Working product ≠ scalable product ≠ mature concept

The reasons why we haven’t announced any international event yet is not because we lack the drive or ambition to go over the border, nor is the reason a lack of foreign interest by ticketing companies (on the contrary actually, but allow me to boast about this attention later on).

A screen-cap of our Intercom overview, the chat platform we use to handle customer tickets/questions. Can you spot the moment we sold 18k tickets in one hour?

The main reason we haven’t conducted any ticketing abroad is because even though we have a working product, we don’t have a mature product. The difference? A mature product is able to handle the wide array of edge cases thrown at any ticketing use case in the real world. These edge cases for example are a consumer having no smart phone that still wants to buy a smart ticket. Such cases are now handled on a case-by-case basis by our support staff. This means a support session per edge case (meaning we have to chat/email with these people and figure out how they will be able to attend their event). Such assistance is called ‘support overhead’ and it basically just costs money.

While offering support is not a problem at its core (you can price the costs into the service charge of the tickets) it is pretty logical to conclude that your product should work in such a way that it minimizes the need for such support. All in all: we want to minimize support overhead. Why? Competitive pricing. Offering personal support is quite expensive and becomes a really complex/expensive endeavor when you have to support events all over the globe (different currencies, times zones, languages, cultures, laws etc.).

So what am I trying to say? Well, currently we have a relatively large support overhead on a event basis (not in comparison with other ticketing companies, I wouldn’t know). Just based on own experience and our drive to make the experience of buying a smart ticket as frictionless as possible, we conclude we have room to improve. We are improving a lot overhead wise but there is still room to be more efficient, smoother and more fair and transparent.

Should we go abroad because we can? Because marketing?

Could we ticket a festival in the US? Or Asia? Certainly, no problem at all. Would we learn from it? For sure. But would we learn from it more than from ticketing a Dutch festival or theater show? No, not in this stage of our product development. Actually we would learn less from an event so far away from Amsterdam HQ as we cannot directly interact/observe the reaction and feedback of the actors during the event. At this point we need to keep our finger on the pulse of the actors/consumers to improve our product and thus reduce the support overhead and overall experience.

Slowly we are getting at a point where we are comfortable and can handle larger and larger events without breaking a sweat. Where we boasted to you last year on this exact blog we conducted a sale of 2 000 tickets in a single day [pilot 1, pilot 2], last Friday we sold 18 000+ tickets in a half hour. Next stop; in Q3 of this year we are going to sell 40 000 tickets in one sesh and in the final Q4 of ‘18 we have around 100 000 tickets scheduled to be sold. You see where this is heading or should I make a plot?