Molly
My Alumni Website

 

Chris Stanchak
Founder and CEO
TicketLeap

 

Chris Stanchak

This is Chris.

 

Molly

Hi, Chris. This is Molly from My Alumni Website.  How are you?

 

Chris Stanchak

Good, Molly. How are you?

 

Molly

I'm good. Thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it.

 

Chris Stanchak

Thank you.

 

Molly

I want to start by asking you about your education.  I understand you're a Wharton grad and you started your own business while working full-time in the eCommerce industry.  How do you think your education prepared for this juggling act that you did originally?

 

Chris Stanchak

Well it's kind of interesting you say that because I was in the middle of a juggling act while I was in school as well. I went to school part-time for the first two years while working full-time in technologies, so I was basically had hours of 8:30 a.m. to midnight the whole time I was in school and then started the company while I was in school as well so never really had a break where I wasn't juggling multiple things at the same time.  So as the company progressed and I was working in other positions full-time in the eCommerce world and then also running Ticket Leap on the side, it actually was quite similar to what I was used to already so.

 

Molly

Do you think that Wharton prepared you for being an entrepreneur?

 

Chris Stanchak

Absolutely.  Yeah, so when I was at Wharton, they had a program that just started while I was there known as the Wharton Venture Initiation Program, which is - - it's a business incubator, so I was in there for the first year of the incubator program.  So not only was I in this great new business incubator, but it was also the first year of it, so we were collectively as part of the incubator also trying to figure out what it was all about as we were starting it.  But I also took classes in entrepreneurship while I was in school, so there was a lot of stuff that I learned that was applicable to running a company and then not to mention just traditional classes, things like accounting and financial classes that were very helpful in terms of things you need to know when running a business and so… But my major was - - were in marketing and management, so they were very helpful in getting the company started.  The other I want to note is that when I was starting company, since I was doing while I was in school, it was great to be able to leverage the knowledge of the professors and ask them real world questions sort of on the fly as I was learning things.

 

Molly

Absolutely, it was very practical. And then that of course accumulated into TicketLeap, and I understand that you've doubled your staff and launched a new project, the Anywhere branch of TicketLeap.  That's pretty amazing growth for your company, particularly in this economy.  What do you attribute that to?

 

Chris Stanchak

It's pretty interesting.  We have not… From our business, it was something that people were concerned about because ticketing is sort of - - it's discretionary spending so it's not something that people absolutely require to go to events, but what we've seen because we deal in the small-to-midsized event space that ticket prices typically are a little bit on the lower end in terms of… So instead of going to a Broadway show and traveling to New York, families a lot of times these days are staying at home and going to their local theater.  Those are the types of customers that we deal with primarily.  So for us and for the theaters as well, we haven't really seen a significant impact from the economy. But the other piece of it is just our product has advanced so much so in terms of what we offer to our customers and the convenience to the event organizers and then to the patrons, the prices they pay to use our service is much lower than what you would see from Ticketmaster or some of the other competitors that out there.

 

Molly

So then you-

 

Chris Stanchak

And what we have done with - Yeah, and what we have done with Anywhere product is basically taking all the features and benefits of TicketLeap, the online system, and bringing it so that an event organizer can use it at their box office to handle their online sales in a way that integrates with what's happening online, so it's basically a single system that they can use. The way we've designed it, it's very low cost and very quick and that's what makes it different then some of our competitors.

 

Molly

Okay, so then you have filled in a gap that maybe this economy opened up with people looking for lower cost entertainment as well as being a little more maybe approachable or user friendly for the people who use your programs?

 

Chris Stanchak

Yeah, exactly.  So if you're an event organizer, your options, especially if you're one that is a little bit more sophisticated, you need to worry about not only selling tickets online, but you also really need to worry about how you're handling your door sales and presales and things like that, so we've been able to provide for them is a system that integrates those things together in a very seamless way. It helps them manage their business and get - - allows them to focus on what they do best, which is putting on the events, and not on the technology.  So some of the…  Again going back to some of the competitors that are out there, the traditional systems like Ticketmaster and some of the other bigger players like that require significant capital expense to get started with them because all of the software and servers and things like that that you need to invest in and because we've designed it in a way that anybody can use it from anywhere, those costs aren't really there so it's been a real benefit to the event organizer.

 

Molly

Then people can already purchase tickets to sporting events, live theater, music. How do you hope to grow?  What do you think is next for TicketLeap?

 

Chris Stanchak

Well there is, it's interesting that in the part of the market we operate, which is again is the small-to-midsize event space, there's billions of events being sold in the U.S. alone and there's not - - currently there's no real go-to-name or household name in that space, so there's a lot of opportunity for the whole market, everybody, us and our competitors as well.  But our goal is to capture the market and be the dominate company that operates in that space so that's - - so it's basically just getting better at customer acquisition and continuing to innovate on our product, that's - - we think that there's so much market out there for us that we think that that's not going to be the thing that's going to stop us.  It's really just about making sure that we continue to stay ahead of the curve and innovate and deliver something that's truly valuable to the event organizers and to patrons. 

 

Molly

Excellent.  Well, Chris, I really appreciate your time today.

 

Chris Stanchak

Thank you so much.

 

Molly

You take care. Bye.

Chris Stanchak

Bye-bye.