Ticket sales and event promotion are sets of jobs-to-be-done that the Internet enables very well. Individuals can send waves of spam event-promoting notices over Facebook, and of course the 800-pound gorilla of "high-end" ticket sales is Ticketmaster. One startup, however, believes there's space in between: Eventbrite, backed by $6.5 million from Sequoia Capital, is seeking to provide a lower-end, less-expensive Internet-based ticketing and event promotion solution for the masses. But can they successfully disrupt Ticketmaster and find space in a crowded market?
One potential hurdle Eventbrite faces is what one might call "ease of imitation." An event-promotion website isn't terribly difficult to set up, and a model that targets less-demanding customers would in theory be very easy for Ticketmaster to replicate. Of course, Eventbrite's willingness to charge much less than Ticketmaster does, and its focus on less-enormous events (Ticketmaster's home page promotes everything from U2 to the NFL to Cirque Du Soleil) may protect it if Ticketmaster sees that segment as too unattractive and unprofitable to bother with. But the catch-22 is that if Eventbrite succeeds, Ticketmaster will strike.
Eventbrite faces significant less-sophisticated competitors as well: simple solutions individuals organizing small events might turn to, from handwritten notes to Excel to Craigslist. A statement from one of Eventbrite's backers, Roelof Botha, is telling: "Most of the people who use Eventbrite didn't switch from anything else. These are people who organized events using spreadsheets, pen and paper. They never had a solution before." Of course, spreadsheets and pen and paper are solutions, and if many of Eventbrite's target customers are happy with them, what will motivate them to go online and pay a third party a fee?
Again, the Internet can be a terrific tool, and sites and applications built on it can do an ever-expanding array of jobs, but it's a mistake to assert that something people aren't doing on the Internet is something people aren't doing well. Using something as low-tech as a notebook to track ticket sales for your garage band or your small company's annual forum doesn't mean you need something electronic and "better." Eventbrite will only thrive if a niche truly exists between people for whom low-tech is "good enough" and higher-end customers for whom Ticketmaster will aggressively compete.
