If you want to build a good business, look for an unsolved problem that can be solved.
Two decades ago, its co-founders were Eventbrite saw. Many people wanted to host events, but selling tickets had always been complicated. Then, two changes emerged: Social media enabled communities to create and organize events. And financial services companies like PayPal enabled microtransactions in ways previously unimaginable.
Eventbrite was created to bring it all together. “We wanted to combine the power of micro transactions with the creative genius of community organizing,” says Eventbrite CEO Julia Hertz, one of the company’s three co-founders.
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The company will officially turn 20 in January, and a lot has changed. Eventbrite is a public company, steeped in competition, and actively evolving – working to find even more unsolved problems that are worthy of new solutions. Instead of just being a ticket sales platform, it has been expanded to become an event discovery platform. Hertz explains how they have kept the company relevant for so long.
Twenty years is a big milestone. How are you feeling right now?
I am feeling emotional. And I’m thinking about how after the IPO, after the once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic, there were a lot of different changes we made to our product that we saw as opportunities. They force us to clarify what really matters. And more recently, we’ve been using this analogy of Eventbrite becoming the “Spotify for events” – which, thanks to them, is because this analogy immediately sticks to people.
What inspired that comparison?
We essentially became an infrastructure for creators. They come to Eventbrite, they publish their event, they bring their attendee list; They invite their community – and that community transacts on Eventbrite. But midway through our existence, we realized: Wow, we have millions of consumers looking for things to do, and we don’t always have the right answers for them.
Whether it was on Eventbrite or through social media, people were not Search Events. he was stumbling Them. How many times have you felt like this, Oh I wish I knew that show was coming to townSo we found a missed opportunity in the experience economy: Discovery is broken.
When I think of events, I think of a band telling me about their show. But what you’re describing is actually a completely different user: it’s someone who is just looking for something to do.
We started to really focus on what I would call the “social scout”: someone who is naturally curious, who always knows about the coolest new restaurant or best drink at a bar, who takes pride in knowing what’s going on. And we thought of creating a solution for this type of person.
It was less about structured data – I mean, there was a point at which I certainly thought that if we could access your calendar (events), we could grab it. But in reality it is not so at all. Spotify doesn’t win by helping you find songs you already know, right? It doesn’t ask you what you want. Spotify wins by learning your preferences and recommending the right songs at the right time. And this is inspiring for us. Our bet is that the next billion attendees aren’t searching. They are searching.
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So how do you serve that new type of user?
We’re thinking about it this way: every time someone is looking for an event, whether it’s on Eventbrite or off it, they should be able to easily find great things to do through the Eventbrite source – which means making sure we can put the right event in front of the right person at the right time, virtually wherever they are.
We’ve never been too precious about making this happen at Eventbrite. This is our first principle. The search is taking place through relevant media. So we’ve built APIs and distribution partnerships with people like Spotify that make contextual discovery possible. If you’re listening to an artist, and that artist is coming to town and their show is on Eventbrite, you’ll be able to purchase tickets without missing out on that experience. This is the ultimate goal. We started this way with Facebook, and have expanded to TikTok and other social media distribution platforms.
Now here’s the other thing: When people log into the Eventbrite consumer app, our recommendations are a challenge to them. We have always thought that we can leverage technology to make connections easier, faster and more effective. We know what they might be interested in based on past events they’ve attended, where their friends are going, what’s trending in their area, etc.
Julia Hertz, with co-founder Kevin Hertz, recognizing Eventbrite’s logo in its early days.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Eventbrite
And if you can reach the Social Scout, they can bring other people along with them, right? They bring more customers to Eventbrite.
Event producers are our heroes. This is probably one of the most stressful careers you can choose. When we think about the logistics of creating an event and breaking the value loop for an event, every additional attendee that we can lock in for the creator is extremely valuable to them.
Most events have a fixed cost of the venue and the artists and vendors, so the producer is simply hoping to cover that fixed cost. So we realized that if we could provide incremental value by helping each creator reach a larger audience, that’s magical. It could be the difference between them being able to host another event or not.
It may also be a difference between them using Eventbrite or another platform. Because now that you are almost 20 years old, you have got competitors.
We have a lot of competitors. But about 23% of tickets transacted on Eventbrite are driven by an action taken specifically by Eventbrite. We see the strength in that, but that’s not where we’re building our value proposition. We’re really hoping that creators understand that if they stay with Eventbrite, they’re creating their own compound growth loop in the audience, in the community, in the attendees, in the people who will tell other people about their event.
That’s where we really focus our product: on making sure they understand who their most loyal customers are – where they came from, when they bought tickets, at what price – and really helping them understand the intelligence layer of it.
So Eventbrite isn’t just looking for social scouts. You’re still developing the creator side.
Our job is really to help event creators understand with some degree of accuracy how we are engaging them as audience members – to help them do more of that. Unlike most of our competitors, we don’t operate in a black box. We show creators exactly where the person is coming from, because we know creators are entrepreneurs; He is a builder. We want them to be able to go out and be better marketers of their event. That’s why we’ll never hide our marketing strategy or how we drove someone to an event. We will always try to teach them how to do it themselves.
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If you want to build a good business, look for an unsolved problem that can be solved.
Two decades ago, its co-founders were Eventbrite saw. Many people wanted to host events, but selling tickets had always been complicated. Then, two changes emerged: Social media enabled communities to create and organize events. And financial services companies like PayPal enabled microtransactions in ways previously unimaginable.
Eventbrite was created to bring it all together. “We wanted to combine the power of micro transactions with the creative genius of community organizing,” says Eventbrite CEO Julia Hertz, one of the company’s three co-founders.
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