What’s the matter with a little arbitrage between friends? ConcertIn.com is an interesting music discovery system that uses your Facebook social graph to find bands you and your friends like and, if you can’t make the concert, it lets you resell your tickets to your personal circle of buddies. It’s obviously a bit shady – some would call this a scalping site – but creator Jan Horna says that his service “brings a clear and transparent user identity to the marketplace,” reducing the chance of shady dealings.
I first met Horna four years ago in Prague where he pitched an early version of this product. Over time, it has grown from a social recommendation engine into a ticket sales system. A paid model will allow folks with lots of tickets to sell to pitch them across the entire ConcertIn network, but as it stands right now you can only buy and sell tickets with friends.
“Each ticket sales listing is accompanied by a user’s profile picture, name, location, and number of Facebook friends. This information helps to confirm that the ticket seller is a real music fan rather than a scalper located hundreds miles away or a fake person with just a few friends,” wrote Horna.
Horna bootstrapped the entire company, which is now seeing 18,000 visitors a month. Facebook is the driving force behind sign-ups. Concert data comes from BandsInTown.com, a band tracking website.
“Our new website serves two purposes: live music discovery and, more importantly, concert ticket reselling,” said Horna. “It is easy to use, no need to enter any data as we get your musical taste from your Facebook profile as well as your location. The user gets an instant result right after adding our application. Most of major competitors require some data entry and provide too complex user interfaces together with a lot of features.”
“It is really a tiny tool that makes a life easier,” he said.
The site is live now and already doing about $150,000 worth of business – not bad for an acorn of an idea that grew into an almost mighty startup oak.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/8Y0eKwUCWOw/
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