The Ticket Fairy was created to reduce the risk for event organizers and optimize their profitability. It’s also dedicated to simplifying event marketing, eliminating scalpers, reducing ticketing fees and enhancing the overall experience of event attendees.
The Ticket Fairy platform allows organizers to better monetize and manage events within one highly scalable self-service system while providing huge benefits to consumers who attend events.
Ritesh Patel, Co-founder of The Ticket Fairy, is an interesting mix of event promoter and tech wizard. With more than 15 years in event management and marketing, he also has experience as a cloud engineer.
“The purpose of us starting The Ticket Fairy was to reduce the risk of the person running the event so they can be profitable,” says Jigar.
“We’re a marketing and analytics solution for the events and ticketing industry,” Ritesh continues. “We help organizers book more attendees and secure ticket income in advance by offering a referral reward to ticket buyers. This way, everyone becomes a promoter. Our goal is to make sure all of our clients’ events sell out.”
The Ticket Fairy optimizes attendance through word-of-mouth marketing with a referral system that gives fans a rebate or full-free ticket if they get enough friends to buy tickets. A public leaderboard further encourages referrals — those at the top become eligible for backstage passes, free merchandise and bar tabs. Only buyers, partners and street teamers get the referral code, so spammers are locked out.
Incorporating unique marketing automation and analytics tools, The Ticket Fairy solution is designed to meet the demands of producers of small events as well as large-scale festivals, concerts, sporting events and conventions.
In essence, The Ticket Fairy has two customers: the ticket buyer and the event promoter. The service optimizes the experience for both. The ticket buyer has more opportunities to buy tickets at a more affordable price than from other ticket sales and distribution companies and can refer friends and potentially get the ticket free. The event promoter also benefits because The Ticket Fairy solution helps it reduce the risk of running the event so it can be profitable and market the event more effectively using analytics.
In addition, The Ticket Fairy includes technology that mitigates resale fraud and scalping. The identity-locked tickets must be presented with the buyer’s ID at the event, which means customers can’t scalp them. The company also offers a waitlist for sold-out events so buyers can sell their tickets back to it. The Ticket Fairy then redistributes them at face value with a quick response (QR) code to a specific friend or the people at the top of the list. This single closed-loop, primary and face-value-only secondary ticketing system automatically matches late buyers and sellers to avoid direct money transfer between strangers.
To provide even more value to its service and boost ticket sales, The Ticket Fairy’s pre-registration system lets event organizers collect contact information and track demand before ticket sales even start. It can track sales and demographics in real time and relay instant stats about check-in at the door or gate. Integrating email managers and sales pixels simplifies marketing. And the metrics, budgets and expenses are automatically organized into financial reports.
The Ticket Fairy chose Cloudant at its inception. With the mindset of becoming a global ticketing and event management company, Ritesh knew he needed a reliable database with global scalability. And IBM had the solution he was looking for to build his solution on — the Cloudant fully managed IBM Cloud database service that lets him spend time building his business instead of his data layer.
“One of the many benefits of choosing Cloudant was its global availability,” Ritesh remarks. “Since a large percentage of our current business is global and will only increase from there, it’s great to have a solution that distributes data easily across the world.”
Beyond the scalability, Ritesh had to find a cloud solutions provider that would not add huge costs to his operation or margins. As a startup, it helps that The Ticket Fairy only pays IBM for what its needs are now. This way, it’s not incurring large and extra up-front costs right now for its cloud usage, computing and storage. Cloudant is scalable, so as the company grows, it can add more services as needed and pay accordingly.
Ensuring uptime was also a factor. “Obviously, we need to have continual access to the data,” says Ritesh. “Any downtime can be a disaster for the event. What’s great is Cloudant moves the application data to all the places it needs to be, so you get uninterrupted data access.”
With the Cloudant database, The Ticket Fairy has a powerful API for seamless integration with event-driven applications and the cloud. And because a sizable amount of ticket transactions take place on mobile devices, Cloudant technology helps The Ticket Fairy with its point-of-sale (POS) mobile applications that use analytics to personalize the ticket buyer experience.
“For companies like ours, Cloudant allows us to build out without having a large, complex API layer, so we can talk directly to the database,” says Ritesh. “That’s very powerful.”
He also notes: “The IBM Cloud has this feature where you can replicate parts of your database or the whole database onto a device. That comes in handy when you don’t have a network connection because you’re at a concert with thousands of people.”