We have two bits of news today. One, we launched a revamped version of the site with a new UI. Two, we closed a round of funding. Both were covered today by TechCrunch.
The funding news largely speaks for itself. Early-stage startups raise money to accelerate growth; we are no exception. We hooked up with a group of angels whom we think will add real value to our company. All of them are experienced, successful entrepreneurs.
The new UI deserves a bit more explanation. SeatGeek’s primary focus is on timing when you buy your tickets—our price forecasts enable you to buy tickets when prices are lowest. We help you find the optimal time to buy. By “optimal time to buy”, I mean the time the average price is the lowest.
But even when you know the average price is lowest, you still have to decide which particular ticket to buy. For example, right now it’s the optimal time to buy tickets to the Wizards vs. Kicks game on February 3. But there are 1,000+ tickets available. Which one should you buy?
Our revamped UI addresses this problem. We just launched interactive seating maps that overlay ticket listings on top of the map, enabling you to see where each ticket is located in the venue. Additionally, for sporting events we color each listing based on how good a deal it is. Green tickets are good deals, yellow are average deals, and red are bad deals.
These new maps were built in partnership with SeatQuest. Over the past few months we’ve been busy integrating them into our site. There are still a few performance issues—everything is running a little slower than we’d like—but for the most part we’re happy with the integration. We’d love to hear feedback from you.
SeatGeek’s offices are in SoHo Haven, an incubator in downtown Manhattan. Working here has exposed us to a bunch of cool startups, including Atma. The guys at Atma are building an innovative app that should shake up the in-text advertising market—a market that has earned a bad rep due to companies like Kontera, which often deliver spammy ads. Atma’s app eliminates the spamminess and delivers ads that are actually useful.
The Atma guys hacked up a way to integrate their in-text links with SeatGeek. Thanks to Atma, select words in this blog will now link to SeatGeek event pages. Let’s say, for example, I’m talking about the Cleveland Indians. Whenever you roll over the Indian’s name, you’ll see a small popup that links to the SeatGeek page for the Indian’s upcoming game.
Over the next few months we’re going to be making a major push to integrate SeatGeek content into partner sites. The Atma links will be one way that content sites can include SeatGeek data. Every time a user clicks one of these links and buys a ticket, we’ll share some of the revenue generated with the content site. So from a blogger’s perspective, adding a few lines Atma JavaScript gives their site a new feature and an additional revenue stream.
Here’s an example. The following paragraph is excerpted from a CBS Sports article about the Red Sox. Try rolling over the team name:
“The Red Sox didn’t get Roy Halladay to front their rotation, but the did add the next-best thing this winter by signing John Lackey.”
This Atma/SeatGeek integration is currently being added to several sports blogs. We think both bloggers and blog readers will benefit.
Dedicated users probably noticed that we soft-launched NFL forecasts a week ago, but today we’re making it official. All NFL games for the rest of the season are now live on the site, each with three price forecasts—one for cheap, moderate, and pricey seats. Our forecast accuracy is over 80% (for those of you who are interested in the stats details, that’s using jackknife out-of-sample-testing), and will continue to increase as the model gathers more data.
As we refined our model, we’ve spent the last month poring over NFL ticket price data. In the process we’ve noticed a bunch of interesting trends. I hope to cover some of these in future posts, but here are a few interesting high-level tidbits:
- Green Bay Packers tickets sell at the highest premium, 298% of face value
- The NO Saints and Chicago Bears are second and third, with premiums of 243% and 242%, respectively
- At the other end of the spectrum, Oakland Raiders tickets have been selling for a mere 82% of face value
- Looking at historical data, the premium on Cowboys tickets have varied more widely than most other teams. Six years ago, Cowboys tickets sold for a solid 186% of face value, whereas they’re only going for 96% of face this season. Does that mean that no one wants to go to Cowboy’s games? Not necessarily—their shiny new $1.15 billion stadium drove up face values big-time, and is probably responsible for the effect.
We’re expanding our team. Check out our jobs page for a list of open positions.
We’re listing seven jobs there, under the philosophy that startups should always be hiring. Jason Cohen has a great post that explains the rationale.
With that said, there are two positions we’re focused on filling within the next week or two: (1) Lead Backed Web Developer (listed as LAMP Web Developer on the jobs page) and (2) Social Media Intern. If you or anyone you know might be interested in either of those, drop us a line at jobs@seatgeek.com. We’d also love to hear from people interested in the other jobs listed.
As an aside, as we’ve gone through the hiring process I’ve scoured the web for blog posts on startup hiring. Here are a few of the posts I found most useful:
As mentioned in the previous post, SeatGeek launched last week at TechCrunch50. It was a superb experience from all angles–the publicity for our young site, the exposure to investors, the feedback from a hyper-educated group of potential users and, most importantly, the frenzied fun of it all.
There are already some great advice posts for TC50 companies. Alistair Croll & Sean Power covered how to handle the TC50 bump, Mark Suster discussed how to avoid letting the event irreparably distract you, and the folks at Expensify wrote about how to work a DemoPit booth like a pro. But we have a few thoughts about how to handle the actual pragmatics of launching a company at TC50. I’ll skip over the obvious to-dos like hosting locally, printing enough business cards to take down a small forest, etc. Beyond those…
- “Lock in” your site a week before the event
A week prior to the event, finalize the TC50 version and don’t let anyone push a new version to the live server after the lock in time. Making changes up till the last minute is an invitation for a random bug to work its way into the version you present on stage. You want a solid week to test things with your alpha/beta users and make sure everything is bulletproof. More broadly, to be as successful as possible you’re going to want to do plenty of non-coding preparation before the conference. A firm lock in time lets you do this freely.
- Practice responding to questions as much as you practice your presentation
This was our biggest regret. We practiced our presentation ad nauseam, but we were under prepared for the questions from the judges, and one question in particular caught us off guard. Write down every question you might be asked and figure out how you’d respond to each. The best way to build a list of questions is to pitch to smart people and see what they ask afterwards.
- Take advantage of your DemoPit time
After presenting on stage all teams are given a table in the “DemoPit”. We were shocked by how some companies never even bothered to set up in their booth. Don’t make that mistake. Many DemoPit companies that didn’t present on stage paid thousands of bucks to attend (between the conference entrance fee, airline tickets, hotels, etc). They were willing to drop money on a DemoPit slot because a DemoPit booth exposes a company to dozens of investors and influential new users. As an aside, it’s a major boon to be one of the first companies to present, since you get more time in the DemoPit. But you can’t control that, as the event organizers set the schedule.
- Use the press list that TC50 gives you to your advantage
The organizers gave presenting companies a list of all media folks attending the event. It’s a freaking gold mine. Right after we presented we contact everyone on the list that we thought would be interested in SeatGeek. This ended up landing us a few stories in big-time publications.
- Book your return flight a week after the event ends
If you’re coming from outside CA, make sure you stick around after the event. If all goes well you may have meetings with investors and other interested parties, and you’ll want to strike while the iron is hot.
A few days at we publicly launched SeatGeek at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. We got up on the main stage at TC50 and, in front of a live audience of 2,000+ and a streaming audience of another 8,000+, we described what SeatGeek does and how we think we can revolutionize the way people buy tickets. And then, right after we hopped off stage, Russ FTP’ed a few files and voilà, the site went live. Here’s a link to the presentation video.
Things have been quiet on this blog recently; apologies for that. TC50 is a superb event for startups, but the participation requirements stipulated we not talk publicly about our business nor our forthcoming launch. So, instead of awkwardly blogging about SeatGeek without even saying what the hell we do, Russ and I put our heads down and focused on making the site as useful and stunning as possible for our public launch.
But, thankfully, the moratorium has now been lifted. So expect more activity here. We’ve gotten some great positive press after our launch, nearly all of it positive, including articles by the LA Times, Fast Company, VentureBeat, and CNET.
Near term plans for Russ and I include:
- Building our team by hiring a CTO and a few developers
- Raising money–we’ve begun raising a seed round of $500k-$1M
- Adding NFL forecasts. They’re nearly ready, and they’re looking awesome.
- Launching our premium broker service, SeatGeek Pro
