If you convince all your friends to go to a concert, shouldn’t the promoter give you a discount? Now they can with The Ticket Fairy, a full-stack events marketing and analytics suite coming out of stealth from Y Combinator today.
The Ticket Fairy’s goal is to make sure all its clients’ events sell out. Promoters let The Ticket Fairy sell their tickets, run their analytics, and handle ad buying in exchange for a fee on each ticket sold.
The startup sells 100 percent of an event’s inventory when it can, but sometimes exclusivity contracts with ticketers like TicketMaster mean it can only sell the 20 percent that a promoter has the right to distribute on its own. Eventually, though, co-founders Ritesh and Jigar Patel say The Ticket Fairy hopes to earn promoters so much money that they ditch their contracts and sell everything through its platform.

Ritesh built The Ticket Fairy to solve his own problems after running more than 400 events since 2000. Now it’s handled over $3.2 million in ticket sales, mostly for concerts, but it’s also breaking into big eSports competitions.
Ticket Fairy offers four central tools, but it’s building more:
If The Ticket Fairy can consistently sell more tickets on less marketing spend, promoters will happily adopt it. It’s a similar strategy to some of the event marketing and analytics tools that EventBrite and TicketFly have launched over the years. But those platforms want you to sell 100 percent of your tickets through them, which isn’t always convenient, and they lack features of The Ticket Fairy’s dedicated tool.
The Patel boys’ startup will have to compete with EventKloud, Eventgrid, and other wide-reaching services. But they often require upfront subscriptions or seem outdated for the mobile and social channels where events are shared today. It also might face direct-to-fan ticketing platforms like Applauze and Songkick, which recently merged with CrowdSurge.
The Ticket Fairy’s biggest challenge, though, may simply be getting access to ticket inventory for great events. That’s what stumped WillCall and led it to get bought by TicketFly. Exclusivity contracts lock up a lot of traditional concerts and sporting events with established ticketers. The Ticket Fairy’s best bet might be fighting for non-standard events like conferences and esports.

We’re amid a shift to the experiential culture. More and more, people want to do things, not own them. We have event discovery apps to find experiences, camera phones to capture them, and social networks to share them. Ticket Fairy just has to connect promoters to the event-hungry masses.
[Image Credit: Almost Famous]
