Homepage for the app, simulated on an iPhone.
A fundraising event for a high school volleyball team served up inspiration for a locally based ticketing and promotions startup.
Richmond-based Ticket Spicket seeks to bring tickets sold at sporting events at high schools, middle schools and small colleges onto its mobile app platform, along with donations and sponsorships to teams.
The app is the brainchild of Roanoke resident Russell Hertzberg, who saw an opportunity to combine the fundraising, sponsorship and ticketing functions of non-professional sports teams into a single mobile platform after his daughter’s team planned to sell season tickets to raise money.
“I’ve always put together ideas (for startups), some of which were good and some of which were stupid, but I thought this one had some traction,” Hertzberg said.
Hertzberg is one of Ticket Spicket’s three co-founders, along with Richmond residents Donnie Schemetti and Ernest Hawkins. The team is based out of coworking space Gather in Scott’s Addition. The space opened July 1, and the team has been working on the app since January at coffee shops and hotel rooms, as well as at Schemetti’s and Hawkins’ apartments.
“We don’t have that Silicon Valley garage story, but the coffee table at an apartment kind of has the same feeling,” Hawkins said.
The app organizes and transfers tickets for middle school, high school and small college sports.
Ticket Spicket customers will be able to input their credit card information and pay for tickets before games begin. The team also designed a ticketing application that allows attendants to scan customers at the gate of events via a QR code with a smartphone. Payments will be processed by PayPal subsidiary Braintree, with Ticket Spicket charging a processing fee on those payments.
All three founders have developer backgrounds, but Hertzberg and Hawkins were the primary coders. They built the app on the Ionic mobile framework and used Java Play to develop the back end. The website is intended to be used by athletic directors to handle administrative duties. Schemetti is the firm’s chief marketer.
The firm has not received any grants nor been entered into an incubator program to date, though the cofounders are in talks with an unnamed West Coast venture capitalist.
“We’re bootstrapping it,” Hawkins said of the split-equity, founder-financed partnership.
If they are able to secure additional financing, Schemetti said Ticket Spicket will pour more resources into marketing campaigns and hires and for funding travel to conferences.
The founders said Ticket Spicket attracted attention at the Virginia Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association conference at the Short Pump Hilton on April 15. They exhibited the service at a similar conference in Maryland and plan to attend a national high school athletic department conference in Nashville at the end of the year.
While Ticket Spicket isn’t the first app of its kind linking high school athletics to customers, the founders believe they have found a niche with high growth potential on the East Coast. They said they’ve received interest from high schools from New Jersey to Virginia.
“There are other competitors doing this type of thing, but I don’t think there’s enough money on a per-transaction basis for Ticketmaster to get into it,” Hertzberg said.
Schemetti added that if Ticket Spicket only focused on tickets, it wouldn’t have the potential to be a lucrative business. He anticipates the majority of revenue to be derived from in-app and other types of sponsorship deals that can be shared with the schools.
“We’re not trying to jack ticket prices up 50 percent,” Schemetti said. “We just want to get some fans in the seats, and if we can get sponsorship revenue on top of that coming in, that benefits everybody involved.”
Ticket Spicket will launch a prototype Aug. 1 with the hopes of spreading word-of-mouth attention throughout football season. The company currently has five high schools and middle schools signed up for its service, including schools in Mechanicsville, Fredericksburg and Roanoke.
Homepage for the app, simulated on an iPhone.
A fundraising event for a high school volleyball team served up inspiration for a locally based ticketing and promotions startup.
Richmond-based Ticket Spicket seeks to bring tickets sold at sporting events at high schools, middle schools and small colleges onto its mobile app platform, along with donations and sponsorships to teams.
The app is the brainchild of Roanoke resident Russell Hertzberg, who saw an opportunity to combine the fundraising, sponsorship and ticketing functions of non-professional sports teams into a single mobile platform after his daughter’s team planned to sell season tickets to raise money.
“I’ve always put together ideas (for startups), some of which were good and some of which were stupid, but I thought this one had some traction,” Hertzberg said.
Hertzberg is one of Ticket Spicket’s three co-founders, along with Richmond residents Donnie Schemetti and Ernest Hawkins. The team is based out of coworking space Gather in Scott’s Addition. The space opened July 1, and the team has been working on the app since January at coffee shops and hotel rooms, as well as at Schemetti’s and Hawkins’ apartments.
“We don’t have that Silicon Valley garage story, but the coffee table at an apartment kind of has the same feeling,” Hawkins said.
The app organizes and transfers tickets for middle school, high school and small college sports.
Ticket Spicket customers will be able to input their credit card information and pay for tickets before games begin. The team also designed a ticketing application that allows attendants to scan customers at the gate of events via a QR code with a smartphone. Payments will be processed by PayPal subsidiary Braintree, with Ticket Spicket charging a processing fee on those payments.
All three founders have developer backgrounds, but Hertzberg and Hawkins were the primary coders. They built the app on the Ionic mobile framework and used Java Play to develop the back end. The website is intended to be used by athletic directors to handle administrative duties. Schemetti is the firm’s chief marketer.
The firm has not received any grants nor been entered into an incubator program to date, though the cofounders are in talks with an unnamed West Coast venture capitalist.
“We’re bootstrapping it,” Hawkins said of the split-equity, founder-financed partnership.
If they are able to secure additional financing, Schemetti said Ticket Spicket will pour more resources into marketing campaigns and hires and for funding travel to conferences.
The founders said Ticket Spicket attracted attention at the Virginia Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association conference at the Short Pump Hilton on April 15. They exhibited the service at a similar conference in Maryland and plan to attend a national high school athletic department conference in Nashville at the end of the year.
While Ticket Spicket isn’t the first app of its kind linking high school athletics to customers, the founders believe they have found a niche with high growth potential on the East Coast. They said they’ve received interest from high schools from New Jersey to Virginia.
“There are other competitors doing this type of thing, but I don’t think there’s enough money on a per-transaction basis for Ticketmaster to get into it,” Hertzberg said.
Schemetti added that if Ticket Spicket only focused on tickets, it wouldn’t have the potential to be a lucrative business. He anticipates the majority of revenue to be derived from in-app and other types of sponsorship deals that can be shared with the schools.
“We’re not trying to jack ticket prices up 50 percent,” Schemetti said. “We just want to get some fans in the seats, and if we can get sponsorship revenue on top of that coming in, that benefits everybody involved.”
Ticket Spicket will launch a prototype Aug. 1 with the hopes of spreading word-of-mouth attention throughout football season. The company currently has five high schools and middle schools signed up for its service, including schools in Mechanicsville, Fredericksburg and Roanoke.