Biz Op: Ticket Sync Software

Discussions
#1

Hey Everyone,

Like I said in my previous post I have an excess of business opportunities that came my way. All of them are from people with actual pain points that they are willing to pay money for a solution.

Anyway, here’s the second opportunity in the customers words:

"I work in the sports industry for a tennis tournament that is owned by a non-profit organization. A big pain point for us is that our on-line system that sells tickets to our annual tournament (ie Ticketmaster, Veritix, etc.) does not automatically sync our customers’ information to our organization’s main database (Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge).

We have to manually send spreadsheets of information and upload ourselves, which is a huge time suck.

I would 100% pay for a software program that would do this automatically for us.

It would save us loads of time, let us update in real time, and provide a more organized and cleaner database for our company to use across all departments.

We would not have to pull a customer list from our ticket system, clean the list up, and then email it over to our development department, who then has to upload the list into the database. Right now we need to do this weekly throughout the year."

You know, I have a bunch of these, maybe I should put together an email list or something.

Anyway, would be good to hear what people’s thoughts are about this one.

Thanks,
Justin

3 Likes
#2

There is so much I love about this lead, Justin.

First, they use known, popular, industry ticketing apps that a lot of other customers use. Which leads to the first testable hypothesis that there are many other customers having this same pain that would also pay for a solution.

Speaking of that…

I love any issue where the customer uses the following phrase:

Cha-ching! Jackpot! Balloon drop!

Further, I love that the customer is using specific language that is demonstrating the extent to which they’re frustrated with the inefficiencies in their current process:

Last, I love that the customer is telling us how often they feel this pain:

We can feed all of that specific language back to them in landing pages and marketing efforts.

In any business, when there’s a step in a workflow that involves exporting something from one system to be fed into another system, there’s a business opportunity.

In this case, we see an even better example: this customer exports something from one system (ugh), manually edits it (ugh), emails it to another human (omg), who then uploads it into another system (what the).

It’s a unicorn of a business problem that can be solved with software.

If it’s just this one business having this issue, then it’s a good gig for a freelancer.

If there are many businesses doing this process, you’ve got yourself the makings of a bootstrappable SaaS app.

Justin, what next steps would you take to validate this?

Me, I would start by first finding out if there are other businesses having this issue.

1 Like
#3

Well one thing also is they literally TELL you which system they are having the issue with - Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge). - and of course they have a marketplace and are actively looking for providers to build this kind of solution: https://www.blackbaud.com/marketplace

2 Likes
#4

Oh man, that is excellent!

From the blackbaud site:

featuring products that extend and enhance Blackbaud solutions.

The Ticketmaster import utility for Blackbaud would be an excellent addition, no?

:slight_smile:

And, look at this, TicketMaster has a developer API:


:smiley:

#5

This is free money :wink:

1 Like
#6

AXS/Veritix doesn’t seem to have a public API, but perhaps you get access to that in their Partner program.
http://www.veritix.com/about/partners/

#7
#8

This sounds like a good op. I was unsure at first as it wasn’t clear the tool they were putting the data into was something commonly used.

If you start work on this I’d definitely get in touch with blackbaud early on and let them know what you’re doing. I’m sure they’d love the chance to feature a happy customer in a blog post alongside your integration or something. Whatever you can do to help them promote the integration will probably be the biggest lever you have to get customers.

I’d propose building the smallest POC and try to get this customer signed up. In the meantime ask if they know anyone else who has the same issue and do some manual outreach to try and find others who you could work with while building a v1.

Exciting!

1 Like