There's simply nothing like being there. Whether that means sitting in the stands while your favorite team wins the championship as confetti rains down or standing in the crowd as you and your friends sing along to your favorite artist’s last song at a sell out concert. Unfortunately, due to the fact that so many people want to “be there”, ticket scalping and ticket fraud are problems that fans have to deal with all across the globe. This isn’t just about sports. Nearly 5 million people a year receive fake tickets to concerts, sporting events and theme parks...and that’s just domestically.
Ultimately, with fans having dozens of options to find tickets to their favorite live events, teams and artists need to find a way to verify the authenticity of tickets regardless of where fans purchase.
The future of ticketing isn’t exclusive partnerships or requiring fans to purchase through one specific app. The future of ticketing is increased distribution, allowing fans to buy tickets however and wherever they want. The future of ticketing is safe, simple, and secure.
Bandwagon is an analytics company that uses data, and our proprietary blockchain technology, to help teams and event organizers eliminate ticket fraud while increasing fan engagement.
We believe that blockchain is the right technology to address these issues, by allowing stakeholders to cooperate on a shared model of tickets and fans, with the confidence to know that the model is only ever accessed and modified in ways that meet agreed-upon business rules, enforced by smart contracts securely, mathematically, and cryptographically.
IBM’s Fabric platform allows us to roll our own blockchain with an industrial-grade and production-ready infrastructure. Since it is open source and under the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger umbrella, not only can we work closely with experts at IBM, we can also take advantage of a fast-moving community of developers, contributors, and users in the open source ecosystem. Some notes about Fabric:
Block-extension criteria is a based on "proof of properly executed contract", not "proof of work"
Stakeholders work together to validate proposed changes against pre-established smart contracts.
Faster and less wasteful than other blockchains like Ethereum.
For example, if we sign a professional sports team that has a venue that seats 75,000 fans per game and there are 8 home games in a season, we would expect that more than 50% of fans resell their tickets for each game. That means our revenues from this deal would be:
We want to be viewed in each case as a partner and not a competitor, supporting each link in the existing fan experience. Clients are incentivized to fill in missing pieces about a ticket or a fan because through participation they gain the complete fan picture, as built by the entire network. Our product allows stakeholders to set individual terms and restrictions on their shared data, as well as hold important “crown jewel” data in reserve.
We have evaluated that market both domestically and internationally and believe that as the adoption of mobile and RFID tickets continues to increase, our solution will become more and more powerful. Our projections for revenue focus solely on our success in the U.S. but we're already talking to customers in the Caribbean and the UAE.
With more than 1.1 Million tickets on our system, we are proud to be the largest commercially built ticketing blockchain in the world. While building our solution, we spent a lot of time learning about fans and protecting their data by aggregating it into data points like you see below. Through the identity management platform, we are able to gather fan data, aggregate it, categorize it by segment, and secure it.
BANDWAGON Interns Teri & Oluwatoni with President NelsenOur work with our first customer, Sacramento State Athletics is a perfect example of how our solution can be used to solve multiple business challenges. The Athletic Department gained valuable insight into who was in their venue as well as what some of their preferences were. Here is some of what we learned together:
Our small, yet scrappy team is headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina with a presence in Austin, Texas. From an ex-Googler to a military veteran to a cupcaker who paid their way through college by starting a meal delivery company (seriously), we value our differences because of the perspectives that they provide as we set out to solve a major problem with live events around the world.
The visionary and team captain behind BANDWAGON, Harold brings a wealth of experience from his time in sales and business development in corporate America and as a passionate sports fan. With an MBA and Bachelors degrees from Clemson University (and currently pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Innovation & Entrepreneurship from Stanford University), Harold has the knowledge, insights and experience to help our clients better understand and act upon the available data about their fans to create the ultimate fan experience.
We have been at this for over 2.5 years and we've lasted long enough to know that execution means everything. The decision for our founder, Harold, to go full-time in January 2016 was not an easy one. The idea of bootstrapping is challenging enough without factoring in a growing family but sure enough, we set our goals, followed our plans and executed - we cut the ribbon to launch our first product on August 16, 2016...and welcomed in the youngest member of our Bandwagon, Carter, on August 18th. "The world is often such a divisive and segregated place. We're building BANDWAGON to be a vehicle that brings fans together. We want the buying process to be safe, simple, and secure."
With over 25 years of experience, Arshad is the technology enthusiast who brings the BANDWAGON vision to life. He keeps all the behind the scenes gears running so that all our clients see is a clean, sleek and innovate product. With a computer science degree from Nebraska and experience as everything from an inventor to co-founder, Arshad rises to any challenge.
With years of experience leading large teams and overseeing accounts for clients worth millions at a Fortune 1000 company, Samotria has the background to put our mission into action and ensure that we deliver on our promise to our customers.
Director of Data & Architecture Solutions
The brains behind our proprietary blockchain technology, Dr. Hampton Smith is responsible for our secret sauce - the data. From his experience at Google and as an indie video game developer, Hampton knows his stuff and that helps our clients really know their fans.
Head of Sales & Biz Dev
As a former founder, Kim has a unique background that stems from technology conception/creation/deployment, wellness/talent & F500 business development which allows her to bring a completely unique set of eyes to BANDWAGON.
Director of Brand Strategy, General Counsel
La-Vaughnda helps mold the BANDWAGON image and fulfillment of our brand promise of ultimately enhancing the overall game day experience for our clients and ultimately the fans.
Our mission is to create better fan communities inside stadiums and arenas across the world. We believe that the key to elevating the fan experience is creating a collaborative environment with the event organizer and every potential distribution channel that fans will use to buy tickets to their events.
$25,000 – $1,070,000
BANDWAGON needs to raise
$25K
before the deadline. The maximum amount BANDWAGON is willing
to raise is $1.07M.
Learn more
Jan 1
BANDWAGON needs to reach their minimum funding goal before the deadline.
If they don’t, all investments will be refunded.
Learn more
Crowd Safe
·
Learn more
The Crowd Safe is an agreement for future equity in the startup,
meaning that it can convert to equity in the future.
20%
If a trigger event for BANDWAGON occurs, the discount provision
gives investors equity shares (or equal value in cash) at a reduced price.
Learn more.
$10,000,000
The maximum valuation at which your investment converts
into equity shares or cash.
Learn more.
Form C
Traditional databases are great for supporting internal customers, but where the data meets the wider world businesses need to collaborate and innovate and that means working together to build a cohesive picture of fans, tickets, and events. Bandwagon’s open blockchain ecosystem allows stakeholders to come together and share the pieces of the puzzle that allow for deep insight into the fan experience. No need to build or maintain complex APIs and gateways--the data is the gateway.
Built on IBM’s open-source Hyperledger Fabric blockchain technology, Bandwagon’s fan experience ecosystem supports private chains and network-enforced smart contracts. Share only the data you want to share, and only with the stakeholders with whom you want to share it. Embed smart contracts that ensure your data is only used in just the ways you want.
A private chain is a personal immutable ledger of transactions and observations that you control. Bandwagon administrates it, you share it with whomever you want and only in the ways you want. Strong elliptic-curve cryptography keeps everybody else out, and embedded smart contracts ensure that those you privilege to contribute do so appropriately.
With a traditional database, data must be manipulated by people and applications that you trust to update it correctly. A bad update and you have incorrect data, data inconsistency, or data loss. Opening a traditional database to partners means building and maintaining expensive APIs and gateways that enforce safe, consistent updates. And, without direct access to the data, multiple cooperating organizations end up maintaining independent fractured databases of the same (hopefully!) information. Smart contracts embed the rules of fair play directly into the data. Cooperating partners get direct access, but are unable to make updates unless they conform precisely to the pre-negotiated rules.
Bandwagon provides infrastructure that makes the fan experience blockchain ecosystem work, but partners can enter the network themselves, contributing their own infrastructure to form a decentralized network to manage their data and the data of their partners. More partners means more availability, more disaster-resistance, and more stakeholders with an interest in maintaining the integrity of the data.
Bandwagon is an analytics and identity management company that uses data to help sports teams and artists increase their revenue and eliminate ticket fraud by focusing on fan identity. Our small, yet scrappy team is headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina but we are fortunate to have presence in Austin, Texas and Sacramento, California thanks to our relationships with Capital Factory and Valley Extends, respectively. From an ex-Googler to a military veteran to a cupcaker who paid their way through college by starting a meal delivery company (seriously), we value our differences because of the perspectives that they provide as we set out to solve a major problem with live events around the world. Our mission is to create better fan communities inside stadiums and arenas across the world. We believe that the key to elevating the experience for these fans is personalization, specifically around the services that are offered and the marketing messages that are being delivered. Our focus began with college football and has now expanded to include other sports to curb the effect of seasonality, however, we are beginning to be approached for our solution to be utilized in other sports, live music arenas, and conventions.
The data that’s needed to move the state of the industry forward is siloed in the databases of many different stakeholders who have different needs and market drivers. The teams that issue the tickets know about their season ticket holders but not what happens to the tickets after they leave the distributer. The secondary markets know when a ticket is being sold but not where it was originated and equally important, if it’s being sold on another market at the same time. Marketers and vendors may know have an expected target audience, but may not who actually attended the game or who the ticket buyer brought with them.
From a lost opportunity and challenges perspective, we see our solution working for three parties: teams, ticket companies, and brands. For teams, personalization of marketing messages and services begins with identity. By knowing who is in the stadium regardless of the marketplace that the fan used to purchase their tickets, teams are able to curate the fan experience and deliver value that can’t be obtained at home. For ticket companies, identity is everything when it comes to solving the fraud problem. By having a clear audit trail of authenticity, ticket companies can now allow fans to list tickets with certainty of their origin, ownership, and restrictions. As for brands, the biggest opportunity is the ability to do lower customer acquisition costs by using enriched data of fans based on the preferences that they display in aggregate or down to the individual fan level.
We believe that blockchain is the right technology to address these issues, by allowing stakeholders to cooperate on a shared model of tickets and fans, with the confidence to know that the model is only ever accessed and modified in ways that meet agreed-upon business rules, enforced by smart contracts securely, mathematically, and cryptographically. We believe that under this scheme, all stakeholders are properly incentivized to participate in data-sharing, in a way that opens new markets and new opportunities to capture fan engagement and provide enjoyment and a satisfying fan experience.
We believe our blockchain solution is a core part of our business and thus wanted to avoid becoming tenants on someone else’s chain. This ruled out the Bitcoin Blockchain and solutions like Ethereum early on. At the same time, we see our primary business value not as the providers of a blockchain, but as B2B facilitators, market designers, and consumer data analysts. Our blockchain is an important part of that infrastructure, but it is not itself our product, and so we were interested in exploring chain technologies that eschewed wasteful mining and proof of work and instead focussed on permitting flexible and dynamic smart business contracts.
IBM’s Fabric platform allows us to roll our own blockchain with an industrial-grade and production-ready infrastructure. Since it is open source and under the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger umbrella, not only can we work closely with experts at IBM, we can also take advantage of a fast-moving community of developers, contributors, and users in the open source ecosystem. Fabric’s block-extension criteria is based not on proof of work, but rather on what we think of as “proof of properly executed contract” in which stakeholders work together to validate proposed changes against pre-established smart contracts. This is both faster and less wasteful than other schemes, and appropriate for our relatively stable pool of stakeholders.
The ability to participate in building a fuller profile of fans and a better picture of their customers, marketplaces, and stadiums.
Our goal is to create a product that offers direct value to each stakeholder. We want to be viewed in each case as a partner and not a competitor, supporting each link in the existing fan experience. Clients are incentivized to fill in missing dots about a ticket or a fan because through participation they gain the complete fan picture, as built by the entire network. Our product allows stakeholders to set individual terms and restrictions on their shared data, as well as hold important “crown jewel” data in reserve.
We offer our clients the ability to participate in our blockchain as full peers, running their own instance of our software and thus maintaining full control over their identity and data end-to-end, or to interface with the existing Fabric network either programmatically through our API, or using our easy-to-use point and click frontend.
2018 is all about increasing our partnerships and use cases to enrich the fan experience. Whether we’re partnering with one of the world’s largest point of sale companies or integrating with an industry leading RFID ticketing company, we’re focused on unlocking the value of in-stadium/in-arena engagement and delivering services both on and offline. As we prepare for our next round of funding, we are actively seeking opportunities to work with teams to help solve their pain points that come from poorly managed database solutions.
Blockchain is a distributed technology that makes it possible for stakeholders to share a collaborative set of data, secure in the knowledge that no matter who serves their data, the data is being served correctly. Mathematical and cryptographic techniques combine to ensure that all participants obey the rules of fair play that are baked into the chain from its inception.
With a regular database, a single actor is in charge of holding, securing, and serving the data. Sometimes you host your own database, but many times you pay a third party to host it on your behalf. To interact with that data in a way that is secure and consistent, elaborate gateways and web services are required to manage permissions and data integrity. With Blockchain, the rules of fair play are baked in and multiple actors can access and serve the data, with all parties assured that permissions are respected and data integrity is guaranteed.
Our blockchain solution is built on the IBM Hyperledger Fabric framework.
Unlike systems that build on Ethereum or Bitcoin’s existing blockchains, Bandwagon is not a tenant of another organization’s chain. We own our own technology and run our own chain. As a result of that freedom, we were able to design a technology tailor-made to our use-case rather than letting the tech dictate our business process. Our Hyperledger-Fabric-based blockchain eschews wasteful mining and elaborate cryptocurrency schemes in favor of cooperating business partners collaborating on a chain for the direct benefits it provides.
We offer our clients the ability to participate in our blockchain as full peers, running their own instance of our software and thus maintaining full control over their identity and data end-to-end, or to interface with the existing Fabric network either programmatically through our API, or using our easy-to-use point and click front-end.
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