Created by Clockenflap founders Mike Hill and Pete Gordon, Ticketflap was the ticketing platform answer to their epic music and arts festival. After listening to Hill’s investment pitch at a bar in Soho, angel investor Martin Haigh (pictured middle) signed on as a seed investor in Clockenflap and was brought on as Ticketflap’s CEO to handle operations full-time.
Before leading the charge at Ticketflap, Haigh traded emerging market equities for the likes of HSBC and Merrill Lynch and has worked in London, New York and Hong Kong and has started and angel funded a number of startups. Besides a background in finance, Haigh also has a serious case of wanderlust. He’s travelled to places such as Antarctica, Colombia and Ethiopia, and believes that his globetrotting adventures have contributed to his entrepreneurial spirit.
What is your startup?
Ticketflap is a Hong Kong-based ticketing company that offers a complete event solution to venues, promoters and their customers. We can do it all for you! We provide an events listing website that promotes, sells and distributes paperless tickets. (www.ticketflap.com). We supply technological services to venues and promoters like WiFi, cashless transactions, access control and brand activation.Think of using your smartphone to gain entry to an event and then paying for your food and merchandise with a swipe of a card, then communicating with your friends via WiFi – that’s what we’ve done at Clockenflap, the future is now!
How did you come up with this idea?
Mike Hill and Pete Gordon founded the company in 2012. Clockenflap (a music and arts festival) wanted a ticketing solution to satisfy their client’s needs. Hong Kong’s venues, promoters, (in fact anyone needing a ticketing solution) needs an affordable, flexible, modern, online paperless ticketing option. The incumbents (HK Ticketing, Urbtix and Citiline) have high cost bases and have found it hard or have been unwilling to migrate towards a modern integrated solution. In the space of a few short months we’ve established partnerships with the media, with venues and related companies such as Uber (to offer free rides to or from events). Everyday we see opportunities to join forces with companies and I’m amazed that the incumbents haven’t got there before us.
Who are you targeting and how big is the market in HK/Asia?
Our paperless ticketing model means that we don’t have the overheads that the incumbents suffer from, they have long lead times with regard to printing and postage costs which means that they can’t set up events quickly and have to stop selling tickets a few days before the event takes place (peak ticket selling time in our experience). They pass on these costs to their clients, they also need to charge set up fees as the selling and distributing of paper tickets is a capital intensive business.
Many small venues can’t afford to use the incumbents which is a real shame as it stifles their ability to get to know their client base. Imagine being a venue: Every week, you see people pay cash at the door to come to your events but with no way to track who they are, not being able to encourage them to come back again?
Ticketflap is targeting the medium and small sized venues. It’s a untapped green field site. We are helping smaller events and venues to gain market awareness and sell tickets. We are doing this for festivals, start ups, charities, music, spoken word – the market in HK is massive and in Asia so large its impossible to calculate and its growing fast.
On the event technology and RFID side to the business we would like to target the large venues, the benefits to event goers to be able to gain access by clicking-in, purchase food and drinks by the swipe of a hand and to interact with a brand on Facebook and Twitter (in all likelihood to win something) is huge. Imagine no more long queues to get in or to buy that burger!
What are your futures plans for your startup?
Your readers will need to sign an NDA in order for us to share those with you – just kidding. There’s so much in the pipeline I don’t know where to start. We have a number of interested parties looking to invest, we would like these partners to help bring finance, experience as well as connections
1 Benefit and 1 Challenge in the HK startup scene?
Benefit – I’ve never seen so many people willing to help each other – often for free.
Challenge – aggregating data about the startup scene is hard with so many startups and so many incubators – its hard to get a grip on who is trying to solve which problems and why.
Ticketflap on Startbase.HK: Ticketflap
Martin Haigh on Startbase.HK: Martin Haigh
