Earlier this year, five University of Iowa students came together to create a new online ticketing platform for students to sell to their peers. Just months later, the company is already looking to expand.
SeatStock launched in February after months of development and shifting staff. It is a platform exclusively for UI students to safely sell tickets to football games, but the team behind the platform has plans to expand to other campuses.
Josh Cohen is a third-year student at the UI studying entrepreneurial management. He oversaw the development of SeatStock as its chief executive officer. He was inspired to create the website by his own experiences of ticket scams during his first year at the UI, Cohen said.
“When I was a freshman, I was buying and selling tickets,” Cohen said. “I was getting scammed, and my friends were getting scammed. I realized there is no dedicated marketplace for tickets.”
Cohen said his entrepreneurial drive began long before his work on SeatStock. He shoveled driveways during school and was involved with e-commerce for years leading up to the company’s creation.
SeatStock’s model is built around guaranteed satisfaction for the customer, which Cohen says is possible to achieve through the methods the platform uses to allocate the seller’s ticket and the buyer’s cash.
“When the buyer pays for a ticket, they can place a bid for the ticket or buy it outright to get it quicker,” Cohen said.
He said that once a price is agreed upon, SeatStock holds onto the buyer’s money using Stripe, a common financial services software. This secures customers’ purchases.
“Once you pay for the ticket, meaning that a seller has agreed to sell the ticket for that price, we hold on to the buyer’s money until they receive the ticket,” Cohen said.
He said SeatStock brings in a set rate of 10 percent from the buyer of the ticket and the seller, compared to ticketing businesses like SeatGeek which collect 40 percent.
He said that 85 percent of SeatStock transactions were successful with no issues, and any problems with transactions were mostly handled, leaving the customers satisfied.
RELATED: UI students launch ticket platform
SeatStock is expanding through business deals and partnerships on campus, third-year UI student and SeatStock’s Chief Financial Officer Adam Hasan said.
“We’ve partnered with The Summit to do a drink promotion deal where if you sell a ticket on our platform, you get a free drink or discount,” Hasan said.
Hasan said SeatStock was fortunate to enter the market as Ticketmaster faces litigation for monopolizing the ticket and event merchandise market.
“Us being a niche marketplace, we see that as a great entrance into this space offering things that we, as students, want and are going to continue to need,” Hasan said.
Hasan said SeatStock will continue to expand, starting with more promotions with restaurants and bars. SeatStock will focus on finding a presence at football tailgates and forming partnerships with Greek life on campus. Cohen said he works on the big-picture issues while Hasan works on legal security and business partnerships. The SeatStock website was designed by Chief Technology Officer Brandon Egger, a graduate student at the UI.
Egger said he met Cohen and Hasan after Cohen reached out to him on LinkedIn. Eventually, Egger began designing and coding the website, a process that he said took four months.
From the technological end, Egger said expanding SeatStock’s services to an app may be possible down the road.
Egger said the SeatStock team has discussed adding features like SMS messaging between students. That collaboration has made Egger’s experience on this project an improvement from his time on other projects, he said.
“I worked at another startup two summers ago, and it couldn’t have been more different,” Egger said.