Just kidding. Hi, I'm Dan one of the cofounders of TicketStumbler.com. If you have any suggestions or feedback please leave them here no matter how minor.
If you have scathing criticism and are worried about being down modded, please email me directly - dan [at] ticketstumbler (dot) com.
When I click any of the ticket categories, such as NHL, I get 'led zeppelin' in the search bar. Not sure if that's supposed to be a humorous example, but I don't get any search results for it. Perhaps populate the search bar with relevant events to the ones being searched for already so that there are results, and hopefully, ticket purchases. :P
For the event I was looking at (a Cubs game @ Wrigley, if it matters) 3 of the 4 links I clicked went to tickets that were no longer available at StubHub. You obviously have no control over third-party content, but the result is that I simply closed the tab your site was in and continued my search directly on StubHub.
So right now that's a result of the frequency of our crawler runs. We're in the process of ramping that up to provide as close to real time results as possible.
Unfortunately, most of our ticket providers are stuck in the dinosaur age so it's difficult to provide close to real time results (like the airline industry).
Something I'd really find useful for this service would be an API. If I were working on an app (totally hypothetically, of course) where people can meet each other by connecting over shared interest in events, it would be great to automatically associate TicketStumbler results with the events where applicable.
This is planned, though in the beginning we're planning on it being a sort of private API so we can know who's using it. From there, we'll see what happens. I totally agree though, I love APIs ;)
Well, this is not something that applies to me, as I rarely buy tickets.
I do have one question: how do people get passionate about tickets? I mean, I LOVE the stuff I am working on, I NEED the stuff I am working on for myself, and I would not want to do anything else, but if they asked to me make a startup about tickets with a guaranteed 1 million payout, I'd really have a hard time doing it.
I just cannot imagine myself being passionate about tickets. It's a freakin ticket, I'm not going to devote a good chunk of my life towards making them a bit cheaper.
Hi. I'm Tom and I am the co-founder at TS and you know what, you're right -- I am not passionate about tickets. I'm not even passionate about sports. In fact, the only sport I care about is hockey; the rest I essentially hate. I am still very passionate about the project, however, because it has been very entertaining from a technical perspective and has been a great opportunity to not only take part in YC, but build a company with a very old friend.
I'm very passionate about the site, but not because I necessarily want to make my own ticket-buying experience better. I like TS because it's a useful service for other people, presents challenging work, and has been an opportunity to work with very large volumes of data, among other reasons. I may not find tickets or sports exciting, but not once since the start of this project have I thought to myself, "I really wish I was working on something else."
Edit: Once we have concert listings I suppose I can meet the artificial requirement of building something I would use because there's little I'm more passionate about than music.
Tom, are you using your own site? If you are interested in working with large volumes of data, then you are not struggling with the real issue - which involves all the different ways people interact with the site and how it solves different needs.
This is the reason open source software so often sucks - because people want to solve the difficult technical problems (to prove themselves or why, I don't know), and they are not solving the most important problem - which is knowing all the different ways users want to use your site and making sure each and every way is so smooth it's sweet.
That's a core of passion - you create a little baby, and you want that baby to be perfect, so you do the little things - smooth out the icons here, make sure that the window pops up just right, test it 30 different times to see if the flow is smooth and obvious, you ask people what they think of it, and how exactly it can be made better.
It's like when you finish a painting, then you take a step back, look at it to see how a stranger would look at it. Then you squint your eyes to see how the colors look on their own. Then you go up close to see how the shadow on the little corner box looks, then you think what color of frame would properly offset the color on the inside....
TS is "my baby". I want it to be perfect. I have tested it way more than 30 times, probably 3 million, but whatever. We have gotten countless amounts of feedback in writing, in person, over the phone, in every possible way. We ask people to nit-pick. Then, we take what they say, and implement the things that will make us better.
You've assumed that because I don't have a passion for the subject of my work, I therefor do not have passion for my work. You've assumed incorrectly. I take pride in all the projects I create and I strive to make them as good as they can be. I may never use TS to compare and find sports tickets (never mind; hockey season is starting soon), but that doesn't mean I can't be passionate about making such an experience as good as it possibly can be, and better than anyone has done before.
Umm I don't think Tom cares how you feel about passion. He's happy, I'm happy and our friends and family are happy for us. The rest really doesn't matter.
I'm glad you've found some unannounced projects that you have extreme passion for or whatever but you can't really apply that to other individuals' tastes, hobbies and desires. It varies.
Good luck with your projects - nothing is more fulfilling than doing something you enjoy working on all the time (as Tom and I and many of the HN crowd have done).
I don't think the creator of an interface can ever objectively measure the usability of the interface, no matter how much they use it; they don't ever have to learn it, because they created it in the first place.
No, it's the same thing. The purpose of a painting is not to have gleaming edges or colorful patches - it's to awaken emotions. The point of a software application is to allow us get work done as easily as possible. The point of a car is to transport us from one place to another as painlessly as possible.
Success is when a creation achieves the goal of what it is supposed to be. Being great in what you do is the ability to create something that achieves that goal.
Software applications are like paintings. It's easy to create a mediocre painting, and the difficulty in the magnificent paintings lie in the attention to detail.
If you really think usability is not the CORE of any software application, then you are not just on the wrong path, you are going in the opposite direction.
I'm not saying it's not the core. I'm saying that the creator of the interface is in no position to objective judge the usability because they have an innate knowledge of the system because they designed it and they know exactly how it functions and how it's supposed to be used. If you want a real measure of usability, you have to get someone who understands the problem domain, but has never before seen your interface, and then objectively determine how easily they can figure out how to perform tasks and get things done. The fact that you, as the designer, already know exactly how the interface is built and operates precludes you from having an objective opinion of how easy the interface is to understand.
Similarly, a painting's artist cannot objectively determine how beautiful/emotional/successful the work of art is, because he has an innate sense of what it is trying to convey to the viewers. Just because the artist sees the subtles details, nuances, allusions, etc, does not mean that other viewers will be able to glean the same information.
And to drive the nail home a third time, an engineer could not possibly be an objective judge of how easy a car is to operate (usability), because they already know where everything is and how it works. They need to have a real person sit in the seat to realize that putting the cigarette lighter and cup holders inside the center console is a bad idea and not at all intuitive...
It seems like you are defining beauty AS usability. To me they are orthogonal. Beauty is a quality that appeals to my aesthetic sense, and usability is a quality that appeals to my practicality. There are beautiful websites that are unusable, and ugly websites that are very usable, I'm sure you can think of examples for both cases.
I believe perpendicular applies to only two dimensions, while orthogonal applies to three or more. The latter makes sense when there might be more than two dimensions present in the discussion.
I just cannot imagine myself being passionate about tickets. It's a freakin ticket
What the founders seem most interested in (like their customers, presumably) is not the tickets themselves but the sporting events that they're tickets to.
Right. As someone who tried to do this recently, I can attest to how hard it currently is to compare ticket prices from various brokerages. Getting into a sold out game is an experience much like buying a used car, no matter what you pay for it, you still feel like you got ripped off. (And the prevalence of scammers on Craigslist/eBay doesn't make them any better).
There's a definite pain point that they're addressing here. They want to save you from devoting a good chunk of your life to getting them cheaper. (And when they're priced like playoff tickets, it's worth it.)
So what are you passionate about? What are you working on?
I for one would find ticket sales really interesting. Concerts are probably my favorite thing to do, and sporting events are fun too(prefer to actually play sports, but watching is ok too)...This would be much more interesting than probably every Facebook App and most web apps in existence(which mainly consist of programs to help people waste time, hopefully clicking an ad on occasion)....I think working with large datasets of events, prices, and consumers would be really interesting....
Some of the best days of my life have been at concerts. I'm sure millions feel the same way. How could you not be passionate about helping people have more of these types of experiences?
I'm working on two projects that are not revolutionary, but evolutionary. I'll be letting YC have their dig at me when the time comes around, I'm sure most people will be happy to finally let me have it, after all the jam I've dished out here...
But back to the issue - if I am passionate about concerts, it's because I like being at concerts. Not because I like selling tickets for concerts. So I would work on something related to actually being in the concert.
I thought I was passionate about some of my past projects, but it was only when I started the latest two that I rediscovered what real passion is. It is when you are already using your own app before it is ready, and when it is crashing and being odd all the time. If you're not doing so, then you have not done the most important bit yet, and that's the wrong way of going about a project.
I don't need money or care about it. I have more than enough for my needs. What I want is to do what I failed to do the first time round - start and complete a project. In the initial .com thingy, I sold my startup way too quick, and never had a chance to make my own mark. This time round, I'd like to really create and polish something, and see it through all its phases.
haha, well I think this is why: "as I rarely buy tickets."
But other than that, tt's not about the tickets; it's about the events.
I _love_ attending sports and concerts. I probably go to (and will continue to go to) 20-40 sporting events per year and 5-10 concerts per year. Now going to them is a business write off.
The site is nicely design, being a search hacker myself; I have to say this site pass the test of great relevancy search.
Your search model is as good as Intelliverb’s PageScale algorithm if not better, I think we should get in touch and share some tricks. : ) Nice Job guys!
I personally think a missing ‘e’ is among the least problem in domain naming these days, it may actually help engrave the name in someone memory.
How about flikr.com, scribd.com, tumblr.com and lately karatr.com? Not that bad as compare to all the strange names I’m not going to mention here so I don’t offend anyone.
In my experience, it's very difficult to describe any of those names in Spanish without writing the name down for people. Latin America may not necessarily your main market, but why alienate people? Fotolog is readily pronounceable, and has been doing very well here, despite getting little traction in the US market. Not saying the name is everything; it's just one of the little details that helps word of mouth.
I hate to disagree with you on this, in fact I agree with you on most of what you say but reality is most of today’s names must be spell to someone who never heard of it, even Fotolog.
I like the simple interface. I wish you could extend it to the actual buying phase though, so I don't need to go to StubHub and make an account there just to buy it, which (when I get a look at the overwrought stubhub site) might make me throw up my hands in frustration. Also, a couple tickets I clicked on had already been sold; it'd be great if you could prevent that... (btw, add concert ticket search and I will probably use this all the time.)
Thanks for the feedback. We thought about this but including the buying phase on our website would not only expose us to significantly more liability but it would essentially destroy millions of dollars in brand equity that places like Stubhub and Tickets Now have built.
Although we agree that it's not as convenient, we're pretty set on sending our visitors to the actual providers (like Kayak does with airlines). Not doing that carries a lot of wrongly addressed customer service issues and liability exposure we're not prepared to and don't want to, deal with.
We're going to be adding servers soon so our crawls will approach closer and closer to real time. Sorry we didn't have your tickets still available.
I should have clarified...by maps I mean: stadium seating charts. We want to have stadium seating charts and directions so it will be a combination of both ideas.
I hope you guys can implement something a little more interactive, like what SeatQuest has, rather than just static jpg/gif of the stadium. SeatQuest has it decently there, but I bet you guys can do it better.
Seatquest is so slow and having tiny dots on a screen, in our mind and most of our testers mind doesn't add too much value. Everything they have is pretty much educated guess work (i.e. the accuracy of the dots is not very high).
The holy grail of seating maps (and what our users have requested many times) is what Stubhub has (interactive, sortable, clickable). This is just really really difficult to implement when we have listings from multiple providers who all call things slightly different names.
I resell a fair amount of tickets, and I rarely make a sale through StubHub and my prices are always lower than market. I sell 95% of the tickets I have through Craigslist. So here's a challenge for you: incorporate Craigslist ticket listings.
Another big competitor are white label companies. When you buy direct from a (larger) venue/club/sports team/etc. they are using a white label solution.
Stubhub is one of our ticket providers although we'll be competing for the same traffic. And yes Stubhub rocks - our other providers are so far behind them it's not even funny.
Thats what I thought at first sight, but its not exactly true.
If all you want is a cheap ticket than stubhub seems like the place to go, stubhub is the cheapest on all of the ticketstumbler searches I have done.
However, If you want something rare like courtside at the lakers.. Stubhub might not always have it, but ticketcity or some other place will. Thats where the value of TicketStumbler comes in I think. Its a useful site.
TicketsNow (coming soon to TicketStumbler) is close behind Stubhub. Ticketnetwork is pretty big too. The real value we provide is showing the niche places. I never used to fly Jetblue or Frontier airlines before Kayak.
Oh hai Ticketwood sock puppet person, it’s your pal Dan from TicketStumbler. I noticed that Ticketwood has spammed at least five other TicketStumbler articles with the exact same comment. Actually this might be time #11.
Are you guys really this desperate for visitors and attention? How much do spam commenters cost anyways? Love always and forever, your friends at T-Stumbler.
P.S. Maybe instead of spamming our press coverage you should focus on building a good product. kekekeke
Just kidding. Hi, I'm Dan one of the cofounders of TicketStumbler.com. If you have any suggestions or feedback please leave them here no matter how minor.
If you have scathing criticism and are worried about being down modded, please email me directly - dan [at] ticketstumbler (dot) com.