How to monetize a startup

A year ago we had the idea to make a startup dedicated to the secondary ticket market GoritBilet.ru . The niche was free, we needed the service ourselves, since we have a tourist business (as the guys from 37signals write, this is a very important factor), and the western experience showed very good results.



Today we made a project redesign; following the fashion, they socialized, but they could not implement an effective monetization system. I would like to share my experience and, perhaps, hear advice from a respected audience.





In brief, let me remind you why you need BurnitTicket: a resource is calculated for resale of tickets, for the purpose of profit, if the ticket is rare (for example, a ticket to the Cirque du Soleil), or in order not to lose the money spent in the absence of the opportunity to use it (for example, in a refusal tour ).

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Our attempts to introduce monetization

First

Western monetization scheme (on the example of such services as viagogo.com , seatwave.com , stubhub.com ). This scheme did not take root after a detailed study of the stages of interaction between the seller and the buyer. The principle of its work is as follows: the seller finds an event for which he has a ticket, puts it on sale, then the buyer who is interested in this event sees his offer among the rest, and, if desired, buys it through the service. The seller receives an alert at this time: “Your ticket is purchased, send it by mail to such an address and receive money minus 10% of the ticket price immediately after the buyer confirms receipt of the ticket”. Obviously, the weak link would be the Post of Russia. In conditions when there would be less than a week before the event, the probability of delivery of the ticket in time would tend to zero.

The second

The scheme may be useful to someone for use in such services. Our working title is “Promote your ticket”. The idea is that when a ticket is being sold on a website, the seller is offered to promote it through contextual advertising (the ticket header becomes the heading of the Yandex.Direct ad). It works automatically as on Blonde.ru. The user does not need to configure anything: everything is simple - he paid 500 rubles, and your ticket is in the TOP. The stumbling block is that the average price of a ticket does not exceed 2000 rubles and, obviously, it will be a pity to give a quarter of the price of a ticket for context, and contextual advertising with a budget of less than half a thousand rubles will be ineffective.

Third

The most relevant for today is the analogue of groupon.com. In Russia, there are so many such services that an aggregator is already needed that more than one team is trying to do (for example, kupongid.ru , rukupon.ru , kuponator.ru , kuponer.ru ). In our case, we wanted to apply this model in the ticketing market, but so far it has not been possible to agree with anyone about serious discounts, accounting restrictions of counterparties interfere, or a standardized way of selling through electronic series like MDTZK, but we continue to work in this direction.

Fourth

"VIP ticket". Quite a banal scheme, but we decided to try it along with restarting the project. It works like this - the ticket seller is offered to increase the number of views of his ticket for 98 rubles: since free tickets look quite ascetic, you can make a bright individual cover; To secure a ticket in the first place for a few days and automatically light up in all our social profiles. In principle, this monetization scheme is already yielding the first fruits, but, at the same time, it is clear that this will not bring much money, especially if you focus on the performance of the secondary ticket market today. On average, on all known bulletin boards, in Vkontakte statuses, on blogs and on Twitter, they sell about 1000 tickets and, even if everyone knows about our project, and 5% of them want to make a VIP-ticket, you cannot call it profit. But we hope that the secondary market in Russia is in its infancy, and we expect growth, especially after the habr.)

Total

If your startup does not have clear monetization at the very beginning, then it is worth considering whether you should start it. Implementing monetization in an existing project is almost as difficult as creating something new. For us, this question remains open.



PS Together with the redesign, we announced a contest: you need to make a video of the Burning Ticket and what it is for. The winner will be the one whose video will collect the most likes on our page. The main prize of course is the iPad)