Fighting failure

Ryan Waier understands failure. He considers his last big tech idea a bust.

But the lessons he learned from the 2008 rollout and failure of his social collaboration tool, Obsidio, have helped him grow his newest venture, Event Live.

Tampa-based Event Live is a software and event management and promotion firm with an audacious goal: Compete against event ticket giants such as Live Nation.

Event Live provides a website and mobile app, with proprietary technology, for people to discover events and access additional information such as speaker bios, event files, social media feeds, band set lists and schedules. For sponsors, Event Live provides a medium for accessing the audience through push notifications, running contests and soliciting feedback.
For event hosts, it provides a way to collect feedback and engage with attendees, addressing questions and concerns before or during the event. It also provides marketing and sponsorship management for events, helping clients secure permits and negotiate contracts with local media or liquor distribution companies.

The do-it-all model seems to be working.

Event Live's app quickly gathered a following in the Tampa area since Waier launched it in 2012, right after Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park in downtown Tampa opened. “Now there's an event every weekend,” he says. “Event Live is capitalizing on those opportunities.”

In the last year Event Live assisted with 30 events at the park. It has also worked events for the New York Yankees, Ribfest and TopGolf, among others.

App users, meanwhile, grew 32% in 2013; 118% in 2014; and 302% in 2015. The company expects another year of 300% growth in users in 2016, with the launch of its new mobile ticketing system providing a big boost.

Also, after personally investing more than $500,000 in building the technology and network, the 38-year-old Waier says 2015 was the first year the company was cash flow positive.
Around 80% of its revenues come from marketing and sponsorship services for events, and 20% from fees it generates on ticket sales.

But Waier estimates that with its new ticketing system, Event Live will flip its model, to gain 80% of revenues from ticketing fees by the end of 2017. The system includes built-in ticket scanners in the app, so organizers can use their mobile devices to quickly scan tickets, working with either Wi-Fi or cellular signal. If there's a big event, Event Live will provide hardware for scanning the tickets.

Fees for the Event Live ticketing service will range around $2 to $3 for a $20 ticket, Waier says, while competitors such as Live Nation's Ticketmaster might have a fee of $14 on a $30 ticket. Event Live also pays back a percentage of the fee to the organizer, and all funds are batched and processed daily to avoid cash flow issues. Also different than the competition, Waier wants to have onsite support for all the events the company plans to run.

With three full-time employees and six contractors, “we're pretty lean and mean,” Waier says. “People think we're this Live Nation that came into town, but we're really just a few people.”

With the Tampa market success, Waier seeks to raise at least $1 million to hire more developers and grow into different markets in the next two years, including possibly Orlando or Fort Lauderdale.

Waier also hopes Event Live, in addition to the success, stands as a post-Obsidio success. With Obsidio, Waier hoped to build a platform that was a cross between Facebook and LinkedIn. The social network aimed to replace a string of emails with a thread of communication, allowing users to act in virtual private rooms to share files and information, or source talent from other companies.

“It was basically like the first Yammer,” Waier says, which is a social collaboration tool now sold as part of Microsoft Office 365 package. “I still think it's a viable platform, but it was way too ahead of its time.”