I’ve been meaning to write this post for a few weeks now but TicketLoop has had a lot of progress lately so we’ve been focusing more on that than on posting here. As part of our progress this post might not be relevant anymore due to some really great developments that happened this week. This post sums up some feelings I had in the last few weeks about TicketLoop and where we were going. I will be writing it from that perspective.
Alissa and I have hit a bit of an awkward point in TicketLoop’s development. We’re getting more and more subscribers but we’re also marketing mostly to our friends and immediate social network. This is a spot that most entrepreneurs find themselves in. Are we actually selling to people and these people believe in our product or service OR are we getting social sympathy from our friends and family that just want to be good friends.
A product like TicketLoop that relies on a lot of social clout and momentum might be perfect for social support from friends. As we gain more eyeballs on our newsletter and social media we can offer those as a better opportunity for promoters and their marketing plans. I’m scared that what might end up happening is that we will get a lot of vanity and un-actionable metrics. This would be a potentially large problem for us because we can see our product getting early growth and having metrics that appear successful but when we actually want to sell a product to the consumer side of the market we will have all our friends slyly reject purchasing opportunities.
The next issue that we potentially face with friends is having non-target users sign up for TicketLoop. It’s possible that we get led in the wrong direction by our friends that are either not our typical customer or not located in the South Australian region. If we’re spending time getting feedback from these people and seeing what they want TicketLoop to become that’s time we’re not spending on developing our target market. There’s also the risk that we listen to people outside of our target market and somehow end up with a completely different product that suits a market we weren’t initially aiming for and perhaps don’t understand.
There’s a lot of risk when it comes to cherry picking initial customers and testing a feedback loop. We’ve chosen to involve as many people as we can in this process. The people that are interested aren’t always from our target demographic but they are still able to provide valuable information on potential problems and give us information from their past experiences.
It’s an interesting time with TicketLoop at the moment and a lot of exciting stuff is happening.
Ticket Loop 