Gone are the good old days when concertgoers and sports fans only had to bargain with the semi-intoxicated scalper in the parking lot.
These days, a big percentage of tickets are snapped up by online resellers who move their merchandise on on secondary markets like Razorgator and TicketsNow.
“We found there just wasn’t any transparency to this market,” says Russell D’Souza, co-founder of the NYC startup SeatGeek. “We wanted to help people search across all these different sites to find the best price.”
Founded in May 2009 by Dartmouth classmates D’Souza and Jack Groetzinger, SeatGeek has since raised more than $2 million in funding from Founder Collective and NYC Seed. A SeatGeek partnership with The Wall Street Journal is also rumored to be in the works.
“For this to have real value to people, it had to go beyond just showing you the best prices,” says D’Souza. SeatGeek took their cues from airline ticket sites like Farecast, creating an algorithm that predicts how the price of seats will change over time and what spot in a stadium has the best view to help users decide when and where they should purchase a ticket.
The site makes money by collecting a 8 percent to 14 percent fee on each ticket sold to one of their customers. “We send these sites highly qualified leads, and they are willing to pay for that traffic,” says D’Souza
SeatGeek may have the best seats in the house, but its still facing a common problem among NYC startups. “We’re hungry for talented developers, and those are hard to find here,” says D’Souza. Any programmers willing to work for box seats to the World Series?
Check out SeatGeek’s forecast for the most expensive tickets in New York City this November >
