Oct 23, 2021
A new startup with a better way to do ticketing.
Billions of tickets are sold every year, in a very old-fashioned way. It’s a sector that is ripe for innovation.
Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, writes about how big incumbent companies are almost never able to create real innovation. As a result, they always end up eventually being slayed by new entrants who have the disruptive innovation that customers want. It’s a cycle that repeats itself over and over.
Tixologi, a new startup in Los Angeles, has plans to bring much-needed innovation to the ticketing sector. There are billions of tickets sold every year — for everything from movies to concerts to sporting events — and yet it’s a sector controlled by a few large incumbent companies running 1990’s technology. There is a huge opportunity for innovative new entrants.
Tixologi’s founding team includes a former NBA digital product manager and technologists with deep experience with blockchain software application development. Together they’ve developed a ticketing platform that provides consumers the sort of 21st-century user experience they expect today and also provides event producers with the tools to sell more tickets, prevent fraud, and drive revenue through sales of additional merchandise and NFT collectibles.
Blockchain and NFT are very hot buzzwords these days, but they are simply underlying technologies upon which solutions can be built. One of the things I love about Tixologi’s founding team is that they are focused on building a platform that solves customers’ real-world problems. There happen to be some interesting new technologies they are leveraging, but the team’s focus remains steadfastly on understanding customer needs and figuring out how to meet those needs better. The trendy technologies are simply part of the solution set — they are not an end in and of themselves.
Ticketing has been around for a long time. Billions of tickets will be sold this year, and billions more every year after that. Meanwhile, consumer expectations are dramatically different today than they were ten years ago and yet the big ticketing companies are still using the same technology and same business model they used twenty years ago. There is a big opportunity for innovative new entrants like Tixologi, and I’m excited to watch as it all unfolds.
Tixologi will be presenting at Demo Day for the 4thly Startup Accelerator on November 4th.
