#557 The Shadow Audience Problem: Matt Zarracina on Fixing Ticketing’s Biggest Tech Blind Spot

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Mehmet: Hello, and welcome back to an episode of the CTO Show with Mehmet today. I'm very pleased joining me from Boston Matt Zarracina. He's the CEO and Co-founder of True Tickets. Today we are gonna discuss, uh, [00:01:00] little bit. A topic that I didn't cover much, uh, mainly related to, of course, as you can imagine, to ticketing problems.

Uh, we're gonna talk about like shadow audience. We're gonna talk about, you know, also building SaaS inside the legacy industry and maybe a couple of other topics as much as the time will allow us. But as usual, what I like to do with all my guests. Matt is, I keep it to them to introduce themselves. Tell us more about you, your background, your journey, and what brought you to, to start, uh, building true tickets.

Matt: No, my, Matt, thank you for having me. And obviously it's a little bit, little bit warmer, probably in Dubai than it is in Boston. So a little bit about my background. It, it's a bit eclectic. Uh, I grew up in rural Minnesota, so Minnesota for those, uh, who aren't familiar with the United States is essentially middle of the country, but as far north as you can get.

Uh, so we definitely experienced all four seasons there. Uh, I did my undergraduate work or university work at the United States Naval Academy. [00:02:00] I was then a helicopter pilot based out of San Diego, California for about four years. Uh, after that I transferred to Cornell University where I taught for a bit.

Uh, I did my graduate work there. So I have a master's degree in systems engineering as well as an MBA. Uh, after college, uh, or sorry, after graduate school, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be. Uh, so I actually went into consulting. I was a mergers and acquisitions consultant for Deloitte for about six years.

Uh, I had done some innovation work. Uh, at Deloitte and I really liked it. And fortunately for me, I was able to find a job in Boston, which is where my I am now. My wife was working there at the time. That's now where my family is with a French aerospace defense company. Some of y'all may be familiar with called Ali.

Mm-hmm. So I worked there, uh, corporate innovation arm. So I was a director of innovation, uh, with, uh, this group called Explore. And there I led their blockchain project. I led their autonomous vehicle project as well as a couple other things. Uh, and that's where we kind of stumbled upon true tickets. Uh, I left, uh, [00:03:00] Tallis in May of 2018 to be CEO of true tickets full time, and I've been leading true tickets ever since.

So it's been, it's been quite a journey and, and like I said, my background's probably not. Uh, a little bit atypical to most of the founders you talk to in tech. 

Mehmet: Absolutely. And, uh, it's a very rich background, Matt, and I'm sure, you know, you build this, uh, ability to spot, you know, uh, shortcomings, I would say, and then try to solve them, you know, being, you know, with the, whether at, uh, Deloitte or with es.

So. What was the main moment, uh, that, you know, you looked at the ticketing sys, the ticketing systems, you know, in the US and maybe globally, and you saw like, you know what, it's something that is being broken for a long and it's time to build something new. So I like to hear the, these original stories, Matt.

So, 

Matt: yeah, the, the origin story for me is an interesting one. [00:04:00] Uh, in that I, it was, it was a bit of an evolution on my own. So I didn't, I didn't walk into Tallis as a director of innovation and think, Hey, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna learn about technology or emerging technology and build a solution for ticketing problems.

In fact, when I first. Remember stumbling across this idea? Uh, I had just joined Tallis. Uh, I'd just been assigned to essentially a blockchain project, right. And I was at MIT. Uh, whiteboarding, some blockchain ideas, hypotheses with an expert in the technology at the time who was still actually an advisor to our company.

We were talking all sorts of things like supply chain, digital rights management. And this was back in January of 2017, so you shoot almost, almost 10 years ago, coming up, I guess almost nine years ago. Uh, and we stumbled upon ticketing. And in about 60 seconds, Thomas and I whiteboarded, Hey, you know, blockchain and ticketing, you know, this, this could be an interesting fit for this technology.

And honestly, I left it at that. You know, [00:05:00] Tallis had just sold their, their rail ticketing business. So there really wasn't a ticketing opportunity in Tallis from a corporate standpoint. Uh. I would say that the, the idea, the opportunity reemerged a couple months later when my co-founder Steve, who he was working on blockchain at the Pentagon at the time, uh, in a department of defense capacity, he, he and I were working together, but he sent me a white paper on ticketing and blockchain, and I read it and I recall the conversation Thomas and I had at MIT and that, that really started the ball rolling for, for me when it came to.

Kind of what True Tickets is today. And look, we're, I'd say we're guilty as anybody of, of kind of being fascinated by a technology and trying to find, you know, we, we've got a, a solution. So we're trying to find the problem to fit our solution. Fortunately for us, we were able to learn a, a lot on our blockchain journey and ticketing and identify a very credible business opportunity, that that's what True Tickets is today.

Mehmet: Great. Um, and, [00:06:00] and you know, like it's, it's always fascinating to, to, to learn these stories and the, you know, origins of why a company started it. Now, the next, which is, you know. Something I'm sure a lot of us might heard about, you know, the problems that happens in, in that, uh, uh, in that sector, let me call it.

So I know for a fact, for example, that you know, venues usually. Um, they have the problem of like, who is buying the ticket and the, the guy who bought the ticket is actually the guy who came Probably 'cause someone is trying to, you know, either to sell it a higher price or I think they call it also like shadow audience.

So if we can define the problem more, I would say, uh, Matt, what that would be like. I mean, if, if we want to draw the image that. You know, majority of the maybe venues, event organizers, they, they have, [00:07:00] um, before of course, uh, you came up with the solution, which is like true tickets. 

Matt: Yeah. And, and it is, look, it's good to define it.

Right. And I think one of the things that startups always struggle with, and, and look we struggled with it to a degree, is how do you articulate. The problem you're solving in a, in a clear and concise manner. And, you know, we've been on that evolution for eight, eight plus years now. And what we've really oriented around is what our North Star is, which is helping our clients, which are our venues, right?

Live event organizations. And that could be arts theater, uh, even though we're not in sports, you know, it cascades and, and broadens to sports. But our, our North Star is making sure our clients actually know who's attending. You know, their, their venue, their organization, and it's this massive problem. And so when we talk about, we coined the phrase shadow audience.

It's essentially think about a venue, a theater, a concert hall. Most of them [00:08:00] know. One third of the people who walk through the doors, right? So when you're looking at an audience of let's say, 3000 people viewing a show for Hamilton, the venue actually probably only knows about 1000 of those 3000 people.

So you think about that as an opportunity. There's 2000 people. In those venues viewing that content that they don't know. And when you think about the, the world we're in now, the, the attention economy, that is a massive opportunity. And look, it might be a little bit shocking to this audience, but it's really not that much different for sports or some of these, uh, live event organizations that we think are more digital or maybe more forward leading.

Sports is still at best, 40 to 45%. Right? And when we think about the world we're living in that attention economy, not knowing those people who are basically in your venue, viewing your content. It. Puts them at a huge disadvantage, right? When we think about, uh, other digital [00:09:00] solutions that are vying for attention, Netflix, Google, Amazon, uh, you, HBO, anything that's kind of, you know, Facebook meta, um, they know 90 plus percent of the people engaging with their content.

So, you know, the, when we think about Boston Symphony, they're not competing against the Boston Red Sox. They're competing against Netflix. And the key is then you need to know who's coming in your venue so you can market more effectively and you can make your, make sure your organization is not only successful to today, but long in the future.

Mehmet: Matt, and another, uh, aspect, which also, you know, I, I hear about, uh, about it a lot, which is, you know what's called like, uh, uh, you know, these trials for having, um. Bots to, to buy tickets early. Right? And then, you know, pushing people to buy from what they call it, the black market, right? Mm-hmm. Uh, and [00:10:00] this is, goes also like kind of a disconnection how big this problem is, uh, in, in your opinion, in, in, you know, whether in sports or other arenas.

Matt: You know me, it's a massive problem, and all you have to look at is what's happening both in the US and internationally. There's a Department of Justice lawsuit against Ticketmaster Live Nation, uh, for, for certain practices. There's the, in the uk, they banned, uh, put a cap on, on resale. And so obviously there are, or governments now are attempting to address this problem.

However, we would argue the solution to that problem is actually. Connecting the organization, the venue with the actual attendees. So while obviously you can, you can legislate things, legislation's only as good as your ability to enforce it. Our hypothesis is coupling legislation with technology solutions that can help reveal these shadow audience members, create a direct connection between the venue and the person attending.[00:11:00] 

That creates visibility, and it's that lack of visibility that's been this massive blind spot in this industry for decades. And it, it, look, it's been a blind spot for, I'd say two reasons. One is. Many venues, I, I, I think, assumed that their ticket buyer was the attendee. We're realizing now that in many cases that's not the case, and two, technology really didn't exist to solve this problem, which is really create a custody solution after a ticket was sold.

And it, it's not hard to, to really understand that If you think back to ticketing. 30, 40, 50 years ago, they were cards, hard stock, you know, card stock tickets printed and ticket racks. The minute that ticket was handed to the person who bought it. There's really no way of custodying that ticket, understanding who actually got it, what was done with that ticket.

And while there have been innovations and evolutions of ticketing and ticket delivery technology, even, you know, PDF printed at home, it, it's really no different than that hard, hard stock ticket that that was, you know, in a [00:12:00] ticket rack 40 years ago. And so with the digitization of ticketing, you now create an opportunity to actually provide custody capabilities around a ticketing, which then.

Allows you to create that direct connection between the actual venue attendee and, and the venue. And that's ultimately what's gonna solve this problem, right? It's these bad actors. They've lived in that kind of obfuscated gray area where once that ticket is sold, the venue really doesn't know who has it.

And so these, these bad actors take advantage of that. And obviously Digit, you know, innovation technology can help create visibility there. Which, which that is the opportunity. 

Mehmet: Matt, do you think also like there's a missed opportunities when it comes also to know who actually attended it mainly? And you, you touched kind of it, but for example, if, I want to think if, if I take sports or if I take maybe a, a, a band, right?

Mm-hmm. So there will be merchandise, there will be like a lot of things. So if I [00:13:00] have beforehand knowledge about who are like the kind of people would be, there wouldn't be better Also too. Kind of target, like what I'm trying to, to show them, sell them. Or maybe even I, again, it's very famous. Everyone knows about, you know, the Super Bowl ads in the US and, you know, uh, the ads that are being shown in these big events and, you know, sports events of course is one of them.

So wouldn't be also like a missed opportunities kind of for the brands, uh, as well to know who are actually the people who are gonna be in this venue. 

Matt: Absolutely right. So that, that direct connection, your ability to personalize your marketing, there's a multitude of dimensions that can take. Here's a quick story of one of our organizations.

Sure. The, the Kaufman Center in Kansas City, Missouri. They, and prior to True tickets, they wouldn't have been able to do something like this. But this shows how quickly, uh. This type of solution can have an impact for an organization. So they had [00:14:00] an entry-level donor event. So these are kind of younger, um, entry-level donors.

Uh, one of those donors had four tickets to a gala. They brought three friends. They shared three tickets with their three friends again. Previous to true tickets, they wouldn't, the, the organization would've had a really hard time knowing who those three friends were. Maybe they could have gotten information from credit card information or a survey.

But again, it, it, it's not as direct as literally those, those three people telling them, telling the coffin center who they are. And so this one donor shared their three gala tickets with their friends. The Kauffman Center then sent out a marketing email a couple days later saying, Hey, noticed you attended this event.

If you would like to attend these events in the future. Here's an entry-level donor package, and with that one email, those three people signed up. Typically, when it comes to donors and securing donors, um, acquiring donors [00:15:00] for organization, it can be anywheres from eight to 12 touch points. In this instance, the Kaman Center was able to, to gain three new donors with one touchpoint.

And that's one example of just very basic marketing personalization. Hey, you came to this event, if you liked it, here's an entry level option for you. And they all signed up. That obviously can go out to merchandise content creators, knowing who, who's actually engaging. 'cause if you only know the ticket buyer, you're advertising potentially, and marketing to the wrong people.

'cause the ticket buyer, if they're flipping a ticket. They're really not interested in your content, in your merchandise. They're just interested in that additional arbitrage they can make by selling to someone who actually wants to go, they have really no interest in communicating the information to the content creator about who that person is so they can market to them and they can benefit from that relationship.

Mehmet: Cool. Now, the question that maybe, I'm sure the audience are keen to understand how, uh, true tickets solve all these challenges, Matt, like whether, you know, for fing, [00:16:00] you know, maybe the, the tickets or let's say, um, not knowing who are exactly, uh, as we said, the personas of the audience who are attending and the other problems we just touched on.

So what do you offer. Uh, map for, you know, for the venues and for the organizers. 

Matt: So for the venues and the organizers, what we've created, and look, this is one of our big learnings. When we started True Tickets in 2018, we actually built essentially a, a basic ticketing system. We had an app, uh, we built it on a blockchain protocol called Hyperledger Fabric.

Uh, and we were really searching for a fit, right? We were throwing spaghetti at a wall. Uh, we had done in 2018, I think seven or so different events, sold 1500 tickets or so on chain. Uh, it was 20,000 in top line, Relu top lip, top line revenue, nothing earth shattering. But back in 2018, we were one of the first to.

I'd say provide a, a blockchain enabled solution to the market. And [00:17:00] it, it really was this, this serendipitous conversation at a conference I was at in November of 2018 in Miami. Uh, we were at a ticketing conference. Our focus at the time was obviously trying to talk to sports leagues teams, um, bigger organizations, bigger venues, and there was a side conversation I had with a, a woman at the Adrian R Center, and for those of you who don't know, the Adrian R Center is Miami's performing arts center.

They have touring Broadway. So Hamilton comes there and she asked me a question. She said, Hey, I hear you're doing something, blockchain and ticketing. And I said, yeah, we have this app. She goes, I don't want your app. I said, all right, what do you want? She goes, I want you to figure out how to plug your technology into my ticketing system to make my ticketing system better.

And that that is the evolution of true tickets. So we are a custody solution. We essentially provide a service. We're a delivery option for the ticketing systems we work with, whereby. The person who uses, or the organization who uses true tickets to deliver a ticket really gets three superpowers. You know, the first one is they're always gonna know who's in possession of a [00:18:00] ticket with true tickets.

There's not a world where someone can be rightfully in possession of a ticket and the the venue can't quickly ascertain that. The second, and I think most powerful. Superpower is this concept of a rules engine. And so for the, the blockchain crypto wonks on this podcast, you know, the, there's this concept of a smart contract, right?

I hate the phrase, they're neither smart nor are they contracts. But their business program, their business process logic, essentially that's our rules engine. So our clients can start at the universal level all the way down to the order level, and they, they can. Stipulate things. Can this ticket be shared?

Does the owner have to go? Can the ticket be reshared? Can it be resold? Where can it be resold? How much can it be resold for? Those are essentially the rules that organizations can put around a ticket. So for example, if you are a season subscriber, a season ticket holder, maybe your rules allow you to resell a ticket for whatever you want.

If you're a student, you can't, you, you can't, you have to go and you can't resell your ticket and you can only share one of your tickets. And [00:19:00] that, that allows organizations to put rules around tickets that meet their business objectives. And then the third superpower is the ability to pull back a ticket from the market.

So we, when tickets are transacted, when someone proposes a ticket for share lists, a ticket for resale, uh, does anything with a ticket, we process that data in the ticketing CRM of record. And if our clients see anything funny, they can pull that back and take it back from market. And that's essentially what we provide and how we provide that value.

So think of us as that custody solution from the minute that ticket's sold until it's scanned. We're essentially that bouncer that enforces all the rules around the ticket and makes sure the venue knows what's happening with that ticket. I'd say the, the best analogy is for people who are familiar with the sabre, which is the underlying airline ticketing infrastructure, right?

So if you're in the US and you're. Delta flight is canceled. The reason they can book you on JetBlue is because of technology called Sabre, which underlies all of us airline ticketing that doesn't exist in live event ticketing. And essentially that's the, the infrastructure and the [00:20:00] solution we've built and, and we're, we're expanding and scaling today.

Mehmet: Matt again. Do you know, and I'm not saying this to hammer on, on, uh, on this vertical or this sector, but usually, uh, what I've heard from other people like this is one of the kind of, we can think about it as they, they, they, they stayed in legacy for a long time, so how. How, you know, hard was it to educate, maybe first, you know, your, you know, potential clients about the need for this technology.

Especially because, you know, here you're talking about SaaS cloud, you're talking about blockchain, uh, uh, you know, was it like the hardest part of, of, you know, letting the business, you know, really. Get, uh, its foot on the ground or like, was it, you know, integrating with whatever, you know, [00:21:00] uh, your, your initial customers.

They have maybe legacy systems, maybe still they have something which is, you know, manual, uh, work to do. Like what kind of challenges, uh, you face at the beginning. 

Matt: The, the challenges are always evolving. You when we, when I think back to 20 18, 20 19, when we first really started, we were a fascination with a, a small set of organizations.

We had about seven pilot organizations. So in the very early stages, it was almost finding the believers who saw the same problem we saw. So I'd say that first challenge was convincing people that there's a problem. Right. The, the second one then, and, and this is, I, I'd say unique to ticketing is for people outside the industry.

And this took me a little bit of time to learn as well. Ticketing is a mission critical system. Yes. While outside the industry may think it's just a ticket, right? I, I how hard is [00:22:00] this? Right? It's not, it's not sending a rocket into space. It it, it's not one of these maybe more complex SaaS solutions that people think about, but when you think about it from the venue standpoint, if ticketing doesn't work for one.

It is a disaster, and it took us a while to really, I'd say, comprehend that. And once you kind of convince people there's an opportunity, now you're obvious. Now you're kind of saying, Hey. Let me handle this mission critical, you know, aspect of your business. So that's a, a very high hurdle. And I'd say that took a, a bit of, a bit of time to prove out.

'cause look in ticketing, the Silicon Valley mantra, move fast and break things simply doesn't work. If it breaks once, you're probably done. And so we've been very fortunate, uh, to, to really clear that hurdle and show, hey, we can handle. Mission critical software, a mission, a mission critical need at scale.

I mean, we've now delivered 24 million tickets and over one and a half billion in, [00:23:00] uh, face value for our clients over the, the six plus years we've been in operation. So we're, we continue to prove that out every day. Once you can show, you can do it. You, you get those early adopters. After that, it's really about proving value and we've gotten much better at, look, we've got a lot of great data and on our website, we, a couple years ago we put, uh, on our website a, a return on investment calculator, so, mm-hmm.

Potential clients who are looking at us can plug in the number of tickets they deliver a year, a couple other metrics. And based on data from our clients, we can provide them an estimate of what we think, you know, the benefit might be for them. And then we were able to revamp it this year, such that we can now show, hey, year one, year two, year three.

You know, if you're the average true tickets venue client, this is what you should expect to see. If you're top quartile, this is what you should expect to see. And it's really hammering home that value proposition. I'd say this, this next evolution of it, so that's kind of at the venue level, is as we [00:24:00] look to expand, it's, it's convincing some of these other systems that you, we provide enough value that, that we're worth partnering with.

Right? And so when you think of these legacy systems. One, they were optimized for selling a ticket. The minute the ticket was sold, their job was done, so, right. For all intents and purposes, they were never architected or data modeled to do custody, and so we, we've essentially built that custody layer. The second thing is too, is that these legacy systems, they are CRMs.

That's what they do well, and there's, there's a lot of things that they. Are trying to improve, make better just within their core product. And those systems are known to work with partners, right? So when you think of events, uh, if there's a large on sale, many of these systems work with queuing partners.

There's queuing solutions, right? And when you, when you think queuing, think those, like waiting rooms, right? So if you're going to a show, that high demand show, you know, Hey meme, you're, you're 10th in line many times. Like that's a vendor actually working with a ticketing system to provide that capability.

Payment processing. Right. Most, [00:25:00] most ticketing systems are not doing their own payment processing. They're working with a vendor to do that. And where we're at now with some of these other systems is essentially convincing them that it's, it's worthwhile to work with us as a partner for this segment of their business.

And it's a little bit challenging 'cause they, some of them see this as like, no, this is, this is a core capability of our service. I would argue no, it never was. You never did ticket custody. You obviously outsourced it, you know? Four decades ago, you outsourced ticket custody to a card stock and, and a printer.

Uh, you outsourced it a couple, you know, a couple decades ago to PDF print at home. So you outsourced it to basically someone's home print printer and a piece of paper. And so in some ways, they've confused ticket delivery at ticket custody, and it's convincing them that, that we're a worthwhile partner.

So there's always like different hurdles along the journey. But I would say that, you know, the first couple were, were pretty tricky to figure out, but in some ways. Because they're tricky. It actually creates a defensible position for us. It creates that moat in that, you know, if someone's gonna compete with us, they've gotta [00:26:00] not only.

Do they have to show they can do what we do. But now that we're in and we're proven, you know, people don't change for 5% or 10% better solutions, those solutions have to be 10 x better solutions. And I, I struggle to think over the next five to 10 years in our space, given what we're doing, that someone's gonna develop a, a 10 x better solution than what we are today versus where we will be in five or 10 years.

Mehmet: Right Matt? Like there is a misconception probably about like when, because part of what you do is you're trying to secure, uh, a, a process, right? Uh, and make sure like everything is, is going as it should be. Um, and usually when you do something like this. Sometimes we might have some frictions, like this is something we know in, in, in security usually.

Right. Were there a moment where you needed to do kind of a compromise between like keeping, you know, the [00:27:00] flow as easy as possible for the end user? Um. Just, you know, to make sure that they will not feel any frictions or like, you know, you manage to get everything to be secure as it should be, and at the same time without affecting, um, the, the, the user experience, I would call it.

Matt: Yeah. Look, that's the, the tricky balance we've figured out to a degree, and we're, we're continuing to figure out. Is I, I like to refer to it as creating optimal friction. And when you think about true tickets, the, the secret sauce in our service is we make patrons or fans tell venues or, or ticket issuers who they are.

Inclusive of that definition is some level of friction, right? So if, if your ticket was just a magic link, like a, a link I WhatsApp, you met and you click it and a ticket shows up, [00:28:00] that's frictionless. But in that instance, the venue's not gonna know who MEME is. And what we, what we've always started with is that North Star, right?

It's all about the knowledge of the actual attendee. And if you look at the very first instance of True tickets. We, we definitely over-indexed on security and friction because we knew we had to kind of start from that position. It was, it would almost be, we knew it would be easier to create a more seamless look, less intensive, or less, um.

Uh, more seamless, I, I don't wanna say frictionless, but less friction, uh, ui ux for the, the, the user. As long as we could make sure that that user is, that Patriot is telling the venue who they are. Right. So the very first, a good example of this, there was always a login and password, right? Right. So even if you were accessing a ticket, you always had to enter a login and password and look a lot people forget their passwords, right?

So that was, that was a big [00:29:00] challenge. One of the things that that has helped us, right, is we're we're constantly trying to innovate our products while maintaining our, our commitment to that North Star. And so, for example, we were able to build out a capability log in without password, right? So now people can get a six digit code email to them.

So if they don't have their password or they forgot it, or they don't wanna use it, it's not on their phone, they can say, Hey, send me a six digit code via email. We're in the, in the process now of building that out via SMS. So you can see how we're constantly working to improve the the patriot experience while also may being true to our value proposition.

'cause we also know too, the minute we build something where we're no longer providing our venue clients, the knowledge of who's attending their organization. We we're, we're no longer any different than any of the other basic solutions out there. And so we need to continuously innovate and, and focus on providing that optimal level of friction.

And obviously we over-indexed on [00:30:00] more friction than, than ultimately will be necessary in the long run. But we felt it's easier to start from there and if we can prove out our initial success there. We can figure out how to, to make the, the journey less cumbersome for patrons and venues, then we'll just be even more successful.

And that's one of the things I, I, I think we figured out well was, hey, what's a good starting point from kind of the, the most friction or the most minimum, the maximum level of acceptable friction that venues and patrons could accept and then work back from there with without sacrificing on our value proposition?

That, that's been an, an absolute challenge because that value proposition's really what is core to the. To, to our success. So we can't sacrifice on that, but we're continuing thinking through ways where can we just make the process more intuitive, more seamless, more accessible with our patrons for our clients so they can, they can benefit more and more at scale.

Mehmet: So it's just keep enhancing the customer journey in a nutshell. Mm-hmm. 

Matt: Yep. 

Mehmet: Uh. [00:31:00] From your perspective, and you've been, you know, doing this for quite some time now, Matt, uh, what's, what do you think is the next frontier, you know, in, in this space? I can imagine there's a lot of data now and, you know, you have the blockchain element in it.

So is it like real time personalization? Is it like, uh, more in depth analytics? Is it like. And maybe some people who might listen to a couple of, of the, uh, blockchain related, uh, episodes that, that, that I have done before with, uh, some of my guests. So is this a monetization element there, like maybe a, a loyalty that comes through maybe a, a, a token of a sort to the people who attend there?

Like what could be the next, uh, frontier? I, I would say all of the above.

Matt: I, I think it's best to be open to. What, what that opportunity is going to evolve into. One thing I wanna be clear about is while we [00:32:00] started with Hyperledger Fabric and, and blockchain, and I think at, at our, at, at most, we had six of our clients on our, our blockchain based service. We deprecated that in, in April of 2022.

So we no longer leverage Hyperledger Fabric. Hyperledger Fabric is not a token based solution. It's a, it's essentially a generalized data. Type, uh, distributed ledger technology. So it's, it's not a, it's not token based. Um, that said, you know, our learnings with building a, a production level scaled solution on fabric absolutely inform everything about the troop tickets product today.

Which, which gives us a, a, a significant advantage over others who maybe just kind of look at our product on a cursory level and think, oh, we could build that. Um, they're not gonna understand that. The the why behind the what and the how, and I think that's a key differentiator. But from a a data standpoint.

I mean, Matt, you're absolutely right. There's our clients now have all sorts of real time behavioral data. When are people listing tickets [00:33:00] for resale? When are people accepting tickets for share? When are they engaging in their wallet? And could I see all of that feeding into personalization and. Much more optimally timed marketing, um, around both when and and what you market to someone to, to drive behavioral changes.

Absolutely. Uh, do I, am I smart enough to know now what those are gonna be? Not, not necessarily, but I, I, I think if you're a data-driven marketer, uh, this is gonna be you, you're gonna be a kid in a candy store because just the amount of data and the amount of ab testing you can do, you know, when do you exactly.

When do you kind of propose a call to action for this patron versus this patron, and what does it do? What, what does it drive? Um, I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be key. In fact, we've entered into a collaboration with you in the, in the art space. There's a, a marketing organization called Capacity Interactive, and we have a mutual client, the National Ballet of Canada.

And one of the things that I'm excited about this year is, is we're going to really start to [00:34:00] dive into some ab testing around these new, to file these Reveal Shadow audience members, right? So, think. The thousands of people that the National Ballet of Canada is now gonna know because of true tickets.

What can we try from a marketing standpoint to say, Hey, how can you most optimally market to them? The vast majority of our clients today are, are simply, and, and this is not a knock on them, this is actually what they should be doing, are taking those new to file, putting 'em in their standard marketing funnel.

And they're driving. I mean, we've now delivered almost a million new to file to our a hundred plus clients. You know, those million new to file have gone on to purchase tens of millions of tickets. Wow. Generating significant incremental revenue. Um, but you know. Aside from just kind of putting those, those patrons in your standard marketing flow, is there a more optimal way to market to them?

And, and that's one of the things that I'm really excited about, how that collaboration with Capacity Interactive and National Ballet of Canada is gonna work out, um, in 2026. I look forward to sharing those results with, with, uh, you know, our partners and, and the, [00:35:00] the community more broadly. 

Mehmet: Great. You know, and this is maybe a, a related question, uh, because you, you, you've, you've got the trust of some of the iconic venues already in the US and you just mentioned now in Canada, like Royal Ballet, roundhouse Post and Symphony Orchestra, anything you have done outside of the US or let's say North America, yet.

Matt: So we're, we're live in four countries, so we're, we're obviously primarily our, our current, our our largest partner right now is the test tour, uh, ticketing system. Uh, test serves about 900 venues or so around the world, but primarily English, native speaking countries. So mm-hmm. We are also live, we're in the uk.

We're in Canada. We're in Australia. We're in the us. What that means for true tickets more broadly, obviously, look, there's a, you know, you're in Dubai, there's a massive opportunity for international expansion. There are obviously complexities regarding internationalization and localization of a product and a service.

And so it's, it's seeking out those, those [00:36:00] opportunities, um, as they reveal themselves to us. That said, even with kind of the core. English speaking markets that we operate in, we have a fraction of the market share that I think we should. So I think there's a massive growth opportunity in that mar in those markets alone.

For example, we have one client in Australia. There's dozens of clients who I think would benefit from through tickets. You know, in, in the UK we have three, again, dozens if not hundreds of clients in the UK that could benefit in the us. We've got. You know, 90 or so, but again, probably thousands. In Canada, again, we've got about, about a dozen and there's hundreds.

So I, I think there's still a massive opportunity for growth just in, in, in core markets for us. But obviously, you know, the, the problem of ticketing having been primarily transactional and moving to a, a more relational solution, right? Cultivating audience, that's something that scales and applies globally, right?

So there, there's a global need for this, this type of capability. [00:37:00] 

Mehmet: Anything related to ai, Matt, that exciting you? Like of course, it's kind of a cliche questions nowadays, like asking about like how AI can, can, can be utilized. Like anything you can share on that. 

Matt: The, the biggest opportunity I see is pattern recognition, pattern identification, and I'd say recommendation, suggestion, uh, re recommendation engines, right?

Mm-hmm. So when we think about. Couple things. Uh, obviously everyone's focused on bad actors, so as we proliferate our service, as we get more data, being able to apply AI to train it and teach it to help our clients understand which of those ticket buyers may be a, a bad actor, right? Which of them have a high propensity for fraud or chargeback?

Where they should maybe proactively reach out or even take the ticket back. Um, obviously when you think about getting into resale, there's the whole concept of pricing engines. [00:38:00] Uh, as well as we, we talked about it a little bit with the National Ballet of Canada and the capacity interactive collaboration we're, we're undergoing what does that mean from how you should market to patrons?

And I think there's, there's a whole. Slew of things that that AI could address, but I think it's around obviously the marketing, the fraud detection and the pricing piece. I would say those are probably the three key opportunities where, where AI could generate significant value and, and we're excited to explore those.

Obviously we're building out that data foundation now. I think it's a, it's a, it's a pretty big opportunity for us in, in 2026 and beyond. 

Mehmet: Great. I gotta, you know, as we are almost coming close to the end, I gotta ask you a question, not related mainly to the business, but more about your journey, uh, Matt. So, you know, the transition you did, you know, from different roles, you know, uh, especially like consulting, being a startup founder and now you, you, you are in a scale up and scaling phase.

Because a [00:39:00] lot of found other to be founders, they have this. Kind of, I don't call it doubt, but you know, they, they overthink and they say, oh, like I've been a consultant. You know, usually consultants are looked at like not as good founders. Like the good founders comes from a specific, you know, they have other trades that maybe I don't have as a consultant that even, you know, like recently the word consultant itself, it became like kind of have a lot of question marks for reasons we, we, we might all know, but.

Truly what kind of some lessons you can share for some folks who might be in consulting today? They have a vision. They, they know that there's a problem they can solve. They have the know-how. Of course they might need maybe a technical co-founder with them. They might need like some people to help them maybe advise mentors.

But this transition for you, what, like the main lessons you can share with fellow [00:40:00] founders and, and entrepreneurs. 

Matt: Interesting 

Mehmet: question for 

Matt: me, the, the advice I would give anyone who's considering it is do what you need to do, learn what you need to learn to get you to a point where you feel you are ready to take on the challenge.

So for me, when I was in consulting. I, I like to joke that consulting's a, a halfway home for the professionally undecided in that you go into consulting because you really don't know what you want to do and, and you want exposure to a, a lot of different experiences. And, and I was very fortunate, Deloitte, I, I got that.

Um, but when I was at Deloitte as a consultant, I felt I was, and this is kind of an American colloquialism, but a jack of all trades, a master of none. I knew a little bit about a lot of things, but I didn't feel that I had. Any particular depth, at least in fields that I was interested in exploring to, to a point where I could say like, Hey, I could sit down with someone and say, I want to build this business [00:41:00] and, and look, they're not gonna laugh at me.

Right. Uh, and so for me, I felt if I wanted to build something, which, which, that was one of the things that, that the innovation work I did at Deloitte revealed to me was, was. A desire to do something like this was, how can I go get more experience before to, to make sure I feel ready and that that was my opportunity with TAUs.

And if Consulting's a, a halfway home for the professionally undecided corporate innovation's, a halfway home for startup wannabes, right? So you go into corporate innovation, uh, because you, you want to play in kind of the startup world, the startup community, but you still want your six figure salary. You want your 401k match, you want your healthcare.

Um, but it kind of lets you moonlight, uh, in the startup world. And my, my rationale for taking the position at Tais was it was really an opportunity for me to take a couple years and just explore the startup world and see if I could find an opportunity that I felt ready to, to go do. Um, and then true tickets, obviously, we were incubating it on the side and really the [00:42:00] forcing function for me there.

'cause obviously I, I really enjoyed my job with Tallis. It, it was a really interesting and, and fun job, uh, was. Corporate innovation jobs are one of those line items for many, many companies that if they're under expense pressure or, or anything like that, it's a pretty easy line item to, to remove from the budget.

And so in, in January of 2018, and, and Steve and I and Thomas had been incubating kind of the true tickets idea for, for about a year at that time. Reorged, their innovation group and, and my group was, was essentially not gonna have a home. And it was, you know, either, all right, hey, this is the time to go found true tickets, or I was gonna become a, an a senior director of airport security sales.

And that was that forcing function that said, all right, you've always wanted to do this. I felt that I was. Capable enough, um, to, to give it a shot. And, you know, look, I, I would say, looking back on it, do I think I was capable or should have been more capable? I, I think [00:43:00] any founder's gonna tell you they were naive.

Uh, and I think naivete is part of it, but mm-hmm. That, that was my journey and that's what I look, anyone who I would say is interested in, in starting their own thing. Don't feel that you need to be a, you know, an undergraduate university dropout. Don't feel you. You need to be technical. Um, but what I would encourage anyone to do is, is make sure you are building up your skillset, your capabilities, and your confidence level to, to a point where you feel that you're as ready as you can be to make that jump.

Mehmet: Absolutely. You know, and this is, uh, you know, I ask you this question because there's again, misconception about, you know, uh, who can be founders and, uh, you know, like, yeah, usually coming from corporate it's hard, but, you know, it adds up. Like it's not the case. There's a book that is just finished recently called Super, uh, super Founders.

Oh, I love that book. 

Matt: That's such a book. I would, I would encourage all your listeners to read it. 'cause it [00:44:00] dispels some of the, some of the notions ex. 

Mehmet: Exactly. So Ali did a fantastic job, you know, uh, you know, with data, actually. Yep. Uh, comparing the billion dollar components, the unicorns, and actually the, the, the.

You know, he studied a, I think, um, since 2000, if I'm not mistaken, like 2014 or so, uh, hundreds of startups and yeah, it ended up like this myth of dropouts and, you know, like, uh, being from specific colleges, it's just a myth, right? So, so, so I'm happy, I'm happy you shared this. And actually, I'm inspired by the book to ask now this question too, because sometime, you know, a petition, it, it makes people think, oh yeah, like.

You know, like see Matt have done it before, like Mead have done it before, someone else have done before. I can do it also as well. Finally, Matt, where, where people can find out and uh, you know, get in touch. 

Matt: So obviously look, look me up on LinkedIn. So Matt Zena on LinkedIn. And then you can check out our company, ww dot true [00:45:00] tickets.com.

We've got all sorts of information about our company and our product on there to include the, the ROI calculator, a live demo. Um, I like to say we hide our innovations in plain sight, uh, so people can go check out, check out our service, check out our product, and, and see the value we're delivering and what we're building.

Mehmet: Great. I will make sure that all the links are in the show notes. Again, Matt, thank you very much. I know how it can be for a CEO like yourself. So take, thank you for taking the time. This your morning, uh, to speak to me and, uh, this is for the audience. This is how usually I end or, or end all my episodes.

If you just. Discovered us by like, thank you for passing by. All my requests from you is to subscribe and share it with someone you think would be or should be interested. And if you are one of the people who keeps coming again and again, thank you for the support. Thank you for making the podcast, doing very well this year throughout 2025.

And you know, we are gonna continue, uh, hopefully the same thing in 2026. Uh, also maybe you have noticed like we have a new [00:46:00] cover artwork, so just. You know, we came out, I think it was about time, the podcast, you know, 2026, it'll complete three years. We're gonna enter like season four. So thank you very much again for everyone who support this podcast.

And as I say, always stay tuned for any episode very soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.