Sophomore Rafael Labuto's vision for a better way to buy resale tickets came to life after he took his ideas to Notre Dame's Idea Center. His startup, myTickets, created in partnership with Kenan Wursthorn, will launch next week and offer fans a way to purchase resale tickets at lower prices for a wide range of events.
Wursthorn, a member of Notre Dame’s ESTEEM graduate program, is both Labuto’s co-founder and the startup’s CEO, while Labuto will serve as the COO. Labuto explained that they met through the Idea Center, whose mission is “bringing Notre Dame's best ideas to market” by providing commercialization and entrepreneurial resources.
Their team also includes Notre Dame alum Jerrick Ban and Kaio Lucas, who works in development. Labuto and Wursthorn shared that they have additionally worked with “well-known venture capitalist in the Notre Dame ecosystem” Tim Connors.
Wursthorn and Labuto identified the ticket resale industry as a space with lots of potential for improvement, noting that fans looking to buy resale tickets to concerts or sports games often pay hefty fees and have difficulty finding cheap tickets. To alleviate this issue, they developed myTickets, which will allow users to purchase tickets with minimal fees.
“Our mission is to create a better product that people actually enjoy using with features that help them secure better deals,” Wursthorn said.
After coming up with the idea, the myTickets team entered the McCloskey NewVenture competition, where startups pitch their ideas to potential investors and compete for funding.
They also entered the Idea Center's Race to Revenue program, a summer startup accelerator where founders work on their businesses full time.
Afterwards, the group focused on raising funding.
“We started with our family and friends, and we raised about $17k that way. We had a couple angels come on … and we’ve also worked with Platform Venture Studios and Elevate Ventures, which is what gets us to the $282k mark,” Wursthorn said.
After finalizing the website’s development, the team made their service available for the College Football Playoff to test the idea and learn how to improve their product.
“It was very exciting for us as a business and also for us as Notre Dame. We learned a lot through the experience about the industry and the different players, as well as our customers and what they want,” Wursthorn said.
After their initial launch, the team worked to improve their product by incorporating an auto-buy feature. Wursthorn explained that this feature utilizes bots that scrape ticket websites for cheap seats and automatically purchase them to resell on the myTickets website.
“The way it works is you select a couple sections on a seat map that you’d be interested in attending, then you pick a price that you’re comfortable paying. As prices fluctuate, if a good deal becomes available on our site, we automatically purchase it for that person,” he said.
The team is also working on a price comparison feature.
“The idea here is, if you go to our site, you click a drop down on a ticket that you’re interested in and what it would cost you from StubHub and Seat Geek. What we’re doing here is showing fans two things. One, if they’re getting a good deal with our lower fees. We think we’ll be able to give fans a better deal. But even if we’re not, even if for some reason StubHub has better pricing, we’ll show them where the prices are best, consistent with our mission,” Wursthorn said.
The co-founders shared that the updated myTickets platform should launch next week, where users will be able to purchase tickets to thousands of events including Notre Dame and other colleges’ athletics as well as concerts across the country.
