Fanimal Builds A Group Friendly Marketplace

We all know the drill by now. Tickets are going on sale next week. Everybody wants to go and they all want to sit together. That means someone gets volunteered to buy the tickets and collect the money. But, with hot shows pushing past $250 per ticket that can get expensive. And, inevitably someone cancels or changes their mind and now it’s a whole thing about getting the ticket refunded or resold. There’s got to be a better way.

Jonny Halprin, CEO and Founder of Fanimal, had a thought. What if he could build software which would aggregate the purchase information for those people who wanted to go to an event as a group? His work building out that solution is what got Fanimal where it is now, a company with ten employees which has just raised a $4 million round on top of $2 million raised previously. Their sales have increased by an order of magnitude over the past year. That’s impressive for a company which began in 2019, then faced the pandemic shuttering of all ticketed activity in March of the following year.

Fanimal built a solution which has promise: using their patented technology, fans create a group in which each member pays for their own ticket. Essentially, this is a technology which twists the way tickets are typically sold. In the usual transaction, a consumer goes onto a ticket site, selects tickets and purchases them. Because there is dynamic and constant demand for tickets, particularly for those of high demand shows, the available supply is always changing both in the locations for available seats and in the pricing based upon how many tickets remain for sale and to what degree demand for seats remains.

The Fanimal model has consumers all provide their credit card information and the number of seats they want, then once everyone in the group has uploaded their information, the software searches for the closest match for seats and each person’s card is charged for their specific portion of the ticket block. There’s give and take with this model. The give is that no one is on the hook advancing payment for someone else, the take is that the seats are not determined until the last person uploads their information. The design of the platform also includes a way for those within the group to message each other over Fanimal’s platform which is an interesting feature. That helps make the group sticky and likely will lead to further purchases as it builds repeat traffic to the Fanimal site.

Fanimal has one other differentiator: they are following the “no fee” model in which their prices are displayed to the consumer as the price they pay, rather than the more common model followed by most major resale sellers who show a price for the ticket, then add a substantial service fee on the last page before check out. Famimal’s plan is to compete by offering tickets at net lower price than other markets. That’s tough. There is always a new twist on how to present to ticket buyers the idea that your tickets are less expensive than that of other markets. However, any strategy which works to benefit consumers is welcomed in a market where the majority of the players seek to maximize profit rather than minimize ticket prices. Fanimal’s marketing pitch is: we are the cheapest place on the Internet for any ticket. We charge zero hidden service fees - the price you see is the price you pay.”

I enjoyed the chance to talk with Jonny. Attached below in both video and audio podcast formats is our conversation:

The world of ticketing is fascinating and ever evolving. Much of the inventory is sent to all markets, so if everyone has more or less the same tickets to sell, then there are limited ways to be different than your competition. Still, new ways in which companies can tailor their offers to specific segments of the market continue to surface. Fanimal has knit together two of the most attractive lures for consumers: clear and low prices and the option to build a single group purchase in which each member pays their own way. It’s clever, fills a present need and is giving Jonny and his team the runway to build a viable alternative to their larger competition who are all in a rush to get public fast. In ticketing, as in all business, innovation is always the gasoline which powers the growth of companies. Fanimal is currently burning hot. It’s worth watching to see what other ways they will find to differentiate themselves from their competition in the lookalike secondary markets.