If you attend conferences, go to meetups or see local talent at smaller venues you have probably used Eventbrite (NYSE - $EB). Their IPO is scheduled for tonight (Wednesday) by Goldman, JPM, Allen and a few others. The proposed price range was just bumped up to $21 to $23/share.
EB makes their money with ticket fees but their platform is about more than selling tickets. Their solution is designed to help smaller producers make their events a success. Eventbrite isn't competing with large ticketing platforms like Ticketmaster or Fandango, but rather a broad range of smaller events that skew more toward business, sports, causes, food, classes, and culture.
It's all about the ecosystem
We'll get into more details about the functions offered and how the system works but the key to understanding the long-term positioning of Eventbrite boils down to the ecosystem. Their target clients all use other SaaS tools to run their businesses. Eventbrite works with and partners with and offers enhanced integrations with these systems.
For a large set of this market, Eventbrite is simply the go-to solution and partner for handling events of all types. This isn't a market for large companies like Ticketmaster and although there are quite a few point solutions that offer ticketing, these are mostly DIY which is a different type of market.
There's more you can learn about how Eventbrite integrates for these services. It's not easy to find on the website but they have a listing of extensions with many of these other systems that are already integrated with Eventbrite. You can browse them here: https://www.eventbrite.com/spectrum/.
Positioning and Competition
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