One of the problems we faced when I joined Eventbrite was that Eventbrite had a pretty low take rate, meaning when event creators sold paid tickets on our platform, we took a very low percentage. And when creators sold free tickets on the platform, which are the majority of tickets, we didn’t make any money. You need an incredible amount of volume to make profits with low take rates, like say Paypal or Stripe, and even though Eventbrite has tremendous scale, it wasn’t enough to make material profits. We needed a way to make more money for the value we created if we wanted to be a successful company i.e. a new monetization playbook. I’ll discuss below the playbook we built, and some of the process to get there.
Great write up. I can see nice visual decision tree here… let me create it and share with you.