Congrats to EventBrite on choosing to go public, but I think a congratulations is in order for their 2017 sales team.
> More than 95% of creators who used our platform in 2017 signed themselves up for Eventbrite. In 2017, we derived 54% of our net revenue from these creators.
Selling to about 35,000 creators (700,000 total) for 46% of the profit is no small chore, and, in my mind, speaks to a highly effective sales strategy. It also partially explains why LiveNation is not taking a "create your own event online" approach: direct sales can be more profitable.
Keep in mind that Eventbrite doesn't charge anything to host free events, which is all many of their organic customers ever host. That said, the amount of revenue you can get from music festivals and venues, which require a sales team to make the deals, dwarfs what you can get from most other customers. There's a reason Eventbrite bought Ticketfly. For that same reason, Live Nation has bought some of Eventbrite's customers and moved their ticketing to Ticketmaster.
It's not just the sales team. Eventbrite has a fantastic user interface and features that really work for people with complex ticketing requirements, better than any other ticketing platform I've ever used.
I chuckled when I read "For example, we previously experienced interruptions in performance of our platform because of a hardware error that AWS experienced" on page 26.
I never expected one of the mishaps I dealt with while I worked there to appear in an SEC filing! If you want to learn a lot at the expense of a few gray hairs, I can highly recommend working in ops in the ticketing industry. I've spoken about some of the things it taught me at https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17/conference-program/...
Funny story is my company at the time looked at acquiring EventBrite about 10? years ago, and as part of the integration eval, I happened to run the ab command against their endpoint. Few minutes later VP ran to my office and told me to stop as EventBrite called saying we were DDOSing them.
Congrats to EventBrite on going public. Am glad you stayed independent, as my company would have ruined them, like many other acquisitions..
I hope Eventbrite and Brown Paper Tickets are successful in stealing some business from their nasty competitors like Ticketmaster whose fees can be 50% of the ticket price.
Edit: their fees can be over 100% of the ticket price.
Eventbrite are still expensive in my view and their business model perpetuates the 'booking fee' mentality of the industry.
To sell 250 tickets for $10 each would cost the event organiser (or ticket buyers) $560, excluding payment processing. That's a hefty chunk of cash for relatively little work.
I don't think it's a fair model so I set up Ticket Tailor for this reason - https://www.tickettailor.com. The same event would cost $25/mo, with no contracts or commitment. We have facilitated 8M ticket sales for savvy event organisers who are fed up with [Eventbrite | any other ticketing company].
Go to eventbrite.com, search (blank) your local area "today" and events are not in chronological order. I appreciate that they show the 'best' events first, but when I just want something to do, it kills me that such a simple search is not available.
As someone launching a coding camp for kids, Eventbrite has been instrumental for us. We do free classes to generate leads and the free offering of EB has been more than enough to accomplish this. Good to see them succeed.
Network effect could solve gaps and make Eventbrite emerge as №1 player vs. LiveNation. But only in the ticketing for the entertainment segment. This is further challenged due to Top 5 wants a pie of every tech-driven business: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and even Apple. They own the network.
Considering their competitor is LYV(Live Nation) at a market cap of 10 Billion... Who wouldn't want a piece of that pie? Hopefully they will be able to raise enough capital to bring lawsuits against LYV for their anti-competitive and monopolistic practices.
I'm sure you can rebuild most of the site in a week, but who's going to buy from you? The simplest business models can become major companies moving lots of money because business operations has nothing to do with technical complexity. You should focus on that.
I think the main flaw with your supposition is that being on the market requires rocket science
FIRST, lets talk about history since you know about it. Going public wasn't as coveted and rare of an event as it is today. So people like you had no expectation of being wowed by the rocket science presented in S-1 registration statements.
SECOND, revenue from selling tickets. Ticket selling websites have a monopoly on extra fees which can practically double the price over the face value of a ticket. Consumers have no other way to get tickets to these events. The market likes that. If you want to share in the profits of this money printing operation, then you buy the shares and hope they start giving dividends.
Thats all the market cares about.
High regulations have prevented companies from considering to go public via an IPO, or go public at all. So therefore companies go public via an IPO as the LAST round of equity financing at their peak growth, which they and their bankers think they can sell to the gullible investing public. When the market is frothy like today and the investing public is excluded from most of the growth, they will buy. IF ALL GOES WELL, the company can use that new IPO money and expand into further growth, but it isn't that important anymore.
> It is a website selling tickets. It's not rocket science
"It's just people sending shirt messages. It's not rocket science."
"It's just syncing some files. It's not rocket science."
It's extremely short sighted to think that everything is easy and simple. There are real-world engineering issues that come when you have influxes of people attempting to buy specific, limited items at the same time.
(Also, rocket science isn't that hard. Rocket engineering and manufacturing is the hard part.)
Eventbrite probably wants to sell tickets to every event on the planet [and take a cut]. That doesn't sound so un-sexy from a business perspective. (I don't know anything about their numbers, just saying.)
[+] [-] Sea_Wulf|7 years ago|reply
> More than 95% of creators who used our platform in 2017 signed themselves up for Eventbrite. In 2017, we derived 54% of our net revenue from these creators.
Selling to about 35,000 creators (700,000 total) for 46% of the profit is no small chore, and, in my mind, speaks to a highly effective sales strategy. It also partially explains why LiveNation is not taking a "create your own event online" approach: direct sales can be more profitable.
[+] [-] sciurus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomphoolery|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sciurus|7 years ago|reply
I never expected one of the mishaps I dealt with while I worked there to appear in an SEC filing! If you want to learn a lot at the expense of a few gray hairs, I can highly recommend working in ops in the ticketing industry. I've spoken about some of the things it taught me at https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17/conference-program/...
[+] [-] sfrench|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mshenfield|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buf|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gedy|7 years ago|reply
Congrats to EventBrite on going public. Am glad you stayed independent, as my company would have ruined them, like many other acquisitions..
[+] [-] donnfelker|7 years ago|reply
Good to see you're still around. :fist-bump:
[+] [-] immad|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkstar999|7 years ago|reply
Edit: their fees can be over 100% of the ticket price.
[+] [-] jonnywhite|7 years ago|reply
To sell 250 tickets for $10 each would cost the event organiser (or ticket buyers) $560, excluding payment processing. That's a hefty chunk of cash for relatively little work.
I don't think it's a fair model so I set up Ticket Tailor for this reason - https://www.tickettailor.com. The same event would cost $25/mo, with no contracts or commitment. We have facilitated 8M ticket sales for savvy event organisers who are fed up with [Eventbrite | any other ticketing company].
[+] [-] icebraining|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bing_dai|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sciurus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbrian|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dopeboy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Santoshpanda|7 years ago|reply
here is my detailed thought post: https://medium.com/@santoshpanda/my-thoughts-on-eventbrites-...
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|7 years ago|reply
This is one of the few specific companies I'd actually be interested in investing in, rather than throwing all my money into indexes.
[+] [-] randomsearch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kinnard|7 years ago|reply
though meetup and eventbrite are definitely different.
[+] [-] thinkingkong|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mychael|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donald123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoisjuan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alfanick|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] deathhand|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|7 years ago|reply
They've done a phenomenal job at snatching market share from their competitors, especially for smaller events.
[+] [-] manigandham|7 years ago|reply
I'm sure you can rebuild most of the site in a week, but who's going to buy from you? The simplest business models can become major companies moving lots of money because business operations has nothing to do with technical complexity. You should focus on that.
[+] [-] kyleblarson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gammateam|7 years ago|reply
FIRST, lets talk about history since you know about it. Going public wasn't as coveted and rare of an event as it is today. So people like you had no expectation of being wowed by the rocket science presented in S-1 registration statements.
SECOND, revenue from selling tickets. Ticket selling websites have a monopoly on extra fees which can practically double the price over the face value of a ticket. Consumers have no other way to get tickets to these events. The market likes that. If you want to share in the profits of this money printing operation, then you buy the shares and hope they start giving dividends.
Thats all the market cares about.
High regulations have prevented companies from considering to go public via an IPO, or go public at all. So therefore companies go public via an IPO as the LAST round of equity financing at their peak growth, which they and their bankers think they can sell to the gullible investing public. When the market is frothy like today and the investing public is excluded from most of the growth, they will buy. IF ALL GOES WELL, the company can use that new IPO money and expand into further growth, but it isn't that important anymore.
[+] [-] jimktrains2|7 years ago|reply
"It's just people sending shirt messages. It's not rocket science."
"It's just syncing some files. It's not rocket science."
It's extremely short sighted to think that everything is easy and simple. There are real-world engineering issues that come when you have influxes of people attempting to buy specific, limited items at the same time.
(Also, rocket science isn't that hard. Rocket engineering and manufacturing is the hard part.)
[+] [-] Maro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmanfrin|7 years ago|reply