We just cut off 25% of our revenue on purpose. Here’s why.
Taking the hard decision
We just launched Hivebeat, a place for students to explore their campus. Hivebeat already has customers from day 1 because it’s born out of our previous startup Greenticket (an Eventbrite competitor). Some would call it a pivot. Or a spin-off. We don’t really care what it is. What we care about is that we’re taking action based on the data we have in front of us. That’s what you do in a startup (or at least, that’s what you should do).
We started Greenticket 2 years ago because Eventbrite was more or less unknown in the Nordics (if you weren’t in tech, of course). While studying in college, we built a product similar to Eventbrite and started hunting customers. We ended up with customers in several different industries including sports, education, tech, corporate, entertainment and more, and we pretty quickly faced the well-known dilemma for a startup: getting feature requests from customers. That is normally a good thing, but the problem was that these requests were so different from industry to industry. A school wanted the ability to make their events students only, nightclubs wanted more marketing features and sports clubs wanted seating features.
After having a hard time prioritizing what features to focus on, we decided to take out some time to look at our data. We had a bunch of high schools and colleges as customers, and they seemed to be a pretty good revenue generator, but we didn’t know more than that. After digging more into the data, we saw that 75% of new users and revenue came from the education industry. We had no idea it was that much. This relatively simple action made it super easy for us to decide what features to focus on. But we were still caught between industries and really different types of customers, and we were still seen as a “ticketing system for all kinds of events” competing with thousands of other ticketing systems wanting to get a piece of Eventbrite’s success. That forced us make the hardest decision: go all-in on the college niche.
We did the right thing
Now our focus is 110% on the very specific (and still huge) target group of college campuses and we’ve already experienced how much easier it is getting new users. Right now, more than 50% of new customers are viral signups and we’re growing more than ever. Greenticket is still alive as a general ticketing system, but I’m not an active part of the day-to-day operations anymore. All of my focus and energy go to Hivebeat.
I think we did the right thing. Now back to work ;)
Curious about what we’re doing? Take a look at Hivebeat.com. I’m also on Twitter: @jonasboegh.
