Tandum Takes On The Live Event Ticketing Market

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It’s a common complaint: buying tickets to events is frustrating, expensive, and annoying. UX is out the window for most platforms, and it’s never fun to buy tickets. Nashville and Charlotte-based Tandum wants to change that.

It’s hard to miss music industry startups in Nashville. Basically throw a rock and you’ll hit one of them. Besides that, there are a lot of ticketing startups out there. Tandum will have a battle to prove they’re the best. But, hey, a little competition never hurt anyone.

Check out our Q&A with cofounders Doug Pace and Tyler Griffith below:

What’s your startup called?

Tandum

What’s your big idea?

Our big idea started with two questions:

1) “Why does a ticket fee vary depending on the price of a ticket when the service is the same?” and

2) “Why do online ticketed events sell out so fast?”

incontent3As we learned the answers to these questions, we had more questions…and then some ideas. These ideas soon became the basis for our early concept to fundamentally change the live event experience.

Through Tandum, we are committed to better serve all parties involved in the live event – the fans, the artists, the venues, the promoters, and the event staff. We believe there is a better way to manage ticket fees. We believe there is a better way for venues to manage their events. We believe there is a more efficient way for artists to connect with fans. We believe that fans deserve a better live event experience and Tandum aims to facilitate that experience through a fully-integrated, user-friendly platform. Tandum connects all users and drives efficiencies that greatly benefit the entire live event ecosystem.

What’s the story behind your idea?

We go to a lot of concerts. Though we were never strangers to exorbitant ticket fees, there were three particular events that we found especially frustrating. These three events led us to question some of live entertainment’s fundamental principles, and inspired us to create the Tandum concept.

On one occasion, we were trying to buy tickets to see one of our favorite bands, only for that event to sell out within minutes of going on sale. The website through which we were trying to buy the tickets had limited bandwidth and prevented us from obtaining our tickets. We immediately went to a secondary ticketing website to try and buy tickets, only to find that tickets were being sold at 3 or 4 times face value. As big fans of this particular band, we asked ourselves, “why aren’t we able to get tickets or reasonably afford scalped tickets to see one of our favorite bands?”

On a separate occasion, we tried buying tickets to see one of our favorite bands play a two-night event and decided to buy the tickets through the band’s fan club. We were met with extremely unfavorable and restrictive ticket policies that had been put in place to prevent ticket scalping. While we are certainly not fans of scalping, these well-intentioned ticket policies were overly restrictive and burdensome on the ticket buyer.

The final frustrating story involved the purchase of a ticket to see a popular musician. As expected, tickets sold out quickly and I ended up purchasing a scalped ticket. I learned an unfortunate lesson when I showed up at the door and the barcode on my ticket was not accepted– I was denied entrance because someone sold me a duplicate ticket which had already been scanned. At Tandum we are working toward eliminating these problems from the live event setting.

Who are the founders?

Doug Pace and Tyler Griffith.

Where are you located?

We are currently working out of Nashville, TN and Charlotte, NC.

What’s the startup scene like there?

The startup scenes in Nashville and Charlotte are young, but vibrant. We are fortunate to be in these cities which are placing an increased focus on helping startup companies grow and succeed. Nashville and Charlotte don’t necessarily have the capital and resources as Silicon Valley or New York City; however, it is exciting to see people in the community working really hard to develop the startup scene through accelerator programs, shared workspace for entrepreneurs, and easy access to networks of experts in the fields of business strategy, software development, and finance.

What milestones have you reached?

The Tandum concept has been in development for two years. During that time, we have been fortunate to speak with many different people in the live entertainment industry who have provided invaluable insights and guidance as we continue to develop the concept. At the end of 2013, we partnered with Centresource, a leading software agency in Nashville, TN, to develop a clickable iPhone and iPad prototype. In early 2014, we met with live entertainment venues and music festivals to demo the prototype and received extremely positive feedback. We also received a handful of letters of intent from venues that are interested in using our product once it is developed.

What are your next milestones?

Our next milestones are raising funding, hiring additional employees, and launching the fully-developed product. We have already identified our initial venue partners that we will work with to test and launch the product, so our next milestones are dependent on raising sufficient capital for software development. Our goal is to have the first product launch near the end of 2014. To date, we have been very quiet about Tandum, but we are so excited to unveil it when the product is launched.

Where can people find out more?

Please stop by our landing page, www.tandum.us. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. If you are an investor or a computer programmer and would like to be part of Tandum, please send us an email at info@tandum.us.

Las Vegas Startup: Ticketometer Looking To Disrupt The Ticket Space With Creativity

How creative can the ticket space be? It’s a pretty straight forward business right? Have an event, you need to have a ticket. Nowadays that can be a hard paper ticket, a printed ticket at home or a virtual ticket housed on your smartphone. So is their room for creativity?

Well brothers Ardon and Jaron Lukasiewicz of Las Vegas think there is. In fact creativity is what is driving their startup Ticketometer from being different than all those other event ticketing sites. 24 year old Ardon tells Las Vegas’ Channel 8 news that they have a company of 5 already and their hoping to turn a profit in their first year with their ticketing business.

Ticketometer hopes to attract venues to using their service by being creative. That can mean making a wild and popping event web page or incentivizing ticket sales with new promotions and concepts. Ticketometer also provides back end details on ticket sales to venues, statistics that some other ticketing sites are quick to give up. But that’s not all to their openness. Ticketometer provides information to those buying tickets like how close an event is to actually selling out. Sure we all know what it’s like to miss a ticket sale and find our favorite show is sold out, but when a ticket is available is the show really popular? Are you one of 100 people going to see your favorite local band or one of 5,000. These things make a difference to both the event go-er and the venue.

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