NZ-born duo help event organisers increase ticket sales

February 2, 2017 MEDIA RELEASE

New Zealand-born duo behind secret weapon to turbocharge event ticket sales raise $525k as they reach $2m ticket milestone

Audience Republic, an online platform that helps event organisers increase ticket sales, announces today that it has closed a $AUD525,000 seed investment round.

Founded by Auckland-raised former concert and festival promoter Jared Kristensen, 27, and Palmerston North-born former CTO of GoCatch Jason MacLulich, 37, Audience Republic raised the seed round from Artesian Capital, QUT Creative Enterprise Australia, and several angel investors*.

Now based in Sydney, Australia, the two co-founders say they’ll use the funds raised from the round towards accelerating customer acquisition and also towards product development, in order to bolster customers’ data and analytics capabilities.

Launched in October 2015 and formerly known as Ticket Squad, Audience Republic is a global software-as-a-service platform that helps increase ticket sales for events. Event organisers pay to use the platform to create online campaigns that drive increased ticket sales to their existing ticketing providers, such as Ticketek, Ticketmaster or Eventbrite.

More than $2 million worth of ticket sales from tens of thousands of event goers have been delivered by Audience Republic to organisers to date. Festivals that it’s boosted ticket sales for in New Zealand and Australia include: Rhythm & Vines, Electric Gardens, Pitch Festival, and Days Like This. It’s also been used on concerts for Sticky Fingers, Broods and Rufus. But it’s not just festivals and concerts: it’s helped with ticket sales of conferences and special events too.

“More than 85 per cent of events don’t sell out,” says Audience Republic chief executive officer and co-founder, Jared Kristensen. “And with the live events sector being worth $3 billion alone in Australia and $100 billion globally, that’s a huge opportunity for us. We’re very much focused on being a global business. This is demonstrated by our first customers being outside of Australia.”

In order to increase event ticket sales, Audience Republic’s campaigns leverage social media and rewards – such as access to exclusive tickets, discounts, and prizes – to gamify the process of a ticket-buyer inviting friends to purchase tickets too.

The more friends a user refers that buy tickets, and the more social follows they complete, the more points the user gets and the better chance they have to get rewarded. Through the process, event organisers collect data, including their music tastes, so they can learn more

about the people who buy tickets to their event. Platforms supported include Facebook and Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Spotify and SoundCloud.

On average, Audience Republic says it’s delivered a 76 per cent uplift in pre-sale registrations for events, with 203 per cent being its record - achieved through the virility of social shares.

For event promoters, Kristensen says the data it can provide is invaluable.

“With data collected through Audience Republic, promoters will be able to meet the people behind their ticket sales,” says Kristensen. “We deliver insights like their highest spending, most loyal, and most influential customers. And at a broader level, we provide insights around age, gender and location, as well as interests, preferences and music listening history.”

As a former promoter, Kristensen says a key insight he learned was that if people knew their friends were attending an event, they were 10 times more likely to buy a ticket. “And that’s the foundation our platform is built on: leveraging the power of small groups,” Kristensen says.

He adds that he started Audience Republic because as a former event promoter he knew first hand just how difficult it can be to sell tickets.

“For me personally, there was one event where I lost $20,000 in one night because I just didn’t sell enough tickets, and that was the key light-bulb moment for me,” Kristensen says.

“The industry as a whole was getting much more sophisticated: in ticketing, lighting, audio and everything else. But marketing was still lagging behind. While there were lots of great ticketing platforms, what struck me was that there wasn’t a dedicated product to help with event marketing. That’s where Audience Republic comes in.”

Today’s seed round announcement comes as the company rebrands its platform, relaunching under the new name Audience Republic. The new name takes into consideration the evolution of the platform and expanded vision beyond just events, says Kristensen.

“We’re seeing some fascinating ways customers have been using the platform beyond events in a way that we hadn’t originally expected, including by some major consumer brands who have used us for campaigns. We’re really excited to be exploring this further,” he says.

“The vision is for Audience Republic to power the marketing for all major events globally, within music, but also across sport, conferences and theatre.”

Prior to Audience Republic, Kristensen worked for ASX-listed Flamingo as head of marketing, and for a startup called OneSaas. His start in the event industry began at 15, pushing boxes and setting up lighting equipment for events like the Big Day Out and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

“I worked my way up to running my own company at 18, which produced a number of electronic music events, with international artists like music producer Boys Noize, DJs The Bloody Beetroots and musical duo MSTRKRFT.”

Kristensen’s co-founder Jason MacLulich was a former CTO of GoCatch and founder of The Medic, a secure video conferencing service for doctors, which was acquired in 2016. MacLulich met Kristensen through the Slingshot accelerator program, which both Audience Republic and The Medic went through.

* Investors in the seed round include:

Artesian Capital (via the Slingshot Venture Fund)

QUT Creative Enterprise Australia

Radinck Martin van Vollenhoven (Stocard managing director. Formerly from Spotify (as a sales director and sales manager) and Apple (in business development).

Nick Ingall (Invoice2go’s head of people and culture (Ex Spotify, Atlassian, AdRoll)

Ben Sharp (AdRoll’s managing director)

Hugh Stephens (Schedugram’s founder and CEO)

Allen Liao (Tzukuri’s CEO & founder)

Fredrik Orrenius (G4S Ventures' CEO)

About Audience Republic

Launched in October 2015, Audience Republic (formerly Ticket Squad) helps event organisers increase ticket sales. Organisers use the online platform to setup campaigns, which drive increased ticket sales to their ticketing provider (such as Ticketmaster, Ticketek or Eventbrite). The campaigns leverage social media and rewards – such as access to exclusive tickets, discounts and prizes – to incentivise people to invite their friends to purchase tickets.

For more information visit http://audiencerepublic.com

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