Building a Secondary Ticketing Business From Spain: Ander Michelena, CEO of Ticketbis (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So people were just finding you through organic Google search basically.

Ander Michelena: Yes, we were using SEM, SEO, and affiliates to get traffic. That was what it was. Before we launched in other countries, we were only based in Spain. With that million euros, we created the website and made it compatible with local companies. We follow the same strategy in those countries. In the second year, we did €5 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: What are some other interesting strategic moves that you made in building this company? Obviously, you’ve built a very capital efficient company and you’ve scaled it to a very significant level with a very disciplined approach. I love that. That’s our philosophy in our program. Share more of your insights and learnings on what you did right and what strategic moves you made that helped you achieve that.

Ander Michelena: We did some stuff right and some stuff wrong. I think it’s also important to learn from the mistakes that we did. The right things we did that we were very tight on the cost side. We didn’t purchase anything that wasn’t needed. We tried to be very cost efficient from the very beginning. Also, what we did was attract very good talent. That’s one of the main things that helped us. John and I didn’t know anything about Internet. We didn’t know about this market before this, so we needed the right people and the right talent to complement our skills. We couldn’t pay too much money because on a cost base, we were very low.

Another thing that we did quite well was execution. We were clear what we wanted to do. We were very good at executing and were very fast. Hardwork’s something that I can say that we learned from investment banking. When we talk to our investors, they are very happy because when we send our budgets for next year, we have never been out of the budget. We always do what we say we’re going to do. We don’t say, “We’re going to multiply sales by three times.” Then at the end of the year, you say, “Sorry guys, we can’t hit the numbers.” That’s a wrong approach. You need to be very sincere with your investor base and very focused on the execution. You have to put numbers that you can actually achieve.

We also did quite some mistakes. First, in 2011, we thought there was another opportunity similar to EventBrite on the ticketing side – on launching a model of a do-it-yourself platform. I don’t know if you know EventBrite?

Sramana Mitra: Very well. It is into do-it-yourself ticketing.

Ander Michelena: They are a primary ticketing company where the promoter of the event creates the event and then sells the ticket themselves. EventBrite created the platform for everybody to sell tickets. It was quite a good model. We thought it was quite interesting. We thought there was an opportunity similar to what we did at Ticketbis because the model was not present in Europe at that point. In 2011, we developed a similar platform. I was working with a team inside a company. There were 15 to 20 people working on that part of the business.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Secondary Ticketing Business From Spain: Ander Michelena, CEO of Ticketbis
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