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Eventbrite S-1
- darkstar999 8y agoI hope Eventbrite and Brown Paper Tickets are successful in stealing some business from their nasty competitors like Ticketmaster whose fees can be 50% of the ticket price. Edit: their fees can be over 100% of the ticket price.
- icebraining 8y agoPart of that goes to the venue and occasionally the bands too: https://www.laweekly.com/music/ticketmaster-and-servants-bands-get-cut-of-service-fee-2158605 https://www.laweekly.com/music/ticketmaster-and-servants-ban...
- darkstar999 8y agoDoesn't make a difference. Maybe it's an industry problem, because it doesn't make sense to advertise the ticket price but hide a bunch of fees to be found at checkout. (I'm looking at you, airlines). Might as well advertise everything as $1 and everything else is fees. It reminds me of Centurylink's "Internet Cost Recovery Fee" for $3.99 a month. It's a bullshit sneaky way to advertise one price but the actual price is "below the fold". I think this kind of pricing should be illegal.
- zachberger 8y agoEventbrite does this too on their website, however on the mobile app the advertised price includes any fees.
- sciurus 8y agoDoesn't make sense? Sure it does. Ticketmaster's sales team gets to go to venue and say "if you go with us, you can charge outrageous fees, pocket most of it, and we'll take all the blame".
- barkingcat 8y agoIf they need that money, just put it in the base price and don't charge extra fees.
- jonnywhite 8y agoEventbrite are still expensive in my view and their business model perpetuates the 'booking fee' mentality of the industry. To sell 250 tickets for $10 each would cost the event organiser (or ticket buyers) $560, excluding payment processing. That's a hefty chunk of cash for relatively little work. I don't think it's a fair model so I set up Ticket Tailor for this reason - https://www.tickettailor.com https://www.tickettailor.com. The same event would cost $25/mo, with no contracts or commitment. We have facilitated 8M ticket sales for savvy event organisers who are fed up with [Eventbrite | any other ticketing company].
- minimaxir 8y ago"We have a history of losses and we may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to achieve and maintain profitability."
- donald123 8y agoWhat's the point? This is a common risk for all companies.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoNot companies going public (historically). It’s only recently these hot messes of unprofitably are getting dumped on the public markets. VCs are for gambling, public markets are for profitable businesses.
- captn3m0 8y agoAny reason why this should remain the status quo? Why shouldn't the general public be allowed to invest in slightly-risky ventures?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoBecause the public are not accredited/sophisticated investors. It's to prevent them from being swindled. How much did professional investors lose on Theranos alone (answer: Somewhere between $600-$800 million)?
- madengr 8y agoRecently looked up "accredited investor". Joint income of > $300k and net worth (minus house) of > $ 1M. I wonder if someone actually does the accrediting.
- icedchai 8y agoIt's actually > $300k income or > $1M net worth. And, no, nobody does the accrediting. It's basically an honor system.
- buf 8y agoAs an early Eventbrite employee who saw the company grow from 10 to 200 people, this feels surreal.
- immad 8y agoAre you happy about it?
- alfanick 8y agoEventbrite, what's that? /me goes to eventbrite.com A website selling tickets for events. It's on public market. Why? I struggle to understand why everyone wants to be on the market. It is a website selling tickets. It's not rocket science. Yes, I'm sceptic, I'm afraid we're going to reach another dotcom bubble soon (and yeah, I'm 25yo, but I know stuff about "history").
- Maro 8y agoEventbrite probably wants to sell tickets to every event on the planet [and take a cut]. That doesn't sound so un-sexy from a business perspective. (I don't know anything about their numbers, just saying.)
- alfanick 8y agoYeah, of course companies are for-profit. I struggle to see how selling tickets should cover return for investors, return for shareholders, employee salaries and fancy offices?
- dna_polymerase 8y agoThen start reading up on the raw numbers of the market instead of posting half-assed comments on HN. It's a big market, lots of competition, much to win.
- pbreit 8y agoI'd be curious what type of business would be attractive to you. Selling books? Sharing pictures? Exchanging text messages?
- alfanick 8y ago> I'd be curious what type of business would be attractive to you. Businesses that create value in physical world with stuff customers can touch i.e.: architecture, civil engineering, car companies or even weapon industry for sake of argument. I still believe that physical objects have more value than "virtual stuff".
- thinkingkong 8y agoThey just also recently acquired Picatic, another vendor in this space. Hopefully that helps with the figures.
- sciurus 8y agoThat highlights one thing to keep in mind when evaluating their 2017 growth: EB purchased both Ticketscript and Ticketfly that year.
- bing_dai 8y agoI cannot be happier for Eventbrite! What a valuable product. My own startup wouldn't have taken off as fast without Eventbrite. Congratulations!
- Sea_Wulf 8y agoCongrats to EventBrite on choosing to go public, but I think a congratulations is in order for their 2017 sales team. > More than 95% of creators who used our platform in 2017 signed themselves up for Eventbrite. In 2017, we derived 54% of our net revenue from these creators. Selling to about 35,000 creators (700,000 total) for 46% of the profit is no small chore, and, in my mind, speaks to a highly effective sales strategy. It also partially explains why LiveNation is not taking a "create your own event online" approach: direct sales can be more profitable.
- tomphoolery 8y agoIt's not just the sales team. Eventbrite has a fantastic user interface and features that really work for people with complex ticketing requirements, better than any other ticketing platform I've ever used.
- sciurus 8y agoKeep in mind that Eventbrite doesn't charge anything to host free events, which is all many of their organic customers ever host. That said, the amount of revenue you can get from music festivals and venues, which require a sales team to make the deals, dwarfs what you can get from most other customers. There's a reason Eventbrite bought Ticketfly. For that same reason, Live Nation has bought some of Eventbrite's customers and moved their ticketing to Ticketmaster.
- Kinnard 8y agoI wonder if this has to do with building a war chest to compete with meetup + WeWork . . . though meetup and eventbrite are definitely different.
- subpixel 8y agoNot likely - Eventbrite ate Meetup's lunch a long time ago and the sale to WeWork was about surviving Facebook's stated plans to own 'groups'. I didn't read the S-1 but I believe Eventbrite is in a league of it's own.
- sciurus 8y agoThe best article I've seen so far is https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/23/ticketing-site-eventbrite-files-to-raise-up-to-200-million-in-ipo.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/23/ticketing-site-eventbrite-fi...
- dopeboy 8y agoAs someone launching a coding camp for kids, Eventbrite has been instrumental for us. We do free classes to generate leads and the free offering of EB has been more than enough to accomplish this. Good to see them succeed.
- sciurus 8y agoI chuckled when I read "For example, we previously experienced interruptions in performance of our platform because of a hardware error that AWS experienced" on page 26. I never expected one of the mishaps I dealt with while I worked there to appear in an SEC filing! If you want to learn a lot at the expense of a few gray hairs, I can highly recommend working in ops in the ticketing industry. I've spoken about some of the things it taught me at https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17/conference-program/presentation/pitts https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17/conference-program/...
- sfrench 8y agoI’m happy my stuff didn’t require multiple pages :)
- mshenfield 8y agoIs reading S-1 filings a thing (nerd)?
- jrm2k6 8y agoI think when it is a company you worked for, you might be more likely to do it. You probably still have a bit of attachment to it.
- mychael 8y agoCongrats Eventbrite team. You guys earned it!
- toomanybeersies 8y agoAs a non-American who's never invested in shares outside of his own country. How do I get a slice of this pie? This is one of the few specific companies I'd actually be interested in investing in, rather than throwing all my money into indexes.
- drx 8y agoGet a US brokerage account like Schwab.
- tehlike 8y agoInteractive brokers would be my vote.
- randomsearch 8y agoThat’s interesting, why would you want to invest? EventBrite looks like a very vulnerable business to me.
- davidu 8y agoCongrats Julia (and Kevin)! Amazing company you've built.
- bbrian 8y agoGo to eventbrite.com, search (blank) your local area "today" and events are not in chronological order. I appreciate that they show the 'best' events first, but when I just want something to do, it kills me that such a simple search is not available.
- Santoshpanda 8y agoNetwork effect could solve gaps and make Eventbrite emerge as №1 player vs. LiveNation. But only in the ticketing for the entertainment segment. This is further challenged due to Top 5 wants a pie of every tech-driven business: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and even Apple. They own the network. here is my detailed thought post: https://medium.com/@santoshpanda/my-thoughts-on-eventbrites-s-1-event-tech-industry-segments-and-trillion-world-market-680dc6a437b https://medium.com/@santoshpanda/my-thoughts-on-eventbrites-...