What Jill created the "Netflix you need to put on trousers to" -
Jill Bourque's many years performing in the independent theater scene allowed her to identify a need she knew had to be met: empty seats were costing theatres and artists.
To address this need, Jill created RushTix which is a website for members to attend events and live shows. Through the site, Jill creates a connection between live event organisers (who have to sell seats) and curious event-goers (who want the cheapest way to see live performances and events).
Using , she built an efficient solution that has been growing her business ever since. The following is the way she developed and expanded " the Netflix that you must wear to work."
Jill transformed her passion for business her business
One one of the initial steps to any successful business is transforming a love or specialization into a solution or product. For Jill this was a natural need because of her experience in the industry.
I am a performer myself and have produced independent theatre for the past 15 years. One of the biggest issues of producing theatre is when you have empty seats.
As Jill explains, ticket pricing is a major problem in the entertainment industry due to the fact that unlike airlines and hotels, prices aren't dynamically change.
In the event that theaters run out of seats that are not filled up until the very last moment the theaters face a number of problems:
- Patrons who paid full price could be irritated by seeing discounts
- There's no easy way to get word out
- Alternative options to selling discounted tickets could damage your brand image
In time, discounting opportunities actually devalue the brand's value as time passes. It sends a signal that something is wrong.
According to Jill, as much as 35 per cent of ticket sales go unsold.
Jill turned to a different source of inspiration in order to resolve this problem: Netflix.
Netflix is fascinating due to the fact that they provide access to all sorts of entertainment at a single per month fee. There's also a curation aspect, where they try to figure out your preferences.
With the RushTix solution, customers pay a monthly cost for access to many tickets. Presenters who have last minute tickets transfer those tickets for the RushTix pool.
This is the best part: There's no discount tied directly to the theatre, which means people don't think that the lower price point with the high quality of the performance.
RushTix also curates its ticket suggestions to individual customers based on their habits and preferences. However, it is at present, it's a manual approach. That creates a special group of people who are a part of RushTix as well as the events that they offer.
Jill started with a simple inexpensive, low-cost implementation to demonstrate it worked.
If you've got an idea, the next step is building a version that will determine whether the customers are interested. Although it's tempting to create a complete version, Jill says that making an option that isn't breaking the bank is what's key.
I made a very ugly website and used a basic email system, however, users registered. What's amazing about WordPress is that it's easy to create something quickly, test it and determine if it's a product. I literally put together the website with 500 bucks.
Prior to RushTix, Jill already had prior experience using WordPress and was a fan of the open source design - she was aware that there would be options to directly alter the code as well as that "there's plenty of people who contribute to the project," so finding help in the future will be much easier.
Thanks to a slim execution, Jill didn't have to wait around for big investments to get started. As she says, they began with "friends and family members and a tiny quantity." Since then, based on the initial success of the site, RushTix has taken part in an incubator and recently received some seed funding from famous Silicon Valley angel investors.
We took only a tiny amount. It would have been possible to take much more but we didn't. We simply wanted to try the validity of our concept.
Jill reached out to the partners directly and relied upon word-of-mouth to get the right clients.
If you have a basic online storefront ready to go, the next step is to identify the key people that can make or break your business. In Jill's case, that meant the event partners that could provide the tickets as well as those who were searching for new entertainment choices.
Contact us with the various places and let them know about our organization. With this outreach, we now work with more than 400 cultural and arts organizations.
Since Jill had filled a gap for venues, they were eager to begin and sign up with RushTix. As a result, RushTix hosts around 40 events to present to its members each week.
To the opposite end of the spectrum, Jill also had to find those who would be the best customers to profit from the services. She started with word-of-mouth which allowed the business to develop organically from people she knew and through referrals.
Because her roots are in the live entertainment community, Jill was able to find the most influential people to make the project an enormous success. In particular, she was an original team member called Johnny Funcheap (not his real name) promoted the product by launching his own website FunCheap.com which brought in an audience of interested potential customers.
The company has grown organically pretty consistently, about 20-30% month over month, in our monthly annual recurring income.
Jill fulfills her commitments to her customers and business partners to help grow the company.
Once customers are using your product or service, their satisfaction can determine the outcome of your company. When you make your current customers satisfied, you'll guarantee their loyalty and also make them advocates on your behalf.
For Jill, a big part of the RushTix guarantee is to help clients find shows that they might otherwise miss as well as helping shows that are great in turn, gain exposure.
Another crucial aspect of the RushTix process is the beginning customer experience.
The most significant aspect of subscriptions is the process of onboarding. And subscriptions are extremely dependent on the service aspect, in contrast to other services, in which case it's an one-time.
Essentially, Jill found that first impressions influence how people view the product. The more quickly RushTix can "activate the customers, and get them attending events and interacting with this product better chance they will stay with us and be happy."
In order to meet those requirements, Jill focuses on making sure new customers have a great experience and that they are introduced to events as fast as is possible.
For the other side of things, Jill is happy to be able to witness some significant successes.
I think we've helped give some exposure to some things that people don't know about.
A good example of this is a theatre company called We Players, which specializes in experiences that are outdoors, usually within national parks. Jill was able to get them listed registered on the RushTix platform, promoted them via social media, and enlisted "a bunch of members to sign up." According to her own words, We Players was "extremely pleased with the result."
Jill is dedicated to improving her skills and learning to perfect her model.
With things functioning, you may want to leave your business running for a couple of months to ensure you can iron out the kinks before expanding.
The official launch was in March. It was in beta for 10 months before that.
For Jill, starting her business in San Francisco presented some challenges: there are already so many applications available on that market, not just in the entertainment industry in which finding the perfect group to work with her ahead of the rest proved difficult.
Presently, Jill is experimenting with the use of paid advertisements and PR in order to draw new customers to RushTix as well as making some tweaks to the service to make it easier to pass on the information to friends and family and leveraging customers already in the business to grow even faster.
When you have the San Francisco playbook is worked out, Jill is eager expand to new markets. Ideally, she'll starting with New York and then Los Angeles.
We'd like to go to ten additional markets and we've got a strategy that supports that where we could simultaneously grow across a variety of markets.