Tag Archives: Bruce Springsteen

About 4706 days ago E-Commerce

Tickets to Success

Great Companies Started for $1,000 or Less COMPANY: TicketsNow.com BUSINESS: Ticket brokerage FOUNDED: 1991 START-UP CAPITAL: $100 1999 REVENUES: $8 million 2000 PROJECTED REVENUES: $10 million Mike Domek’s TicketsNow.com isn’t located in Silicon Valley. Nor has it ever received a dime of venture capital. But it’s very much in the thick of the E-commerce revolution. It sells thousands of tickets online every month, and it expects to rack up $10 million worth of sales this year. Domek has come a long way in nine years. Growing up in Woodstock, Ill., he was the kid in his high school who always knew which bands were coming to town and somehow could score tickets for even the hottest acts. At Southern Illinois University he kept up a sideline selling tickets to friends and customers in the Chicago area. Then, in 1991, after three years of college, Domek, then 22, ran out of money for school, dropped out, moved back home, and decided to try ticket brokering full-time. Lucky for Domek, he didn’t require much in the way of inventory to start TicketsNow.com, which is formally known as VIP Tour Co. All he really needed was a phone, a credit-card-processing machine, and a FedEx account. “I’d just let people know that I could get tickets for this or that,” he says. “Then I would just call around.” Once he was established as a repeat customer, other ticket brokers gave him a discount. “That gave me the ability to be competitive for what they were selling. Eventually, I stocked more inventory of my own.” With an initial investment of $100, Domek bought office supplies. He ran ads in local newspapers and paid for them with credit cards. He put in an extra phone line and worked out of his one-bedroom apartment for the first 18 months. “The big move was into a two-bedroom apartment, where I could make one of the rooms into an office,” he says. “At that point a lot of my friends were finishing college. A few of them helped out part-time while they were looking for jobs.” As the company has grown — almost all of it financed internally except for $100,000 borrowed in 1995 to reserve tickets for the 1996 Olympics — it has improved its phone system, expanded its office space, and added new computers and a Web site, Domek says. Putting up the Web site last year cost $30,000, plus $14,000 for the domain name. His payroll has swelled from 7 employees to 21, and annual marketing — including advertising and affiliations — will cost him $1 million by the end of 2000, Domek estimates. In 1999 he barely broke even. But Domek is sure his bet on the Web will pay off. Already he sells 65% of his tickets over the Web. The TicketsNow.com site, which includes information about venues and upcoming events — say, ‘N Sync or Bruce Springsteen concerts or Chicago Cubs games — gets 5,500 hits a day. Domek takes pride in having made it to the Web without massive infusions of venture capital. “I like to control the pace of growth,” he says. Click here for more Great Companies Started for $1,000 or Less. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4857 days ago E-Commerce

Myth 2: Traffic Will Make You Rich

REALITY CHECK: Selling well makes you rich. Traffic only provides eyeballs Click here for the word from the experts Remember when the idea of E-commerce was really starting to heat up a couple of years ago? Blue Marlin CEO Erik Stuebe does. His company, which sells vintage baseball caps and apparel, was young and primed for an Internet play. Founded in 1994 without any venture financing, it had grown to more than $3 million in revenues. When a Web developer told him that Internet sales could represent as much as 20% of the company’s revenues in just three years, Stuebe plunked down $35,000 to launch www.bluemarlincorp.com. Stuebe wanted an action-packed site, so www.bluemarlincorp.com was designed as a baseball-history- lover’s paradise. It used sparkling copy and thrilling animation to spin vivid, romantic yarns about the old minor, Negro, Cuban, and women’s baseball leagues. Deeper into the site, customers could buy Blue Marlin’s soft, classic-looking hats. And the sales would skyrocket, right? Not quite. The hits kept on coming; there was no question that the Blue Marlin site was attracting eyeballs. But by the end of 1998, the company had sold only $50,000 worth of merchandise on the Web — a tiny fraction of its revenues. Despite modest returns, Stuebe spent $15,000 a year for updates, including a store locator and a media section depicting celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and Gillian Anderson wearing the hats. Traffic was brisk, but revenues never took off. Even today “95% of the people who visit the site don’t purchase anything,” Stuebe says. “Maybe they’re more inclined to buy it retail.” In 1999 the site’s revenues started to show signs of life. Blue Marlin expected on-line sales to reach $120,000 for the year — still a relatively small component of its $5 million in total projected revenues. Now, Stuebe says, he’ll be very careful about every dollar he puts into the site. He’s already diverted $500,000 originally budgeted for the site and has put the money back into his wholesale business — where customers will be able to touch and feel his wares. THE 7 MYTHS OF THE WEB ECONOMY Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy The word from the experts Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich The word from the experts Myth 3: Smart money makes you smart The word from the experts Myth 4: Razzle-dazzle makes Web sites great The word from the experts Myth 5: Brand is everything The word from the experts Myth 6: Wild ads make Web stars The word from the experts Myth 7: Community, community, community The word from the experts Plus: Tales my guru told me Dispatches from the Web economy Back to Intro, ” I Was Seduced by the Web Economy”