How Starting With Trust Led This Startup To work with Elton John, Adele, and get 750,000+ Users
Listen to the episode!
Read The Blog Post!
Written by Richard Davies, Founder & CEO of Twickets
Hi HypeNATION,
My name is Richard Davies, Founder of Twickets, an ethical ticket resale platform for live events.
The ticketing landscape is in a state of transition as artists take more control, and fans seek transparency and trust.
Education has been at the heart of this change.
Thanks mainly to artists being more vocal via their social voice, fans now have a real understanding of how secondary sites operate and they have equally started to socialize their displeasure at the current model.
Both fans and artists have grown tired of overpriced tickets on secondary sites and have started to seek out an alternative option.
On Twickets, tickets are always sold at no more than the original cost making resale fairer for everyone. We have made ticketing not just a transaction business but a marketplace for a community of like-minded fans.
As our business model is built on altruism as opposed to financial gain for the seller, we have created a unique community built on trust, which is a word that has often been missing from the ticketing landscape.
This trust has driven over 200 of the world’s biggest artists to now partner with our platform including the likes of Queen, Ed Sheeran, Adele, Elton John, Eric Church, Muse, Arctic Monkeys and Foo Fighters.
Ed Sheeran partnered with Twickets as a preferred platform for his fans to buy and sell spare tickets with Twickets selling over 50,000 fan-to-fan tickets for his most recent tour.
“I decided to team up with Twickets to help protect my fans against fraud and hideous overpricing,” said Sheeran.
Technology also continues to play a major part in helping stop the manipulation of this market, something Twickets is fully supportive of.
More mobile-friendly systems, biometrics, dynamic barcodes and blockchain are just some of the many innovations now available to vendors to ensure tickets become a ‘right to entry’ rather than a commodity and are tied to individual purchasers with all the rights and privileges that this entails.
This in turn helps prevent fraud, increases venue security and creates a fair and transparent fan-to-fan resale environment, which ensures tickets are always traded at face value and not at rip-off prices.
We therefore need to keep our focus on making the ethical trading of tickets an engaging and compelling proposition for fans which means thinking about how these new innovations and thought processes might affect them.
With 25,000 unique events listed annually and a growing community approaching one million users, we have put fans and artists back in control and we now help facilitate thousands of face-value ticket sales between these fans every day.
They can easily buy and sell tickets to a wide array of gigs, festivals, sporting events, comedy shows, theatre and the arts, all in the knowledge that trust is at the heart of every transaction.
As the only platform that aspires to trade any ticket, to any event anywhere in the world and always at face value, we know, probably better than anyone, that there will inevitably be an ongoing arms race to prevent the exploitation of fans.
However, we also know that it is only a matter of time before industrial scalping becomes so toxic, and the ethical alternatives so attractive, that it becomes untenable as a business model.
We aim to put the trust back into ticketing with every fan-to-fan transaction we facilitate.
Listen to more on our trust-based model in my episode with RajNATION on Startup Hypeman: The Podcast.
Richard