When Brett Goldberg and Chris O’Brien launched TickPick in 2011, they wanted to take a different approach to growing a startup.
Rather than rely on outside funding right away, they decided to grow organically and hone their nascent event ticket marketplace. And for the last eight years, that’s just what they did.
It allowed us to figure out what our priorities were and scale in a natural way.”
They bootstrapped, brought on additional team members slowly, added algorithms to improve the customer experience and became profitable. Along the way, their company acquired others, like Razorgator and Rukkus, which served to double its user base and provided a 360-degree-seat-view tool for its platform. This bootstrapping allowed the company to grow naturally, Goldberg told Built In.
“It allowed us to figure out what our priorities were and scale in a natural way,” Goldberg said. “It’s allowed everything to move cohesively. More recently, startups are depending more on capital than they used to.”
But now, the New York-based company is ready to take its shot at the ticketing giants. The company announced on Tuesday that it has raised its first round, a $40 million investment led by PWP Growth Equity. The funds will allow TickPick to accelerate efforts in marketing and business development as well as establish a data team to add artificial intelligence to its platform.
While the company has long held off on raising money through investors, co-founder Brett Goldberg told Built In that the company had the foundation in place to expedite its growth.
“We can continue on this pace now and that would be fine, but we have built the foundation and are now able to throw gasoline on it,” he said.
Though much smaller in size than other ticketing marketplaces, TickPick has been able to stand out from its competitors by offering transparent ticket pricing and a personalized experience. Customers looking for seats to a concert or a football game can visit its platform and type in their preferred price.
The company’s algorithm will then generate a selection of best seats available, along with a 360-degree views from that seat to help the customer make a decision. But the kicker is that the price a customer sees is what they pay. There’s no 20 percent processing fee tacked on at the end.
This year, the company is on target to surpass $200 million in gross transactions and 60 percent year-over-year growth.
“The sentiment in the third-party ticketing space is quite bad,” Goldberg said. “Coming out and saying, ‘What you see is what you’re paying for’ has been refreshing for customers. There’s this ‘Aha’ moment when you check out and see that we did what we said.”
With this round, TickPick plans to grow from a team of 30 employees to 50. The company also plans to build a data engineering team to add an AI component that can help better recommend tickets based on customer history.
