MadeIT, a San Francisco-based startup we profiled over a year ago, is leaving the crowded space of event planning and invitation applications and entering the equally-crowded space of online ticketing service providers.
CEO Stephen Weir told me that the reason for the new direction is simply an economical one.
More specifically, he stated that he took a good look at the balance sheet earlier this year and ultimately decided the cost of acquiring a customer for the ‘old’ MadeIT was far too high compared to the projected revenue from selling ads based on their traffic projections, and that Facebook was effectively going to kill the event social networks / invitations service providers one by one anyway. Basically, he painted a pretty dark picture for startups like Evite (Ticketmaster), Eventful, MyPunchbowl, Socializr and a slew of other similar services.
Rather than giving up, Weir and co-founder Jonny Hendriksen decided to rethink the service from scratch and came up with a low-priced solution for helping organizers of small and medium-sized events sell tickets online. MadeIT aims to provide them with a set of tools for end-to-end event management, including publishing, promoting and collecting online payments for events (the latter comes with PayPal and Google Checkout integration). The service doesn’t cost a thing for free events, but MadeIT retains a commission of 2.5% for paid events, with a minimum charge of $0.99 and a maximum of $9.99.
Like many of their competitors, which include Eventbrite, TicketLeap, amiando and Eventbee, they face a chicken-and-egg problem: you need high volumes of events to generate enough, often non-recurring, revenue out of commissions on ticket sales, while the costs of marketing the service to potential customers is relatively high. The company claims to have come up with “innovative customer acquisition strategies” that bring in a lot of qualified leads for them to build a sales model around.
Personally, I applaud the fact that they’re going at it without taking a dime of funding from anyone else but themselves, but time will tell if MadeIT has what it takes to stand out in the crowded space they’ve entered, which is filled with similar startups who have a bit more breathing room thanks to institutional and angel investors.
(Disclosure: I am a partner in a soon-to-launch Belgian ticketing/event startup, and will be facing some of these challenges myself).
Ticket to the deadpool.
smart move to switch from ad model to transaction based
MadeIT.com is focused on the SMB market and reoccurring event revenue from that. They did not dump their other product as you imply but are working to integrate the two to offer a full event management system with the features required to have multimedia invites.
Having done events for the past 10 years both large scale productions and small boutique events of 100 people – MadeIT offers more than any other product out there. It is an overall event management tool for running an event, not just a ticketing system. The only other option out there that is able to come close to what they offer is EventBrite and EventBrite only just recently offered the ability to send invites to customers – MadeIT.com already has done this for 10,000 customers using their multimedia invite system. Now add the ability to take payment and an event management system and you tell me what you have..
What’s this? Something useful? Make events, manage ticket sales. I like it.
Evite is not a startup last time I checked.
Eventful does not compete with Socializr or Mypunchbowl.
MadeIT never had any significant number of users or traffic, so any comparison to leading Evite competitors is way off base.
Evite has left plenty of room for innovation that will never be Facebook’s main focus. To say that the space is doomed shows exactly the type of ignorance that led Mr Weir to significantly underestimate the challenges of such a site in the first place.
I agree on that! Facebook could only provide generalized solution for event planning. How about integrating localized content for event planning which is key. How about other exciting features which could not be adopted by FaceBook.com simply because it would just end up diluting their vision!
Event planning is more than what is existing today in form of all the portals mentioned in this space.
I could count on various exciting features with evolution of mobile, widgets and video technologies which, if executed properly, could fire and bring revolution to event planning.
“evite has left plenty of room for improvement” – funfacts, are you serious??
I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to create an inviation site. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/w6ZP5RfaXG_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to create an inviation site. ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/yRpSOmbptQ”}}}
Andrew-
I could not agree with you more. There is room to create something new and innovative. Facebook as an application for a party is just that. They may get the tech part correct but innovation does not happen over night, and for the most part not from the tech side. It is unfortunatley , time and money that will allow you to get into that space, understand it, make your mistakes correct them and innovate along the way.
It is a space I have been keeping track of, and when appropriate start to build a beta. I believe in starting small, understanding your customers and building and innovating out. I would welcome a conversation when that time comes. Sounds like you would have some good insights.
Thanks
Hey Stephen, congrats you MadeIt to Techcrunch
Robin, thanks for including Eventbee in the competitors list.
Out of all the players listed here, we are the only one charging flat $1 fee per ticket sale regardless of ticket price (no fee on free tickets) with superior feature set
We even have plans to bring down fee to $0, more news coming soon….
Bala, CEO
Eventbee Inc
http://www.eventbee.com
WOW you madeit allright………….to the deadpool
I hope this startup can swim, because it’s heading for the Deadpool baby.
Dwayne.
http://probablysucks.com
why is everyone obsessed with the deadlool these days?? Looks like a solid bootstrapping startup to me. Small, unfunded and clearly able to adapt.
no chance against the ebrite and amiando tankers … those two just are so far down the process in that space already, it’ll get tough for madeit
Totally agree.
*Poorly* ripping off eventbrite 1-to-1 just puts them in a position of a follower, not a leader, and definitely not an innovator.
A few words of advice from a four month old competitor with way less resources than you guys have. Change your domain name to something that strikes a chord with event organizers. Secondly, don’t waste your homepage telling people what you do, “show” them what you do. Show them events, show them invites — anything but the flow chart you currently have. Also, ignore all the skepticism on here, no space is ever too crowded for a good dose of creativity to shine through.
Hi. Does anyone know of any other good sites for secondary ticketing, preferably ones based in the UK?
Anyone interesting in making friends in China?
We have been running a seminar ticketing platform for more than 6 years, recently spin-off to become C2C business model. Looking forward to friends with similar interests. ^_^