GUTS sells 18.000 Jochem Myjer-tickets in two hours

Exciting times for GUTS Tickets and The GET Protocol. Over 18.000 tickets went on sale simultaneously last week, let’s take a look at what happened.

(Voor een Nederlandstalige versie van deze blog kun je hier terecht.)

Times are tough in the ticketing industry. Not a week goes by without new reports about investigations into secondary ticketing platforms or fans being duped, like Ed Sheeran’s, after the singer cancelled thousands of tickets that were offered by resale sites.

Popular Dutch festival Oeral also had trouble and were forced to halt their ticketing for several days, after widescale technical issues.

Jochem’s show ‘Adem in, adem uit’ has been selling out across the country.

Fortunately we can bring you better news! Last Friday (June 1st), over 18.000 tickets went on sale through GUTS for the 2018/2019 tour of Dutch comedian Jochem Myjer. At 10 AM local time, the tickets for 20 new shows went on sale, spread out over 9 theaters in The Netherlands.

A noteworthy feature that was premiered is the ‘shared queue’, where fans can express their preference for a theater where they would like to attend the show.

Dutch radio DJ Joost Burger participated in the sale, here’s a rough translation: ‘That new ticketing system of Jochem Myjer, Guus Meeuwis and Youp van ‘t Hek works really well. Buying from the queue went super smooth and within 3 minutes I sold a ticket, as I had bought one too many accidentally.’

If that show is already sold out, they are then automatically redirected to a show that is available without having to go to the back of the queue and risking the chance of missing out on tickets again.

In the past, a huge and simultaneous sale like this one could become chaotic, disappointing and pose a ripe opportunity for third parties to scoop up huge amounts of tickets to sell them back to fans who missed out, using resale platforms like ViaGoGo. Thanks to GUTS and its GET Protocol, this is no longer the case. The tickets are registered on the blockchain, making them impossible to re-sell. If someone with a ticket finds out they can no longer attend the event, they can put the ticket up for sale directly in the GUTS app, where it can easily be purchased by other fans, for the exact same price.

Now that’s what we call honest ticketing.

So, how did it go?

Of course you can stress test all you want, nothing can prepare you for the actual event. So, there were still some nerves as the 10.00 AM deadline grew closer. After some minor kick-off struggles (the huge amount of traffic caused a few visitors to have issues with updating their waiting line, a good technical learning for us), the sale was on, and thousands upon thousands (upon thousands) of people started buying their tickets. Things went exceptionally smooth and it took only two hours for the entire batch of shows to sell out completely. Using This link you can see the transactions for one of the shows on the Koven network.

A screenshot of our analytics of the day, showing over a million pageviews and roughly 382K unique visitors.

As any first grader who only uses his math book to wipe his or her butt can tell you: that amount of demand for that amount of tickets is going to leave some people disappointed. Luckily, lots of new shows will go on sale in September. This high demand for tickets used to form a huge opportunity for scalpers to jack up prices to insane levels and get away with it. All credit to Jochem Myjer for bravely leading the fight against scalping and fraud. Jochem Myjer-fans are now amongst the most well-protected fans in the world.

The GUTS app trending in the ‘General’ category. That Sling Drift game must be really addictive..

The traffic and successful sale also triggered some great side effects, as the GUTS tickets app was trending in Holland in both the Google Play Store and the App Store. As of writing this blog, the app has been downloaded over 3500 times, and counting.

For now the main functionality of the app is to make it even easier for ticket holders to manage their tickets and access events, but we will be adding other functionalities in the future. That is one of the bridges that will be crossed when we get there, but of course we will share our plans on this the moment we can.

You can download the app for Android here, and if you’re on iOS you can download the app here. Please check it out and feel free to leave (extremely positive, totally unbiased) reviews in the app stores.

Meanwhile we are very pleased with this sale and the successful real-life results it brings us. This is a great step in the scaling of our system and shows lots of potential for the future. As mentioned in Kasper’s excellent blog from yesterday, we have already almost passed our target of 50K tickets this year. Here, allow me to copy/paste the projections for 2018 and 2019:

2018 Focus on scale and reducing support overhead. Dashboard for event creating, management and data insights for EO. Conducting several scaling tests. Main-net launch of blockchain based GET Protocol in Q3 of 2018. Total smart tickets sold to date (as of June 4th): 40 000.

Projected for 2018: 200 000. 2019 Start sales cycle festival market domestically and abroad. Consolidate domestic market share in venues/stadiums. On-board ticketing companies on a mature and stress-tested blockchain protocol/ecosystem. Scale scale scale.

Projected for 2019: 1000 000+.

We are constantly challenging ourselves and our system by setting new, bigger goals and then doing everything we can to achieve them. And then we set new ones. On to the next show!