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Below is our recent interview with Bryan Derbyshire, CEO & Founder of TicketGuardian:
Q: Your growth has been amazing, what was the key to your success? In what way does TicketGuardian protect the ticket buyers?
A: Our growth has been fueled by a couple key activities. We talk to the ticketing providers, the events/venues/promoters, and the attendee and ask for what works and what doesn’t. We look for innovative solutions to make the entire experience better. It started with our FanShield product and the effort to give attendees a buying experience that reflected what they had come to know in everyday commerce. We built a technology to facilitate this process securely and with an ability to scale. Organically from that point on we have come across other issues being faced by the ticketing companies, and the events themselves and we have worked to help our clients find solutions. While some are in beta, we now have over a dozen unique products, from insurance to fraud tools to automation, allowing us to offer solutions to the varied and diverse clients we interact with across the live event space. We don’t see that changing as we move into the future. We are in the business to #protechtwhatmatters so we will continue to look for what matters and find ways to make it better.
Q: Could you tell us your story and something more about TicketGuardian?
A: As we see the emergence of the “Experience Economy” driven by millennials, which shares stats like 2 out of 3 millennials would rather use their hard earned money towards an experience or event vs. a tangible item, these numbers are just increasing exponentially. In addition to an increase in number of tickets purchased by this new economy, it goes back to our parent company, Protecht, Inc’s motto, to “protecht what matters.” With that thinking in place and through the lens of protecting what matters, think about the facts that while prior generations saved up for the house with the white picket fence and red sports car as those were the things that matter and thus what they insured, likewise this generation saves up for experiences and therefore opts at a much higher rate to protect that investment and protecting those tickets as those experiences are what matters.
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Q: What was your first big breakthrough?
A: When you ask about big breakthroughs it would be unfair to not talk about two breakthrough moments. Our first breakthrough and light bulb moment, was when we were in beta with our MVP product with our first platform partner, as when we released our initial version of TicketGuardian and saw that attendees and registrants were opting to cover their tickets at 18-32% conversions, we knew that we were on to something and solving a real issue that the consumer demand was asking for. The second moment for us was after we spent a year rebuilding our entire dev stack to be Enterprise ready in regards to security and scalability to take on the biggest ticketing platforms in the world, and we landed our first platform that sold over 25 million paid online tickets. We celebrated by sabering a bottle of champagne with the whole team!
Q: You have recently raised $8M, could you tell us more about it?
A: While the Series A document is exciting and helps validate the efforts the team has invested into our company over these past couple years, and allows us to publicly partner with our amazing investors, we have upcoming releases that will have our investors feeling like we do today, validated, and excited. Stay tuned.
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Q: What is your main goal at the moment?
A: Our main goal in the short term is to execute and bring our current contracted partners live in early 2019 and continue to expand our FanShield product reach to as many attendees as possible. Additionally, we are excited to release a suite of fraud and payment products as well as event cancellation insurance in early 201. Additionally, we will continue to support the Event Organizers and Ticketing Platforms with industry-leading solutions to their everyday problems.