How Eventbrite Found A New Customer Base

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show that solves entrepreneurs' toughest problems. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and each week I take a problem that you're probably dealing with and get tactical solutions from people who have been there and solved that. So let's get solving. The longer you run a business, the more likely it is that this crazy, magical thing is going to happen. And that is this. You will discover customers and entire customer types that you were not serving before, weren't even thinking about before, maybe didn't even know existed before.

2:14And you will realize that serving them is a big opportunity. Maybe it is even a bigger opportunity than the opportunity you originally set out for. And then that is going to lead you to a big question. And that question is, well, what do you do about that? What kind of changes do you make to your business to serve these new people? And I know that sounds abstract. So let's make it specific by talking to the leader of a business that's been around for plenty of change like this. I am Julia Hartz. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite. You know Eventbrite. Eventbrite is the place maybe you use to sell tickets to an event that you hosted or that you use to buy tickets to an event.

3:01And there's another reason that you know Eventbrite. And that's because it's just been around for a long time. I mean, I'm feeling sentimental because we'll round out 20 years in January. When Julia and her co-founders created Eventbrite, they did it because they saw this very specific opening in the marketplace. For creators and organizers of events who didn't have any way to easily gather people and sell tickets for events. And we wanted to combine the power of microtransactions that had become possible because of companies like PayPal with the creative brilliance of community organization. The ability for anyone, anywhere to host events and to sell tickets.

3:51I mean, sounds pretty simple now, but kind of revolutionary in 2006. And over the next 20 years or almost 20 years, a lot changed. And not just in the marketplace, but in the user. I asked Julia to just reflect on that. And then in the next 20 years or almost 20 years, a lot changed. Yeah, I think I loved your framework and build for tomorrow. I think that. Oh, thanks. You're welcome. It really made me think about the would be endings for ourselves are vast in 20 years, certainly. And especially surviving through a global pandemic that actually. For a temporary period of time, removed the entire basis of our business, which is gathering in real life in mass.

4:38And so when we thought about post-IPO, post-pandemic, post-different changes that we made to our product, there are a lot of would-be endings in there that we saw as opportunities. And so I think that what it did was it forced us to clarify what really matters. And that's how get into the idea and using this analogy of the Spotify for events, which is like a pretty easy, I mean, major kudos to them and flattery to use this analogy because it instantly sticks for people what we're talking about. it's really not just like, it's not a pivot for us. It's an embracing of the opportunity. And so the beginning of this really started happening, I can't really pinpoint it to a year, but in the evolution of Eventbrite, we had become essentially this infrastructure for creators.

5:31So because we were so focused on democratizing ticketing and making everything around that as easy and accessible as it could possibly be, we had built a supply-side marketplace without knowing, but just the focus is so entirely on creators. But the experience for consumers, when we looked at it, was incredibly fragmented. I mean, if you think about the act and the experience of discovering an event, it's a multifaceted problem to solve because you're not just looking for a skew, right, in terms of like retail speak. You are looking for something that is socially relevant that your friends may be going to or where you would meet people that you want to meet.

6:16You're looking for something that's happening within a certain time frame. So there's a calendar element to it. You're looking for something that is happening near you, right? And that's potentially convenient or where you're going to that's relevant to a specific trip that you're taking. You're looking for an event that fits within your budget. and you're looking for an event that you can trust, that you know that because you're going to spend your time there and you're actually putting yourself physically in that space, that you would get what you were looking for. And for certain people, it's like celebration, connection, change of heart, different perspective, knowledge.

6:54I mean, there's so much, right? The thing that you're describing is also possibly a user behavior that people don't even anticipate or think about because when I think of events, I tend to think of the event as coming through the channel of someone I'm already engaged with. It is a band telling me about an event and I want to go see the band. It is a person putting together an event and I already trust the person. But what you're describing is actually a completely separate user behavior, which is someone who is not actually, who's on stage first, let's say, not that every event has a stage, but is instead actually just searching for an event.

7:34Right. Somewhat agnostically. And that's a very interesting user behavior that I wonder if you even start with that in mind as a behavior. Right. So that's something that came later. So that's what you're talking about. Like here is that you're almost recognizing that there's an entirely other way of thinking about events. It just wasn't even being engaged. Right. And there's millions of people partaking in this activity to, you know, such that we needed to pay attention. And now you see what I am talking about. The business that is around long enough to discover the opportunity it didn't even set out for and the kind of customer it never even considered existing.

8:15What do you do? Well, on this episode of Problem Solvers, I am talking with Julia about what Eventbrite has done, which is to transform itself into what she just calls as a quick shorthand, the Spotify of events. It is an imperfect comparison, she will admit, but a useful one in thinking about what does an events platform look like today and how do you serve that customer, that big opportunity that you never even saw coming. All coming up right after the break. All right, we're back. I'm talking with Julia Hartz, the CEO and co-founder of Eventbrite, about what it did when it recognized just a few years ago that there was an entirely different customer type available to it.

9:06And how do you change the business to expand to this larger opportunity? Let's jump back into the conversation. So we had just established this big idea that Julia and the team had recognized. And so she's now digging into the specifics of how Eventbrite operates. And then we're going to talk about how it started to shift its model to grab this bigger opportunity. The brilliance of Eventbrite's model and the competitive moat that we have in the business is that 99 % of the creators are self-sign-on. They come to Eventbrite, they publish their event. It's a product-driven growth loop. They bring their attendee list.

9:47They invite their people, their community, and that community transacts on Eventbrite. But throughout the years, we started to accumulate and compound these consumers that were coming back and trying to find something to do. And we realized that like, whether it was on Eventbrite or it was through social media, it was really broken. And so people weren't like discovering events, they were stumbling upon them. I mean, how many times have you felt like, oh, I wish I would have known than that the show was coming to town or that festival was happening or it's the age-old problem of FOMO. And so finding out after the fact, it's a missed opportunity in the experience economy that we thought, wow, the problem is discovery is broken.

10:33We've always thought of our role as being on the consumer side of the marketplace, which again was an evolution, probably. I'd be wrong if I tried to tell you the year, but like midway through our existence, we realize, wow, we've amassed hundreds of millions of consumers that are looking for things to do, and we don't have always the right answer for them. And when you say, sorry, just to understand like the way that you are talking about your marketplace, when you're saying the consumer, you're talking about, let's say the event attendee is the consumer. Okay. Early on in 2008, we actually connected with the Facebook team and we received their events API key.

11:12We were the first company to use it. And the reason why we did that was because we started to see Facebook enter our top 10 traffic drivers. Before that, it had been Google, right? Event pages are a beautiful way to create user-generated content that's easily crawlable and indexable. We use schema.org for our structured data. When we started to see Facebook come up the ranks, we called them. We're like, hey, we think people are discovering events on Facebook. And when we investigated to observe what they were doing, event organizers were taking their data from Eventbrite, copying and pasting that into a Facebook event, and then putting the Eventbrite link there to direct people back to buy tickets on Eventbrite.

11:55We gave that information to Facebook, and they gave us the events API, and we built this connection. And the reason why I tell that story is because from that point forward, we really understood that putting the right event in front of the right person at the right time, wherever they were, was part of our success recipe for creators. And so we went into it thinking through the creator's lens, we're going to do everything we can to help them reach audiences that maybe they haven't reached with their own marketing. And again, just the language here. So the other side of your marketplace, you've got the consumer who is the attendee and the creator is the word you're using for the person who's hosting an event.

12:34Correct. Thanks. And so I think that evolution had been happening for a long time in terms of how we thought about gathering more community members for creators and helping them reach bigger audiences and using social media, which was phenomenally successful and continues to be to this day. But I think once we figured out that people were then coming back to Eventbrite to try to find things to do, that's really where we identified this problem. We had to reframe how we approached it from this perspective of one size does not fit all when you're thinking about what kind of event you want to go to.

13:10So, again, there's not one method of connecting with a consumer, and it's this multifaceted problem that I described. So we needed to narrow the focus on who we were building for. And we really started to focus on what I would call like the social explorer. So someone who is innately curious, who's maybe the person that always knows the best new restaurant or best drink at a bar, who prides themselves on knowing what's going on and who's often the social kind of rallier for their friend group. Yeah, it's the person who's looking for the thing to do versus the person who is just going to do the thing that somebody else suggests to do.

13:51Yes, exactly. Jason, are you that person for your friend group? Well, I was before I had kids. That was the problem there. I mean, when I moved to New York, it was 2008. I was 28. And I established a policy for myself, which I held to until I got married and then had kids, which I called something every night. I will do something every night. Wow. Wow. That I did. A lot of that was buying tickets to random things. As I met more people in New York, sometimes something every night just might be getting a drink with somebody or dinner or whatever. But absolutely, it was the person who became very aware.

14:30I signed up for every email list for every venue in town. And then we had kids and now it's impossible to do something like that. But I would have absolutely back then really loved a source of events that was ever scrollable and could tell me about all these interesting things going on that I didn't know about. It's funny. You are not alone at all to be in this moment where you feel like, and now we had kids and we don't go out because there is this barbell effect on Eventbrite, which is like pre-kids. And then right now it's baby boomers on the other side, but one day it's going to be us. There's just like a phenomenal growth in tickets through people who aren't raising school-age kids anymore.

15:15But I do, I remain very passionate about figuring out the in-between because you should have something every night, even with these crazy little people. It's this connectivity that's so important. And the other thing I reflect on is 2008 was a tough time to move to New York. And you likely put a good defense around yourself by saying you would stay connected every night through really uncertain times. I mean, 2008, 2009, that was not a fun time to be in New York. No, it certainly was not. And even worse if you were in media, which was one of the most rocked industries at that time. So you're right.

15:53And that was an incredibly valuable experience for me. It enabled me to get to know the city better, to make friends, to have something to do. And it also just forced me to not create what I think of as a comfort loop of just getting stuck at home. And then because you're stuck at home, then you don't know what else is going on. So then you are stuck at home again. And I loved putting myself just out there. This was a move of mine is that I would get two tickets to something and then I would have to find the person to give the second ticket. Yeah, it was great. The Knicks at the time were running this promotion.

16:36They'd sell you like nosebleed seats and a hot dog for like 20 bucks. It was great. And so I would constantly buy those. Find a friend. Yeah, find a friend. Find somebody. Not even always a friend. Find a random. Would you give the ticket to a stranger? I never went so far as to approach them on the street Times Square style. Like I'm handing out comedy tickets. But I definitely did some. I was online dating at the time. To be like, look, this might be weird. But I have two tickets to the Knicks game. It only cost me 20 bucks. This is not a big deal here, but you want to go? And it was great. It was really great.

17:07Wait, so you're exactly who we're building for. I actually didn't know that. So this is brilliant. Well, let's break it down. Yeah, let's break it down. Like, yeah, go back to 2008. Yeah, right. Exactly. And also online dating. I mean, just as an aside, we've seen three different waves of online dating come and go or offline dating, rather, come and go through these waves of people finding their matches. And today, if you were in New York and you were single, you'd be going to events of things that you love to do, right? Like hobbies you love or passions that you have or niche interests. Like run clubs are huge right now for people looking to date.

17:49I'm going to cross the chasm and say it's like parallel play with toddlers. Like people go to these events to do the things that they love, to be alongside people who they may have a common link with and they might find a best friend, they might find a love interest. We were sitting in a black cabin in London and a run club was happening right next to us when we were stuck in traffic. And I was just dying. I was taking all these pictures. People thought I was crazy because I was just like this anthropologist trying to figure it all out. Yeah, it's fascinating because they just blossomed out of nowhere.

18:22But that also corresponds with something that I don't remember existing in a conscious way when I moved to New York in 2008, which was community. The idea of community and structured community and joining a thing that has some kind of recurring cadence to it and meeting those people there. That didn't quite exist. And I wish it did because it would have been great. But, you know, it's funny. Last night, I was at a community-like thing, which was a group of people involved in the CPG space, which I am in a thing that I do outside of entrepreneurs. Oh, cool. And so we were talking about consumer behavior and how I have this thing, which I think is in the minority view that AI is not actually going to change everything.

19:10And I was explaining One of the reasons for that is because even if something gets shifted by a new technology, that doesn't mean that it's a permanent shift. And online dating is a perfect example of that. When I moved to New York in 2008, and online dating was still relatively in its early days. I joined OKCupid, which was OKCupid.com on a website. It wasn't even an app yet. Tinder didn't exist. I met my wife on OKCupid. and the narrative at the time, I'm sure you remember, the narrative was, this is the end of any other form of dating. There's just, there's no reason why anyone would ever meet in any other way.

19:50And that was a very believable narrative, frankly, as somebody who was doing this, because I much preferred to go onto OKCupid than I did to go approach some random woman at a bar. I didn't want to do that. But now, here we are, flash forward a generation and dating apps are struggling. I know that was an opportunity and it just keeps coming back. I mean, it truly I've seen three major iterations of dating cycling through this idea of like offline dating, online dating. And I think what's happening now is people are creating intentional micro communities for connection. And it's not so much that you have to be the planner anymore.

20:31It's that you are the social scout, right? Who we're building for is somebody who wants to be inspired, who wants to be, show me something I didn't know I needed. Give me, don't give me the calendar, build for curiosity. And I think that's that spark that starts these, they're very intentional, but I think people are really holding themselves out there in a way that that creates maybe serendipity, but it's in a planned way. I really should think of better language to describe it. How we thought about building a solution for this type of person was less about structured data. I mean, there was a point at which I thought, for sure, if we could infiltrate your calendar, we could nail it.

21:18And that's not it at all. Much like Spotify doesn't ask you what you want, It really learns your tastes and serves you the moment. I think we're doing the same with live events in a way that we're helping people discover what might inspire them and connect with these micro communities. And I mean, the thing is to take that one step further into a bit of a cheesy metaphor is you have a playlist of memories from that time when you were going to do something every night and really holding yourself accountable for it. And think about all the memories that you've banked in that playlist that you wouldn't have had.

21:52I did that from age 28 to 35, which is when we had our first kid. And then something every night became impossible. Okay, you know your kid is going to hear this someday and feel really guilty about this. So I feel like we need to reframe. Possibly, but could you imagine your parent having a podcast and wanting to listen to that podcast at any moment in your life? I think the answer is no. I don't think this kid is ever listening to this stuff. Well, I think AI is going to be able to summarize the key points. Yeah, right. Find the moments in which I was criticized. But I think that this social scout idea of yours is very interesting because, to use a kind of old bandied about term for every possible thing, the social scout is something of a gateway drug, right?

22:32Which is to say, if you can reach the social scout, who is the person most likely to be searching for new opportunities on Eventbrite, that person is likely to bring other people along with them. I bet you have a number. Do you have a number of one person who finds an event leads to X number of ticket sales? It's 2.4 or something. I assume that one social scout brings along. Yes, there is a viral coefficient. So that's an interesting person to be targeting. And then, so you'd have to think the thing I had originally seized upon here, which was recognizing this interesting new consumer behavior that you didn't think about when you first launched Eventbrite.

23:13And then you recognized it and you recognize there's an opportunity to serve it. And actually that person also, I was just thinking about this as I'm talking, serves both parts of your marketplace really well because they are a customer who uses Eventbrite. They bring more customers into Eventbrite. But also, this really serves the creator side, the people who are making the events, because Eventbrite cannot just be a great platform through which to sell and promote the event, but actually you can also bring new attendees to an event. That is the full unlock. That's a full unlock. And when we circle back to the creator who remains our hero, because, by the way, event creators are heroes.

23:56Doing that for your livelihood is insane. It's like one of the most stressful careers you could possibly choose. Oh, every time I put on an event, I regret it. It's so stressful. But then you have that moment of realizing that you made those connections and that you brought it to life, but it's so stressful. We think about it as every event on Eventbrite is a social object. Like when someone buys a ticket or they RSVP and a social scout, they're pulling others in. So they're reposting it on social. They're sharing it on a group chat. They're tagging a friend. They're saying that they're going and hoping other people are going.

24:30Or they're buying tickets for the group. And like you did, you had this intention to share this experience with someone. You just didn't know exactly who it was going to be. And I'm sure you can count on one hand the number of times that you actually went by yourself. Because who wouldn't want to go and have a good time? And so it's really drawing on that. And I think every event creates demand for itself. But when we think about the logistics of creating an event and breaking down the sort of value loop for an event, every single additional attendee that we can lock in for the creator is massively valuable for them.

25:09because it's not just that we realize that the ticket is the intention. Two-thirds of the tickets on Eventbrite are free, so we don't actually make any direct revenue from those tickets. A third of the tickets on the platform are paid, and the average price is less than$40. So these are really accessible tickets and events. What happens at the event is a whole value loop, right? So food and bev, merchandise, lead generation, sponsorship, There's all these ways in which a creator generates revenue to produce that event. But if you think about it, most events have a fixed cost. And so the creator is just hoping to like clear that fixed cost of the venue and their performers and the vendors.

25:55The food or whatever, yeah. Yeah. And so we realized that if we could provide incremental value to each creator by helping them reach a bigger audience, that's magical. goal. That could be the difference between them being able to host another event or not, right? And it also could be the difference between them using Eventbrite or other platforms, because now that you've been around 20 years, you've got competitors. We have a lot of competitors. It's always been a fragmented market. And I've stopped trying to put all the competitors on one slide because it becomes a little bit obnoxious. But, you know, I think about the fact that about 40 % of the tickets that are transacted on Eventbrite are driven by an action that Eventbrite uniquely took.

26:37So you look at that and you're like, wow, I mean, that's a big value proposition that you should be monetizing. And yes, we see the power in that, but that's not where we're generating our value proposition. We're really hoping that creators understand that if they stay with Eventbrite, that they're building their own compounding growth loop in audience, in community, in attendees, in people who are going to tell other people about their event. And that's where we really focus our product on making sure that they understand who their most loyal customers are, where they came from, when they bought tickets, at what price, and really helping them understand the intelligence layer of that.

27:16And I just think that at the end of the day, our most active creators, the first thing they'll tell you is that Eventbrite is easy to use, which is great because that's the original product principle. The second thing they'll tell you is that they know that they're getting demand by being on Eventbrite, by being in the marketplace. And I think our job over time is to really help them understand to a certain degree of precision how we're getting them, those audience members, and help them do that more. So we actually don't operate very antithetical to most of our competitors. We don't operate in a black box.