitable soon), to label “built to flip”. Nice.
Providing a kayak-like interface for ticket purchases is a great idea. These guys are in a good position to take control of this market.
A multi-billion dollar industry + relatively few contenders = great place to be in!
Hi Dave, I’m Dan one of the cofounders of TicketStumbler. We’re not built to flip although that would be nice. While I don’t think will ever be millionaires, our site is definitely very monetized.
We started building TicketStumbler in June and had revenue shortly thereafter. We hope to reach profitability very soon.
I see TicketStumbler being a huge success. Great market to be in, with great paths to revenue, made by a couple of guys who seem to be both passionate about the topic and actually know what they are doing.
Just to clarify a few points from the article: the majority of ticket providers we list are ticket market places not brokers. Often times the people listing tickets on places like Stubhub are just fans with extra tickets, which is why you can find tickets priced significantly below face value for week day baseball games. Now granted, brokers list at these places too but I believe TicketCity is the only ticket provider we have who is a broker and not a ticket market place.
Also, let us know what you think of the geolocating and natural language search. Maps, directions and additional sports tickets are coming soon.
wow, there are REALLY REALLY cheap NFL preseason tickets to be had. Thanks guys!
Tom and Dan make an excellent team and are providing a truly great and useful product that has plenty of space to grow. I look forward to observing their rise to stardom.
So I just did a search for Oakland A’s / White Sox tickets for Saturday, August 16. In doing so, 100% of the search results are StubHub listings…so why would I use your site if all you are doing is primarily aggregating StubHub listings? I would rather just go direct to StubHub and be backed by their buyer guarantee.
Also, what’s your plan if StubHub shuts down your ability to port their listings into your site? Or do you have a partnership with them already?
Hi Slim we have a partnership with Stubhub.
I’m not exactly sure why that happened. This is our first go in to primetime so we’ll definitely look in to that get it fixed. Also, Stubhub is the dominant player so even after we add 12-15 providers (I think we currently have 6) they’ll represent ~30% of the tickets.
You have the buyer guarantee regardless of whether you buy through us (since we’re just redirecting to Stubhub) or directly through Stubhub. It works just like Kayak.
Thanks for your feedback.
one big blunder and idea killer i see already which is how the hell could you guys/gals forget to provide a visual of the stadiums so folks can see where they will sit
that is a rookie mistake
Right, since they can’t add new features, that is a total idea killer.
They’ve already stated that stadium maps are coming next.
thats one of the most important feature of any ticket broker
day 1 at launch the map of stadium should have been added
who the hell buy tickets without knowing where the seats are located
but whatever i said my piece
You’re absolutely right - we should have these up. Right before launch our venue numbers got changed so all the stadium seating maps we had needed to be renumbered. We figured it was better to get a working product out the door than to wait any longer (we’re on a shoe string budget).
Hopefully you can forgive us and check us out within a week when we’ll have them up.
Thanks for your feedback.
Hi,
Stadium maps have now been added.
Why does’t ticketstbler aggrigate ticketsnow.com? They are almost as big as stubhub and have the backing of ticketmaster.
We 100% agree. They’re on the to do list, but due to their website structure things are significantly more complicated. Hopefully, we’ll have them up soon.
Sweet idea, great execution. Definitely looking forward to seeing where you guys take it, too.
This is so slick! No need to check around to all of the sites individually. Someone mentioned not having seating maps which I guess is important but you guys already know you’re going to do it so it’s only a matter of time. Finding tickets in one place is now the easiest thing to do through TicketStumbler.
How is this different from backstagebroker.com, ninjatickets.com, seats.com, seatservant.com, seatquest.com, ticketshock.com, ticketwood.com, or tickex.com?
If we remind you of backstagebroker.com we’re in trouble.
Fair enough. How about the other seven?
Well, we’ve been launched about a week and we’re already profitable. Also, we receive more traffic than about half of them and definitely have one of the better user interfaces.
Luckily this market is so massive that there’s room for many players (e.g. think of all the travel sites out there).
http://www.NinjaTickets.com comparison shops data for all types of events and indexes ticketsnow.com. That’s a pretty big difference.
oh hai Ninjatickets
I think ticketstumbler is a great idea and no one should be surprized if they do well in times to come.
Pretty cool, but I assume TicketStumbler is just using ticket broker APIs and getting paid via affiliate programs. Or is there something more? And don’t the majority of the tickets just come from Event Inventory anyway? Seems like most ticket sites have virtually the same inventory and only the % markup changes.
That’s how we’re different. We’re not just using APIs so we can support significantly more ticket providers.
“.. the majority of ticket providers we list are ticket market places not brokers.”
A “ticket marketplace”, even StubHub (fan-to-fan..cough cough), are fed primarily from ticket brokers. So buying from a market place is buying from a broker 98% of the time.
I don’t know the numbers, but that very well could be right.
eBay didn’t pay $300+ million for just another web site showing the same old broker inventory. Brokers just like to spread this rumor since eBay didn’t pay them. StubHub spends millions marketing and doing deals (like MLB) to get tickets from the ticket holders. Turn on the TV, radio, or look anywhere online and there they are telling fans to buy and sell on StubHub.
Actually, uhmm..ya, they did. So what, they spend millions on marketing, believe me, the MAJORITY (a large majority) of StubHub’s inventory is directly from brokers, not joe fan. I’ve heard there fan-to-fan spiel and it’s a good one! Brilliant marketing for sure!
there are tons of websites who do this…cheapest tickts are always available in craigslist
Who? Good luck not getting scammed on craigslist.
Many other sites have tried the ticket comparison shopping model and failed…Oyaka.com, FatLens, Oodle, etc. It’s difficult to build a thriving business on 6-15% commissions from affiliate programs. To build a name for themselves, they’ll have to compete with the actual ticket sellers for paid and natural search traffic, which is prohibitively expensive. However, it would be nice to see one of these sites actually become successful, as it’s a good concept.
No it’s not. We’re profitable.
http://www.razorgator.com/tick.....ce=6261651|1
5126 Tickets Listed
http://ticketstumbler.com/san-.....-chargers/
Put the RazorGator Filter on and you only get 296.
That is a pretty big difference.
You’re right; we’re still getting our bugs worked out. Razorgator is one we’ve had problems with. Should be fixed soon!
I know. We are having the same problem scraping their ticket data. But we are close to getting the right parameters posted into there system to scrape the data.
Good luck… it is not easy.
Are fatlens and oodle even around? Oodle is classified ads now…fatlens redirects. Oyaka is up though: http://www.oyaka.com
Fatlens was only prototyping tickets to show off their technology, and has changed to thefind.com, which searches women’s product categories. While Oyaka still says they are a search engine, they actually gave that up and are now an ecommerce site that fronts for the TicketsNow and TicketNetwork broker systems (just like thousands of other sites).
I run a sports site and thought about doing this as well. Shortly thereafter i ran into
http://www.ninjatickets.com/ and another one that I forget the name of about 6 months later. Both of those were pretty dominated by only a few ticket networks as well. The commission from these networks is pretty good if you can get the traffic to the site.
How is this different from http://www.ticketwood.com I think they are the leaders in this sold out tickets market?
I swear it’s not obvious you work for ticketwood. The SEO “tickets” link doesn’t give it away either.
Hi Ticketwood sock puppet person, it’s your pal Dan from TicketStumbler. I noticed that Ticketwood has spammed at least five other TicketStumbler articles with the exact same comment. Are you guys really this desperate for visitors and attention? How much do spam commenters cost anyways? Love always, your friends at T-Stumbler.
TicketStumbler, I like your offering. I do agree that this is a space where many people can exist, and welcome to the party.
Thanks! I was living in DC before Boston.
Cheers,
Dan