

Ticketstumbler (YC Summer 08) launches - sharpshoot
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/05/ticketstumbler-aggregates-secondary-ticket-search/

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fallentimes
God this website blows.

Just kidding. Hi, I'm Dan one of the cofounders of TicketStumbler.com. If you
have any suggestions or feedback please leave them here no matter how minor.

If you have scathing criticism and are worried about being down modded, please
email me directly - dan [at] ticketstumbler (dot) com.

~~~
kyro
When I click any of the ticket categories, such as NHL, I get 'led zeppelin'
in the search bar. Not sure if that's supposed to be a humorous example, but I
don't get any search results for it. Perhaps populate the search bar with
relevant events to the ones being searched for already so that there are
results, and hopefully, ticket purchases. :P

Are you hoping to add NBA?

Besides that, congrats.

~~~
fallentimes
That sounds like something Tom would do on purpose, but yes we'll fix that.

NBA schedule is released today so we'll be adding the NBA shortly thereafter.

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nuclear_eclipse
I already reported this to Tom over AIM, and he said he thought it might be a
caching issue, and he might have fixed it...

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maxklein
Well, this is not something that applies to me, as I rarely buy tickets.

I do have one question: how do people get passionate about tickets? I mean, I
LOVE the stuff I am working on, I NEED the stuff I am working on for myself,
and I would not want to do anything else, but if they asked to me make a
startup about tickets with a guaranteed 1 million payout, I'd really have a
hard time doing it.

I just cannot imagine myself being passionate about _tickets_. It's a freakin
ticket, I'm not going to devote a good chunk of my life towards making them a
bit cheaper.

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tdavis
Hi. I'm Tom and I am the co-founder at TS and you know what, you're right -- I
am not passionate about tickets. I'm not even passionate about sports. In
fact, the only sport I care about is hockey; the rest I essentially hate. I am
still very passionate about the project, however, because it has been very
entertaining from a technical perspective and has been a great opportunity to
not only take part in YC, but build a company with a very old friend.

I'm very passionate about the site, but not because I necessarily want to make
my own ticket-buying experience better. I like TS because it's a useful
service for other people, presents challenging work, and has been an
opportunity to work with very large volumes of data, among other reasons. I
may not find tickets or sports exciting, but not once since the start of this
project have I thought to myself, "I really wish I was working on something
else."

Edit: Once we have concert listings I suppose I can meet the artificial
requirement of building something I would use because there's little I'm more
passionate about than music.

~~~
maxklein
Tom, are you using your own site? If you are interested in working with large
volumes of data, then you are not struggling with the real issue - which
involves all the different ways people interact with the site and how it
solves different needs.

This is the reason open source software so often sucks - because people want
to solve the difficult technical problems (to prove themselves or why, I don't
know), and they are not solving the most important problem - which is knowing
all the different ways users want to use your site and making sure each and
every way is so smooth it's sweet.

That's a core of passion - you create a little baby, and you want that baby to
be perfect, so you do the little things - smooth out the icons here, make sure
that the window pops up just right, test it 30 different times to see if the
flow is smooth and obvious, you ask people what they think of it, and how
exactly it can be made better.

It's like when you finish a painting, then you take a step back, look at it to
see how a stranger would look at it. Then you squint your eyes to see how the
colors look on their own. Then you go up close to see how the shadow on the
little corner box looks, then you think what color of frame would properly
offset the color on the inside....

That's passion.

~~~
fallentimes
Umm I don't think Tom cares how you feel about passion. He's happy, I'm happy
and our friends and family are happy for us. The rest really doesn't matter.

I'm glad you've found some unannounced projects that you have extreme passion
for or whatever but you can't really apply that to other individuals' tastes,
hobbies and desires. It varies.

Good luck with your projects - nothing is more fulfilling than doing something
you enjoy working on all the time (as Tom and I and many of the HN crowd have
done).

Cheers dude, Dan

~~~
maxklein
Take it easy on the attitude, being nice is a important part of success.

~~~
fallentimes
I agree, but you were telling him not only what he should be passionate about
but how he should be passionate about it?

???

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maxklein
I am telling him nothing, I'm just observing the state of things as I see it.

~~~
fallentimes
Fair enough. Anything you'd change about the site (other than subject matter)?
:-D

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okeumeni
The site is nicely design, being a search hacker myself; I have to say this
site pass the test of great relevancy search.

Your search model is as good as Intelliverb’s PageScale algorithm if not
better, I think we should get in touch and share some tricks. : ) Nice Job
guys!

~~~
fallentimes
Email is in my profile - definitely contact us.

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apexauk
plus points for not naming it ticketstumblr..

~~~
okeumeni
I personally think a missing ‘e’ is among the least problem in domain naming
these days, it may actually help engrave the name in someone memory.

How about flikr.com, scribd.com, tumblr.com and lately karatr.com? Not that
bad as compare to all the strange names I’m not going to mention here so I
don’t offend anyone.

~~~
daniel-cussen
In my experience, it's very difficult to describe any of those names in
Spanish without writing the name down for people. Latin America may not
necessarily your main market, but why alienate people? Fotolog is readily
pronounceable, and has been doing very well here, despite getting little
traction in the US market. Not saying the name is everything; it's just one of
the little details that helps word of mouth.

~~~
okeumeni
I hate to disagree with you on this, in fact I agree with you on most of what
you say but reality is most of today’s names must be spell to someone who
never heard of it, even Fotolog.

~~~
daniel-cussen
I see what you mean, but really, in Spanish, and in this particular case,
fotolog is really easy to convey:

"Fotolog. Fotolog.com, se escribe como suena." [You spell it the way it
sounds; it's phonetic.]

I agree with you that most names are hard to spell, but in Spanish having a
phonetic name is important because the language itself is phonetic.

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lg
I like the simple interface. I wish you could extend it to the actual buying
phase though, so I don't need to go to StubHub and make an account there just
to buy it, which (when I get a look at the overwrought stubhub site) might
make me throw up my hands in frustration. Also, a couple tickets I clicked on
had already been sold; it'd be great if you could prevent that... (btw, add
concert ticket search and I will probably use this all the time.)

~~~
fallentimes
Thanks for the feedback. We thought about this but including the buying phase
on our website would not only expose us to significantly more liability but it
would essentially destroy millions of dollars in brand equity that places like
Stubhub and Tickets Now have built.

Although we agree that it's not as convenient, we're pretty set on sending our
visitors to the actual providers (like Kayak does with airlines). Not doing
that carries a lot of wrongly addressed customer service issues and liability
exposure we're not prepared to and don't want to, deal with.

We're going to be adding servers soon so our crawls will approach closer and
closer to real time. Sorry we didn't have your tickets still available.

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briancooley
Will you be adding venue maps? I know I could look it up elsewhere, but it
would be nice to be able to pull up from the ticketstumbler site.

~~~
fallentimes
Agreed. We have them all downloaded. Should be up within a week.

~~~
omakase
Why not just preview and link to a google map?

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fallentimes
I should have clarified...by maps I mean: stadium seating charts. We want to
have stadium seating charts and directions so it will be a combination of both
ideas.

~~~
sachinag
I hope you guys can implement something a little more interactive, like what
SeatQuest has, rather than just static jpg/gif of the stadium. SeatQuest has
it decently there, but I bet you guys can do it better.

~~~
fallentimes
Seatquest is so slow and having tiny dots on a screen, in our mind and most of
our testers mind doesn't add too much value. Everything they have is pretty
much educated guess work (i.e. the accuracy of the dots is not very high).

The holy grail of seating maps (and what our users have requested many times)
is what Stubhub has (interactive, sortable, clickable). This is just really
really difficult to implement when we have listings from multiple providers
who all call things slightly different names.

We'll get there though.

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mattmaroon
Grats on the launch guys. Wish I had this back during the Stanley Cup finals.

~~~
rit
No kidding. Everytime I DID manage to grab tickets, the Flyers finished out
the series before the game I had tickets to.

~~~
mattmaroon
I was tempted to talk some trash about the Flyers, but figured the code base
of this site might implode if we got into a sports-related discussion.

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johns
I resell a fair amount of tickets, and I rarely make a sale through StubHub
and my prices are always lower than market. I sell 95% of the tickets I have
through Craigslist. So here's a challenge for you: incorporate Craigslist
ticket listings.

~~~
fallentimes
Craigslist doesn't have buyer guarantees or anything that holds the seller
accountable. All the ticket providers we list do.

The guys who consulted with us sell over $1,000,000 (one million - not a typo)
of tickets per year on Stubhub. Not sure why you're having problems.

~~~
mattmaroon
Scammers are far too prevalent on Craigslist for me to buy tickets from. It
might be worth working in eBay.

~~~
fallentimes
They'd lessen list integrity as well as they'd show up as the "cheapest" every
time due to their auction format.

~~~
mattmaroon
Good point, but many have a buy it now price. Maybe only show ones with fixed
price from reputable sellers?

~~~
fallentimes
That's a good idea. We might apply some of our interface and geotracking
features to a yet to be determined part of our site featuring ebay auctions.

Still don't know how I feel - ebay is crappy even with buy it now.

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anthonyrubin
I'd rather see more competitors to Ticketmaster. I never buy tickets from
resellers and I rarely have a problem seeing a concert (not a sports fan).

~~~
fallentimes
We looked in to this. Ticketmaster buys all their competitors. Seriously - the
only "real" competitor they have is Livenation.

~~~
anthonyrubin
Through the end of this year Live Nation tickets are still sold through
Ticketmaster. I'm hoping that next year we see some effect on Ticketmaster.

Front Gate is another growing competitor.

~~~
r7000
Another big competitor are white label companies. When you buy direct from a
(larger) venue/club/sports team/etc. they are using a white label solution.

~~~
fallentimes
There's a lot of them but as a percentage of total primary ticket revenue it's
less than 1 percent.

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fallentimes
Concerts are now available at TicketStumbler. [http://ticketstumbler.com/new-
stuff/2008/10/18/oh-the-horror...](http://ticketstumbler.com/new-
stuff/2008/10/18/oh-the-horror-and-new-tickets/)

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utnick
Its a tough market to be in because stubhub is so good right now.

~~~
fallentimes
Stubhub is one of our ticket providers although we'll be competing for the
same traffic. And yes Stubhub rocks - our other providers are so far behind
them it's not even funny.

~~~
chwolfe
If the other providers do not catch up with Stubhub, won't TicketStumbler end
up being a nice front end to Stubhub?

~~~
utnick
Thats what I thought at first sight, but its not exactly true.

If all you want is a cheap ticket than stubhub seems like the place to go,
stubhub is the cheapest on all of the ticketstumbler searches I have done.

However, If you want something rare like courtside at the lakers.. Stubhub
might not always have it, but ticketcity or some other place will. Thats where
the value of TicketStumbler comes in I think. Its a useful site.

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rantfoil
Congrats guys -- superb job, very well done.

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pius
Great idea!

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Ticketwood
How is this different from <http://www.ticketwood.com> I think they are the
leaders in this sold out tickets market?

~~~
fallentimes
Oh hai Ticketwood sock puppet person, it’s your pal Dan from TicketStumbler. I
noticed that Ticketwood has spammed at least five other TicketStumbler
articles with the exact same comment. Actually this might be time #11.

Are you guys really this desperate for visitors and attention? How much do
spam commenters cost anyways? Love always and forever, your friends at
T-Stumbler.

P.S. Maybe instead of spamming our press coverage you should focus on building
a good product. kekekeke

