Bandwagon - Changing the Game

My name is Harold Hughes, and I'm the founder and CEO of Bandwagon. What we want to do is connect fans with teams and connect teams using data. We think about how people don't know who are in the stadiums anymore. Think about the last event you went to. Did you know the person sitting in front of you? Did you know the people sitting next to you? In a lot of cases, the identity of who's in the stadium with you is really lost. And this was something that was captured by the former CEO of Ticketmaster. So there's a huge problem. Sports organizations don't know who's showing up in their stadiums, and that's directly affecting the revenue and the attendance. Next, fans have no idea who's showing up in the stadium. We surveyed over 45,000 fans and found that game day atmosphere is the number one most important aspect of them deciding to go to a game. But the number two thing was seat location. And we think about how important those two things really are. When you think about them together. So we're looking at fans choosing to stay home instead, and that affects day-of-game revenue for sports organizations. So we've created a sports tech company that uses data leveraging our proprietary blockchain solution to increase revenues and help fans create unique game day experiences. So from a B2B standpoint, that's our main focus. What we want to do is look at these 5 key areas and ways that we can increase revenue. and that specifically goes to driving fan engagement, increasing the day-of-game revenue through various sales, following up and creating more touchpoints for alumni donations, and also utilizing that data to create more marketing opportunities for these affiliates. So when we look at how it works, we really look at the beginning of a database or a ticket being assigned to a season ticket holder and watch it all the way through the process. At the time that ticket is created and originated, we actually assign it into our blockchain database. And from there, fans are able to use whatever platform they choose, whether that's a StubHub, a Bandwagon, Ticketmaster, or even Facebook or Craigslist. The importance of this is really going from paper tickets to digital tickets. From a sports organization, you're able to capture that identity, figure out ways to market them, market to them, create really unique game day experiences. So for example, if you know that this fan has been inside your stadium 10 times and is not a season ticket holder, this gives you the ability to engage with them after the fact. And that's really where the identity comes in. Our revenue model is really straightforward. We do operate a ticket marketplace, and that's so that we can learn along with these other competitors as well as figure out what fans are interested in. We have a buyer fee, which is 15%, and a seller fee that's $10 per ticket sold. That flat rate seller fee allows us to be price competitive across all marketplaces as the price of tickets increases. So that's my economics background coming in for economies of scale. On a B2B side, we look at an annual licensing fee being the gateway to how teams can use their data. So the beginning is being able to identify who those users are, but the next step, and what we plan to sell additional revenue licenses, is basically giving you the option to market to them, do different fan engagement. So basically we're building a platform on which to activate that user engagement. So our projections for the next 5 years really skew— are based on 2 major variables. And so everyone's going to have a hockey stick slide, but I want to make sure we're clear on why we're going to hit the numbers we're going to. We are focused on signing up sports organizations at the annual licensing fee, as well as transacting tickets, the amount of data points and tickets that flow through our marketplace. We're focusing on college football right now. It's more than 3 times the size of the NFL, and so nearly 50 million people pile into stadiums across the country every year. And so you see that the market is also almost a $20 billion market annually. We are founders, 2 grads in one of the first 2 portfolios, select portfolios. We are graduates of the Google for Entrepreneurs program. I'm currently pursuing a certificate at Stanford, and my team is really well-rounded when you think about our various backgrounds. At the end of the day, we're really sports fans that have really unique special abilities, kind of like the Avengers, that are coming together to try and figure out a way to help sports teams make more money and help fans have a better experience if you're going to shell out hundreds and hundreds of dollars anyway. Traction to date, and this is kind of an eye chart, so This will be available to anyone who needs to see it afterwards. But we launched our beta last September, hired our CTO in January after we completed our seed round, and now we're actually building out our blockchain marketplace and preparing to file for our provisional patent with plans to raise our $2 million Series A in the beginning of 2018. So this goes into our fundraising. It really looks at the fact that we're building a blockchain solution and looking at trying to target over 200,000 users, which gives us 25,000 data points per user. So really becoming a data house for live events everywhere. So far we've raised just over half a million dollars from angels and venture capitalists. And that is it for me. Appreciate it.

All right, thank you, Harold. Uh, so Harold, you'll have to, uh, put your speakers back on there. All right, cool, we got you.

Great.

All right, so what I'm gonna do here, um, we got some questions coming in. I'm gonna ask a couple, uh, basic questions, and then just to— that was a great pitch, by the way. Um, but to encourage— this is how every webinar works for from the, the first pitch, people are kind of bashful about answering their questions. So please get your questions in here, um, and I'm just going to ask some very basic ones and, and to build them up. We have a couple here ready to go, but let me just start. So who are the competitors that, that you're facing off against? Are there other competitors specifically? I see that you guys have a very, a very clean angle, right? It's just like just the people coming into the stadiums, right? Who else is competing for that space with a similar product?

So what we're finding is that there are two sides of the coin. One are the people who do the ticketing, and so they're not as concerned who shows up, but they care a lot about that kind of experience. On the other side is the people who want to identify who's in the stadium after the fact, but they have no idea how that user got to there, where they acquired their ticket from, or their various buying patterns outside of that stadium. And so that's where we really— middle there. So we really will kind of play, I guess, marketing analysis. Okay.

I think Vishal asked a— yeah, there's a little bit of noise here.

I'm not sure where the feedback's coming from.

Okay. Let's all just sit really still. So, all right. Oh, Harold, I think it's because if you could throw those headphones on, that would help a lot.

Headphones? Yeah. Hopefully the pitch was all right. You could hear it. Yeah, the pitch was good.

It's just I think when we're talking to each other— Wade says, ouchie, my ears. Sorry, Wade. OK. All right, cool. Uh, so we had a question for sure, because definitely, like, as I was listening to the pitch as well, right, I just hear like a buzzword like blockchain thrown in there, right? So Vishal, uh, asked, you know, why is, uh, the blockchain being used and how critical is that to use as a solution?

Uh, so blockchain is being used because right now teams have really focused on partnerships and exclusive partnerships And what that has done is, is created silos to where no one has perfect information. So what we've done with our blockchain solution is basically created an aggregated database that allows for you to have complete visibility. So think about it this way. Let's say that the team has 100 season tickets and 50 of those season ticket holders sell their tickets on StubHub and the other 50 sell their tickets to Craigslist. The visibility is lost on the data side of that. Or let's say it's Ticketmaster instead of Craigslist, but the team only is a partnership with StubHub. That means that the team's gonna get data from StubHub, but they're not gonna get it from Ticketmaster or Bandwagon or Vivid Seats or SeatGeek or all these other players. So what we've done is created that blockchain solution so that you basically have a stadium map that overlays on top of each other. So you have real-time information every single point throughout the ticket buying process. So blockchain is huge for us. Really solving the identity problem.

Okay, so then you become a partner essentially with the sports teams that can even be leveraged, right? I mean, it's almost like a higher-level partnership than even just some of the reselling partners.

Exactly, that's our goal. Our goal is to allow us to have basically help those asset creators, which we call the sports teams or the Taylor Swifts and concert creators, say we want to help you identify who your users are so you can do better fan engagement. We also want to help you make more revenue because in a lot of cases they have an exclusive partnership with one channel, but their fans have 100% of the control to choose all of these other options to use that. So we've been getting a lot of really great feedback on the blockchain solution. We built it all ourselves with some ex-Googlers, and we definitely see the solution being valuable there. I lost my power. Okay.

We can still kind of see you. All right, that works. This is kind of like a, you know, behind the scenes sort of look, but it's all good.

Yeah, right.

Um, all right, so let's see. Vikram wanted to know, you know, just a little bit of an update on signed clients so far. Um, and, you know, so I guess it's kind of a larger question just based on, um, you know, traction, who's been interested in it, who's signed on, etc.

Yeah, so we just started taking our meetings with the colleges this past month, so in August. So we met with Stanford, West Virginia, Clemson University. We're scheduling a meeting with Alabama. We also met with Sacramento State and West Virginia State University. So all those were done literally in the last 3 weeks. So we haven't gotten confirmations on any of those yet. But aside from that, our marketplace has been open. We're already generating sales. We grew our user base 382 new users last month. So I got that off our boardroom. But so yeah, we're seeing a lot of our B2C traction. And so what we want to do is be able to go directly to the school and show them the value of it. And West Virginia really had a blast seeing what we had and wanted to see how they could implement it in the various atmospheres they could.

Okay. And then there was a follow-up question as well. So our Mike Steele asked, are there B2B customers besides the sports teams themselves? Other brands or anything else that factors into the revenue streams?

Yeah, JMI, who's locally here, they just got the Clemson contract from IMG Learfield. These are the companies that actually sell the marketing rights to these sports organizations. That's a huge opportunity for us. Okay. I would think about that as an example of if majority of your stadium is Coca-Cola drinkers and you don't know this if you're in school, but you want to sell a licensing deal to Pepsi, You really have to understand that that's going to affect your beverage sales from day to day. And so we've been able to show them some of the data we can get down to understanding the types of books people read, the types of food they eat, where they live, how much money they make, religion, all this other stuff. So pending that data really focuses 100% on identity of who shows up, not just the initial season ticket holder, but who actually walks into the gate and what was their economic motivator to get there.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, as a marketer myself, one of the most attractive things that I saw in your pitch was just, yeah, getting all of that data and my ability to retarget those people. All right, as you said, um, you know, if somebody comes to one game and they don't come to another, then that's a casual fan, right? But then everybody else, like, they're going to come to multiple. So being able to get that data and to retarget is incredibly valuable, especially in the physical environment and where mostly the entertainment industry is pushing towards those physical events because, you know, a lot of people just like to sit on the couch and eat potato chips.

Right. And I want to say one quick thing about privacy. I saw someone just commented on that. What we do is aggregate that user data. So Marina, we wouldn't ever give out your first name, last name, email address. What we would do is say there are this many users that fit this profile based on the users inside the stadium. If you would like to say, man, looks like 62% of the people in this section are vegans. Well, we've got a concession stand offering, let's offer it to them. Or if 82% of the people in this section paid an average of $200 over face value, maybe they're price insensitive, let's offer them a mobile concession stand offering. So instead of me rolling out mobile concessions to the entire stadium and having to deploy a bunch of resources that won't be utilized, I can target it to the area where I have aggregated effectiveness that makes the most sense. So that's why we really focus on privacy as well as efficacy.

Okay, cool. So I had one last question myself and then there'll be one other question that came in through the audience. So just for me, in terms of like the sales cycle that you're seeing with some of these brands, What does that look like? What, what's what? Like, is there one selling point that for them, when you hit it, you just see their eyes light up, right? It's usually like one thing. Have you discovered what that one thing is yet?

The one thing for them has really been attendance data. A lot of these schools either have a sellout or sort of a concert, you have a sellout. But the problem is, is if you look at your Taylor Swift and you sell on Ticketmaster, she set her price at $100, but now they're being resold for $400 and $500. Well, she's not able to recoup those discounts. She's not able to play in any of that because those sales are being done on StubHub. So they're losing out on the information and she's not able to figure out all of those other people who she could have a better engagement with. So we're really finding that the opportunity to increase touchpoints, when you think about colleges as well as concertgoers, these fans want to have ways to be more directly connected with that asset creator, whether it's the team or the artist. And so really being able to provide that in an aggregated, safe way helps everybody have a better experience. If I'm going to pay the money, I want to be able to get the most out of it from the people who can provide the most, which is the asset creator, not the secondary marketplaces.

Okay. And then there was one last— oh, all right. Divine Thornton had asked, um, how are you incorporating social media into your strategy? And yeah, I think that's a pretty fair question because if you're going to be building up an audience on the B2C side that would in essence help you start to pressure the B2B side to purchase the licensing fee, you'd probably need a lot of noise. You want to talk a little bit about the social media side after that? And this will be the last question. So Susan, if you want to start getting queued up, we'll get to you next. So yeah, go ahead, Harold.

Perfect. And I appreciate all the questions. Our website is Bandwagon Fan Club. Com. And so my email is just hh@bandwagonfanclub.com. Our social media strategy is one of the things we're working the most on right now. What we really want to focus on is helping users and fans create unique personalized experiences. And what we think is that the ticket buying process is the beginning of that game day. So once you buy your ticket and a lot of platforms, it's like, thanks, see you later, next time. For us, we're saying, oh, great, we're going to help them plan a trip. And so we use artificial intelligence through our our partner uTrip to help them plan a trip in about 15 seconds. Then we use Cruisin to help teams, help fans find ridesharing. And so what we've done is really created that baseline platform that creates the initial touchpoint, and then we tie in all these other partners to help really deliver a lot of value for the fans. So we're trying to capture a lot of that on social media. So packing for a tailgate, hanging out with friends, and all those types of things. That's really what we're focused on on our social media. But But we're gonna get that even better than it is, but we appreciate anybody checking it out.