Matt Freedman, Jay Gaibisso and Dany Gruosso are co-founders of online ticketing portal Sticky Tickets (www.stickytickets.com.au). Matt Freedman who is also CEO of Sticky Tickets was kind enough to give TechNation Australia this email interview.

Please tell us a little something about yourself, your hobbies, what you do when you’re not working on your startup.

I started my working career as an Engineer at a manufacturing company that build trains. From there I became a Business Development Manager for a technology company and then started my own digital marketing agency – Redback Solutions (www.rb.com.au). I’ve been running Redback for almost 10 years now. I’ve just sold it but am still involved as an Online Marketing Consultant.

Spending most of my day in front of a computer, I love to get outside when I’m not working. I’ve run a marathon, quite a few half marathons and triathlons, completed the Oxfam 100km walk last year and had a blast running around the streets of Sydney in the Urban Max Adventure challenge a few weeks ago.

I’m based in Sydney now, but grew up in Newcastle, so love the beach, going for a surf, swimming and diving.

Any new games/sports you’re currently on that you think the world should know?

The guys in the office are into Hacky Sack at the moment, I’m giving it a go, but it’s not pretty. I had a go at second life once, but my first life kept getting in the way. I’m definitely into outdoor sports.

Please tell us about your company/startup?

StickyTickets.com.au is an event registration and ticket selling website that allows event organisers to create an event, promote it, sell tickets and manage the registrations.

It is a self service automated system, so if you want to sell tickets to your event, you can register as an organiser, publish your event and start selling tickets in a matter of minutes. All the credit card processing, registration process and issue of eTickets is handled by Sticky Tickets and the proceeds are deposited in the organiser’s bank account.

How long has Sticky Tickets been online for?

The company was formed in October 2006. After extensive research, planning and development, the site was launched in July 2007.

Where did the idea come from?

Jay, one of the co-founders is a passionate football (read soccer) fan and during the World Cup in 2006 he hired the IMAX in Darling Harbour to watch the Australia vs Brazil game on the biggest screen in the southern hemisphere. He worked out he would break even if he could get 100 friends to attend, so booked it and started to let people know. The response was enormous, and he sold out at 500 tickets, but the logistics of getting the money, keeping track of who paid and who hadn’t and getting tickets to them was a nightmare. After the dust settled, he started looking for a system that could help him the next time and when he couldn’t find one he met up with Dany and I and the three of us started planning what was to become Stickytickets.com.au

The response was enormous, and he sold out at 500 tickets, but the logistics of getting the money, keeping track of who paid and who hadn’t and getting tickets to them was a nightmare. After the dust settled, he started looking for a system that could help him the next time…”

Who are the people that stickytickets.com is trying to reach?

We are trying to reach anyone that organises any kind of event, that needs to take a RSVP or collect money for it. The majority of people to date are organising parties, fashion parades, business breakfasts/luncheons, networking groups, charity fundraisers – we also get people organising a weekend away and need an easy way to collect the money. These people create content for our site and then anyone who is looking to attend these events become our consumers.

How are you making stickytickets.com?

All of the site development has been created by Redback Solutions (www.rb.com.au). The transaction management is quite sophisticated but this is all behind the scenes. What the user sees is really quite simple and we’ve tried to make the site as easy to use a possible.

Can you give a ballpark figure of how many users are presently using stickytickets.com? By how many percent is it growing per month?

We have almost 6,000 members of Sticky Tickets now and this growing between 10% and 15% per month. We have big plans to create online communities for these people in their areas of interest / geography.

What are your metrics for stickytickets.com? Is this metric industry-wide/industry-specific or is it something proprietary?

The income we generate from the site is a transaction fee for the sale of a ticket, so this is our bottom line metric. We also track things like Visitors, Unique Visitors, Traffic referrers, Sign-up rates, New events coming on the site, sales per event and lots of things like that to get insight into where our members are coming from and how they use our site.

Who are the main competitors of stickytickets.com?

We don’t believe that we are really competing against the big ticket agencies as they have a different market and aren’t geared up for the do it your self event organiser. There are several US sites like eventbrite.com and ticketleap.com. These provide the selling tool but you still have to have your own payment system. We have really targeted the Australian market, all you have to do is enter your Australian bank account details and we do the rest. The US sites have experienced rapid growth in the US, so if we can follow that in our market we’ll be very happy.

We have really targeted the Australian market, all you have to do is enter your Australian bank account details and we do the rest.”

That’s exciting - what are your plans for the next few months?

We have several investors and equity partners that have got us through launch and into a growth stage, but we are looking for a strategic partner that can help accelerate this growth.

We are getting ongoing feedback from our members with great ideas for Sticky Tickets that we’ll be implementing over the next 12 months.

What is your definition of entrepreneurship?

In simple terms it’s turning an idea into a business.

The process of entrepreneurship is

• taking an idea or combinations of ideas and working out if there is a market for it
• finding the right people to develop the idea
• working out how you are going to fund it – your own time and money, seed / venture capital or borrow the money
• launching the business
• growing the business
• having an exit strategy so you can take another idea and do it all again

Given a chance to do it all over again, would you have started stickytickets again? What would have done differently? What did you do right?

Without a doubt, I’d do it again. I sort of fell into my first business, so it’s been fantastic to take all of the lessons learned and launch Sticky Tickets the right way with proper planning and funding. What we did right was work out what the core elements were and get it to market, and then listen to our members to add new features. What I’d do differently is I would have worked full time on it from day one instead of trying to juggle it and running Redback Solutions.

Any inspiring thoughts for future startuppers?

The people you meet and the strategic partnerships you make will have more impact on your startup than anything else. Ask for as much feedback as possible from as many people as possible. Have a plan A (fully funded accelerated growth) and a plan B (self sufficient organic growth) so you’re not desperate for capital. It’s hard to negotiate well if you’re desperate.

If you’ve got any questions you can contact me by going to the Contact Us page at www.stickytickets.com.au and I also write a blog at www.mattfreedman.com.au.

posted by Paul “The Pageman” Pajo