Based off this post 7 months ago, where PG compared TicketStumbler ($15k in funding) to FanSnap ($10.5 mil): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458925<p>This is not a criticism of PG's submission OR of TicketStumbler, just an interesting observation that I hope will generate some debate.
Based off this post 7 months ago, where PG compared TicketStumbler ($15k in funding) to FanSnap ($10 mil): <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458925" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458925</a><p>This is not a criticism of PG's submission OR of TicketStumbler, just an interesting observation that I hope will generate some debate.
Well duh, Fansnap has a 1 million dollar per year ad budget :). And now it's 15k vs 15 million!<p>In seriousness though, Fansnap has done a kick ass job on many many fronts. Luckily the market is a $4 billion industry so I think there's room for a few companies to play. I believe PG's point was that a bootstrapped company can now compete with a venture-backed company. That wasn't always the case.<p>Compete isn't very accurate anyway.<p>-Dan, Co-founder, TicketStumbler
TicketStumbler might still be the better business; that's a lot of funding to earn back.<p>But really, I wonder what happened in February-March that gave FanSnap such a traffic boost.<p>Looking on the two companies' blogs for that period, the only thing that sticks out as a possible major traffic driver is a FanSnap partnership to list eBay tickets.<p>Or was it some promotion associated with the NCAA tournament that drove awareness and continuing use to a new level?<p>Or maybe FanSnap is just buying the traffic with advertising dollars -- ROI and longevity TBD?
I wondered when somebody was going to bring this up.<p>For the record however, Fansnap has spent a significant amount of money purchasing traffic. There were ads on finance.yahoo.com at one point. The fact that they only amassed 94k uniques is almost laughable, poor retention/use of money--imo the whole ticketing business is a tough sell if you're just aggregating--<p>Tom and Dan have definitely put in a heart full effort--I think they probably understand the business just as well as fansnap (if not better) and spent much less money learning about it at the end of the day. Kudos to those guys bootstrapping an idea.
Startups are a lot of work. I'm guessing it's fairly indisputable that $15.7m funding can really help your growth. Case in point, employee count: FanSnap 21, TicketStumbler 2.<p>Given that tidbit, I'd say TicketStumbler is still doing a very respectable job by comparison.
If we're going to revisit what PG linked to, should we revisit what Dan said about having a long way to go?<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458946" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458946</a>
There is such a huge variation in sites estimating visitor numbers.<p><a href="http://www.cubestat.com/www.ticketstumbler.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.cubestat.com/www.ticketstumbler.com</a><p><a href="http://www.cubestat.com/www.fansnap.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.cubestat.com/www.fansnap.com</a><p>I think it's pretty obvious that given the variation and low absolute numbers we are talking about that it's impossible to tell the two means apart given the data.
We don't know the conversion rates of each site, so the traffic metrics are useless. One could convert at 15% and the other only at 2% and be comparable in terms of revenue.<p>Metrics are good, but they can be blinding.