UFC 154 is approaching, as the legendary Georges St. Pierre will be squaring off against bruiser Carlos Condit in Montreal, Quebec. At SeatGeek, we have an abundance of UFC fans, so we've been tracking tickets for this fight closely.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of analyzing prices, are you just looking for tickets? If so, here's the link:
That will direct you to the SeatGeek page for the event. For the uninitiated:…
Over the past two and a half years, we’ve poured countless time into building a canonical database of live events in the US. Not only have we cataloged when and where each event is happening, but we also built a system that attaches copious metadata to each event--e.g., the latitude/longitude of the venue, the number of tickets currently listed, etc. Thus far, that database has been used exclusively to power the pages on SeatGeek.com.…
Screenshot of our initial homepage
When we launched SeatGeek back in the fall of 2009, we positioned ourselves as a site that forecasts how ticket prices move on the secondary market. That was our "one thing": forecasts. Russ had spent months building scrapers to collect ticket data. I'd spent months messing with that data in STATA, building models that could accurately forecast prices. We figured we could get traction by helping…
Big news today. We announced a major new feature, Columbus. In a lot of ways, building this has felt like doing a new startup. Columbus is an event discovery engine. We humbly believe it's the best way online to discover live events.
The value proposition: Enter 4-5 of your favorite teams and bands, and Columbus creates a calendar of games and concerts near you that you'll love. It's engineered to constantly collect feedback,…
We recently embarked on a complete redesign of the core page on our site, our ticket listings interface. After weeks of iterating with the other guys on the SeatGeek dev team, I marched off to an interview with a reporter from a major tech publication to show off the new UI for an upcoming story. His reaction: "Well, that doesn't really look very different." Oof.
But he was right. The two versions looked quite similar:
Before…
We got into ticketing for a lot of reasons, but near the top of the list was our belief that ticket buyers are woefully deprived of data. Data begets transparency, which the ticket industry lacks.
Over the past 18 months we've tried to attack the data dearth with a bunch of tools (e.g. Deal Score, price forecasts, all-in pricing, and historical price graphs). Today we're pumped to launch another data-driven search feature:…
The early stage of the hiring process has a huge signal-to-noise problem. A job posting on one of the standard career sites garners hundreds of resumes, but most are poor, and sorting cruft takes countless hours. Outstanding web developers do not generally spend their time trolling the job listings on Craigslist. They do, however, enjoy puzzles.
Therefore, we're changing the application process for our web developer position.…
SeatGeek Partners with Scoop St. for a group buying ticket deal.
We’re sitting on a mountain of data at SeatGeek. Every day, our platform gathers data about how the tickets for games and concerts are priced on the secondary market. The primary purpose of this data is to help generate our forecasts, but, as a side effect, it lets us measure the whims of fans in a way no one else can. Which NBA team is most exciting to watch? Pundits can speculate all they like, but nothing captures…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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We scour the web's major ticket sites and aggregate inventory into one place. Our Deal Score™ helps you identify the best ticket deals available for each event.
