SuchCrowd: De-risk events using a “lean” approach to ticketing
I'm an exponent of Eric Ries and Steve Blank's Lean Startup Methodology, the essence of which is (my formulation): Run your startup like a science experiment – document your assumptions, validate whether or not they're true, alter your business parameters (pivot) to incorporate your learnings, repeat until you either achieve product-market fit or run out of resources.
It turns out that startups aren't the only thing that Lean can be applied to. SuchCrowd provides a lean approach to event planning. Not sure whether there's a market for melodic death metal in Arrowtown? Before you go and book Lamb of God into the Arrowtown Athenaeum Hall and set up a gig you're not sure will break even, you can use SuchCrowd to validate your market. The SuchCrowd team calls it Lean Events Theory.
SuchCrowd lets you set up a tentative event, and start selling tickets. If you don't get to the minimum number of tickets sold by a preset deadline, all of the existing ticketholders get a full refund. Once the event reaches the minimum number of tickets, the event is formally scheduled. The platform provides tools to help people passionate about the event share info about the event increasing the chances of getting to critical mass, and building the artists' fan base.
It's worked really well for events like the Popup Kitten Cafe and Startup Weekend Dunedin 2016. In the case of Popup Kitten Café, they reached their minimum number of tickets in only 40 minutes. And Startup Weekend Dunedin 2016 reached critical mass three weeks before the event – that's two weeks ahead of the predecessor 2015 event. Clearly, it's working.
You can even A/B test parameters around events like venue, time, ticket price, and so on. Get early engagement before pouring money down the drain marketing a product that the market doesn't want. Lean. Next on the product line up – SuchCrowd is building a promotion engine which helps anyone with any level of tech savviness to promote their events on social networks and media easily and effectively so that event planners can get quick feedback on whether their event will fly.
SuchCrowd has now run 45 events between Dunedin, Christchurch, and Wellington, with one event also one in the US. They'll be launching their Aussie platform before the end of August, mainly at the request of Australian bands who have toured NZ and loved the service.
I first met the cofounders Abbe Hyde, Jake Manning, and Tin Htoo Aung at Startup Weekend Dunedin 2015, where they were working on a company to handle online marking of university assignments. During the course of the weekend, they found that it was a busy market and not all that attractive, but the team stuck together and decided to do a "real" startup doing something else. Tin is from Myanmar (formerly Burma), where he was the CEO of a software development company that had built a ticketing system for the challenging Burmese market – challenging because they just didn't have the infrastructure at the time (reliable Internet, payment gateways, etc) that we take for granted in New Zealand. When they started investigating the ticketing market, they discovered the number one problem shared by people running events was fear of not being able to sell enough tickets to break even. This is especially true of people running events with emerging talent. SuchCrowd was developed to solve this problem that remained unaddressed by any of the existing ticketing platforms.
These guys are lean machines. They currently in a sprint where they have a target of testing 10 hypotheses per day. This is a practice they picked up in Lightning Lab Christchurch, which they attended last year. They really loved the Lab, and strive to recreate accelerator culture in their company every day. Since the end of the Lab the team has tripled in size – they're up to nine people, whose roles outside of work include being a comedian, two dancers, bass guitarist, and an actor.
They've just completed a raise of $150K using the Simmonds Stewart Kiwi KISS documentation that's been hacked to meet SCIF requirements. That's a real milestone – the first new investment type to be accepted by SCIF in over a decade. This funding will carry them through to the end of the first quarter 2017, when they'll be raising a seed round.
If you're running an event of any kind, and you're not sure how many people you might be able to get to come, by all means check out SuchCrowd, and if you're interested in following the antics of this creative team, email Abbe and sign up to their newsletter.
