Hey, everybody. Welcome to my guest tonight. I'm your host, Jeff Revilla. I've
got a great guest joining me tonight, Michael Dodsworth, a launch
expert who's seen it all. Servers crashing, fans
raging and bots breaking the Internet. But instead of walking
away, he built Fanfare, a platform that keeps brands
cool. When the chaos hits. Let's hear that theme song.
From the chaos of the crowd to the calm of the co
he's been there when the system explode.
Built a. Platform for the fans to share a
better world Watch that fans fan
Click, click, click the fans can't wait
Midnight hits and the servers break from
meltdown moments to loss and fame.
Michael Stars were changing. Change the
game
now. Jeffrey Villa's got him here
on my guest tonight. Let's make it clear.
No box, no breaks, just hyped on, right?
It's bad magic on your feet
tonight.
Tonight.
I figured with a brand like Fanfare, we had to bring the Heavy Metal Thunder
for the intro song. Michael, welcome to the show. Thank
you. What an amazing introduction. That was a lot of foreshadowing
in that song too. We're going to hear a lot about things that were mentioned
in there. And as you know, this show is kind of an origin story podcast.
We like to go back and go through your history and meander and see
all those little points that kind of made you who you are today and how
you ended up where you are today. And was. Was the industry
and ticketing and events, was that an early interest for you way
back? It's. It's actually something. I mean, I've always
struggled getting tickets to any live events. I think we've all
felt those pains. Like, for me, it was like the Reading
Festival, Leeds Festival way back in the uk. It's
something that everyone has had some. Some pain around.
But my actual journey towards ticketing and trying to solve this problem
actually came later in life. So I started life. You can hear
from my accent. I'm probably not from around these parts,
based in LA right now, but grew up in the UK and I come from
an engineering background. So it was actually my older
brother bringing home a Commodore 64 one day that
sent me on this path. Just on this path of building things
from nothing, from kind of creating something from scratch is always something
I've really enjoyed doing. And then found myself on these
shores through acquisitions. First was Salesforce,
small startup that I joined in the UK, was scooped up by Salesforce
in 2007, and then found my way through
Optimizely through into a live events
Ticketing company called Rival. And as you can tell from the name,
like, we were. We were not trying to pull any punches with who
we were going after. We were trying to solve that problem.
The thing that everyone's been complaining about for
probably two decades at this point is why is ticketing still like
this? Why is it expensive? Why am I stuck in a
queue for four or five hours? Why am I just staring at this spinner with
multiple tabs open? Why are bots able to come in and scoop up
all of these tickets before I have a chance? So, yeah, this is a long
and winding road. There's definitely some scar tissue, I think, in the song
there you were talking about some of those meltdowns that have happened. Like,
I've definitely felt some of those meltdown myself. It's a
painful thing to go through from a vendor's perspective. So trying
to create something to allow vendors to ease that pain for
their consumers, but also ease their pain in running an event
like this, with that. Engineering background and the
history, your love of events and music and the. The struggle to
get into the queue, to get tickets, was there like a tipping
point that you can recall? Was there a specific show? You were just like, I'm
going to get tickets. It's going to be the best time of my life. And
then you're locked out, like it's. It's over before it even
starts. Yeah, for me, it's death by a thousand cuts.
It's every time I'm trying to get whatever it is, whether I'm
trying to get Oasis tickets, whether I'm trying to go to the Leeds Festival or
conferences like Experience that same
terrible queuing mechanic feeling like
everything just disappears before I have a chance. And then the
moment for me, creating fanfare was seeing it outside of ticketing.
So we'd been building out a system to deal with the
Taylor Swift on sales of the world. Like the 3 million, 4 million
Swifties turn up all at once and you have to keep your service
up, you have to keep it running. And there's all kinds of things you
can try and do to move people who are real fans ahead of
everyone else, to try and create a fair and transparent
process. But then at the start of the pandemic
and after leaving Ticketmaster, so I spent some time at
Ticketmaster just feeling the same pain when I
go into a sneaker drop or when I try and buy. At
the time I think it was graphics cards were impossible to get a
hold of. But you see every single time the Swift to the Switch 2
goes on sale. Whether it's like some new
piece of tech, whether it's something in apparel, streetwear,
footwear, it's always the same terrible, terrible
consumer experience. So you're kind of. You
immersed yourself in that. You were, you know, you mentioned Ticketmaster a little bit. You
were working in the industry and you thought, like, was there
a point? You're like, you know, you just mentioned all the pain points. Did you
have a revelation? Like, I think I can fix this. I think I have a
better way. Did you realize something during. During your
time there or after? Yeah, I think it was rival
having. Trying to build a system to deal with those kind
of situations. Just really understanding the
scope of the problem. Like, it's not just 3 or 4 million people
showing up. It's people trying to game the system.
It's very sophisticated people who have a very big incentive
to come in and ruin your day. Like, if you're a fan, a promoter,
anything, it's people coming in and ruining your day.
So having spent some time building that on the ticketing
side and then seeing it both in real life through the
pandemic, and then online in all kinds of product
drops, knowing that we'd solved this problem,
like, we'd provided something that could deal with these kind of events
in a reasonable way, and, like, seeing just such a
massive, like a gap,
like, seeing just a massive opportunity for retailers
and brands to do something with those experiences.
Like, right now, they're so flat and such a low
bar has been set through them. I think there's. There's all kinds of
information that brands are missing out on. People who show
up time and time again, but are just unlucky or just
don't want to wait three or four hours, like, these are potential
VIPs that you just don't have a chance to
engage. Like, it's a huge missed opportunity.
Let's talk about that. So, you know, instead of just trying to
get to the. To the website the fastest and beat the bots and beat the
scalpers and beat everybody who's running software to get tickets,
you've come up with this better way. And whenever you
developed it and released it before you explained to us what it is,
when you started explaining this idea to other people, was it easily received
or did you really have to kind of like, well, this is my idea. I
think we can do it this way. Or do people take to it right away?
Yeah, I think everyone has felt that pain, which is like
an immediate reaction from brands and retailers,
from a consumer's perspective. I think it's a little bit harder to talk
about how the tech would integrate and how you would use this,
but the pain is there. Like everyone's tried to
get tickets to a live event. Everyone's tried to get
the table at the hot new restaurant, or everyone's tried to go through a sneaker
drop or tried to get some exclusive luxury item and
felt like this process just isn't fair.
I keep showing up time and time again for this brand
and every time I fail, like, why is it that this
is so painful? So I think it's an easy thing for people
to grok in terms of a consumer problem.
I think it's more difficult to help
brands and retailers identify the gap,
the opportunity there when you have this audience that you're driving through
to an experience, what you can do with that experience.
You mentioned a couple of things there too that caught my, my eye of fairness,
scalability, and, you know, getting people to trust the process.
And you have to solve for these three problems
simultaneously. What, what is your approach to doing this? So how
can, how do we bring together the event
creators and the people who want to get tickets to them?
Yeah, I think it's. I mean, the first step is making sure that
you can deal with that surge in traffic. That's often
where some of these brands will fall down. So you have
a viral moment and maybe you're Dr. Squatch
and you have a collaboration with Sydney Sweeney and
your servers just collapse under the weight of that traffic.
That's the first step. Just avoiding that complete
failure to capture people's interest and be able to
serve people in that moment. I think bots are an
enormous part of this. If people feel like when I go to
an event and I try and buy these things and I look over the fence
at the secondary market and I can see them going for 10x,
100x the price. What gives? How did they
get through and I didn't. How did all of these resellers get through and
I didn't. So ruling like screening those people out
and trying to identify real fans and make sure those
real fans get access to the product. So I think that's also a big part
of what we do. And then the third part is being able
to provide something in that experience. Like right now, people
just stare at a spinner for multiple hours.
There's a really good example that we showed during our
pre seed raise, which was Disney's season pass
sale. So something that they go through multiple times a year and
there's a huge banner when you go to that season ticket
sale which says like, you may be in this queue for 24 hours,
please don't get up and go away from your desk. Like, whatever you do,
you can't leave your place in line because you may miss your opportunity.
This is not how you treat people who are spending
thousands of dollars on a Disney season pass. There's all kinds of
information you could show to them. There's all kinds of content you could
recommend to them. There's all kinds of things that you could be doing around product
recommendations, around capturing some engagement from those
users that just Disney aren't doing. And these are well
resourced organizations just failing to capture that moment.
And as you, you build up these systems in the process for, for making it
fairer, the first iteration couldn't
have been a perfect success. What are some of the lessons you've learned
along the way? Because you even mentioned that even the Ticketmasters
have scaling problems at times their servers crash
and you're coming into the market now and you had to learn some lessons
to make this fair and scalable. What were some early
hurdles you encountered? Yeah, I think
knowing that this was going to be something that a large
surge in traffic would just show up to all at once.
I definitely been through times at Salesforce at Optimizely
where that had happened before. So Optimizely, like newsworthy
events would often we would find out about them from pagerduty
calling us because the servers were having a bad time. So
we've tried to build this idea of scalable
platforms into the system from the very beginning. So
everything we do is built with this in mind. That has to deal
with these huge surges and then, you know, the traffic
vanishing almost immediately. We have to deal with that in an
effective and efficient way. So that's been a
key part of it. I think key learnings just keep it simple.
There's all kinds of things that you'll find with people
set up, especially focusing on Gen
Z and people who are looking
at streetwear products, footwear products, those kind of folks,
they may not have things enabled that you just kind of want them
to have enabled. On the tech side and the more complicated you
make a process, the more opportunities there is to
fail some percentage of those fans.
So just keeping the whole process as simple and as
well architected as possible. Have you had a chance to really test
and flex the system? Have you had some peak
traffic? Yeah, we try to keep in front of that by running
our own tests, high scale. So making sure that the
Millions of people showing up isn't a surprise to us.
So we definitely have some internal tests that really, really stress
the system in terms of customers doing that.
We've never had an issue with customers pushing us beyond
what we test internally. And again, that's from the very
beginning, knowing that we were dealing with these kind of situations and trying to
keep in front of our customers always. Yeah. The reason I asked those last
two questions, because you describe yourself as, you know, part Internet
firefighter and part launch therapist. Right. So you're,
you have clients, you have to manage their expectations and you have people who
want to get their product. So you're, you're constantly in
this, you know, push and pull between these, these two groups.
Yeah. And customers often come to us from a situation
that they've been burned in the past. Right. They've run a drop
before and they've had a bad time. Maybe their vendor fell over,
maybe they fell over and they ended up getting
dragged on social media because the fans felt like
they were frustrated in that moment. Like you've created anticipation
for a product and you couldn't serve them. So we definitely. The
therapy comes in at that point and just
coming at it from a, from a place of understanding, like I've been in
situations like this before, it's a situation that
no brand really can get their arms around. It's an
incredibly difficult thing to do. And we're here to help.
So that's, that's where we come at this from. Just trying to
help these brands use this incredibly powerful tool
and not be dragged on social media.
Let's say a brand comes out with a limited edition, a limited run of
maybe only a thousand units are available. How does
Fanfare approach that? So that it is fair that you
know and people understand that this is the process that, you know, you're.
Everybody's eligible to get one, but we have to figure out the process.
So how do you approach a situation like that? Yeah,
I mean, we can, we can provide different experiences. So
depending on what the brand wants, we can either have like a first in, first
out queuing system where like the very first people to show
up will be the first, first people to get through the process, or
a live random drawing really depends on what kind
of feel the brand is going for. But just making
sure that everything is set up way ahead of time to make sure
that all of the various configuration
options that we have are in the right place. If you have a thousand
items and you're expecting a million people to show up,
you have to Know that a lot of these people are not going to get
through the process and add them to the wait list
to make sure that they can come in early stages in the next
drop that you do, to make sure you move them in forward in line for
the next drop. You do. And that's an important part too is
like identifying your real fans. So if people show up and
they're not in that thousand people who are successful,
that's important signal. You should definitely try and move
these people ahead the next time you have a drop. So
over time at least people
feel like there's some rewards for their time and effort
in these processes and they're not just kind of out in the cold every time
you go through them. Yeah, that's an interesting approach. I mean, if
you don't want to burn
999,900 fans.
So using that data and you know, for
future campaigns, so you know, you have a limited release, but not everybody can get
it. But now you know who's showing up and who's interested in your brand
for, for whatever, for future releases, for maybe even like
a special event, a live stream or something where you can do a meet
and greet. So there's, there's certain. How do you see some brands handle that
overflow there? You have a certain strategy that you recommend to
them. Yeah, I guess there's two parts to that. One
is just proper management of the waitlist.
A lot of brands will have just this giant set of
users that they have in their waitlist for a product and they'll have multiple on
sales that they'll do. And we've
all been through this process too, where it's just a free for all. Every
single time an email blast goes out to all of the people on
the waitlist and everyone just piles in and tries to get
that product, we try and make sure that if you were close the last
time, you're first in line the next time. So there's some
fairness in how we run the waitlist.
And in terms of running the drop, there's also
some really interesting things you can do. Like I said,
moving people forward in line, identifying
real fans. There's also kinds of other signals that we
can pull from outside the system. Maybe people engage with your brand
in different ways. Maybe they engage with the content you put on social media.
Maybe they come into the store repeatedly. Like those are real fans
of the brand too. And we can work those signals into
our own signals to then move people ahead and make sure they get the
product. Are there any types of brands or artists
that are that this works better for than others or, or
do you see the platform pretty agnostic and we can help
anybody? Yeah, I think our focus has been definitely on
the people who are used to running this model already.
So people like streetwear brands, footwear brands who
are familiar with the drop model and are just struggling to deal with
that surge in traffic, the bots and so on. But I do see this as
just any place that they're a queues, any people,
any place where people gravitate towards and you can build
an audience and drive them through to an experience is an
opportunity here. We've definitely had use cases around
campsites, you know, where there's
scarcity for the places when they go on sale and they
infrequently go on sale. So we can put up a fair process
for anything really where you have that kind of scarcity.
And we mentioned ticketing, right. For concerts and events and
there's the, the 2,000 pound elephant in
the room is this integrated silo that's been taken
over the entire entertainment industry from ticketing to
events to concessions, to owning the artists. And
do you see fanfare? Maybe you know, not
replacing them or putting them out of business, but maybe starting to crack that
armor a little bit. Maybe starting to show fans that there could be a
better way to be treated
by your company and the brands and not just some
giant corporate conglomerate sucking all the money out of the industry.
Yeah, that's my hope. That's always been my hope is that
we can provide meaningful competition so
there's some innovation and there's some
improvement for the consumer experience for live events. It's been
far too long, I would say like we can help out
for not just people like a Ticketmaster, but also all of the up
and comers. Like this is a really important,
difficult challenge to get through if you're going after
the likes of a Ticketmaster. So we can come in and we can help
you get over that massive hump that you have in
implementing a process. So you know, trying to ease
the process for up and coming vendors, for other vendors who
are trying to compete and you know, unseat
the conglomerates of the world. So that's I think where we
can provide help. I would love to be able to help
even at Kimaster with just their painful process. I think we
can, we can make a meaningful improvement. Even just things like
capturing users intent. You know, I have
these dates that I can show up for. Here's my price
range, here's the number of Seats that I want, like that kind of
information can then help you in feeding people through
to the, to the actual like on sale experience.
So in the short term it could be supplemental too, until the
public's ready, you know, to fully like. I think I trust this system
a little bit better. I'm going to just make sure I go to events
that are on this platform instead of another platform because of the
experience, because of the way we're treated, because of
the access, actually have access to getting or having a chance of getting
a ticket. Yeah, I think when, when consumers start
advocating for fanfare, like this is the vendor
that I trust, this is the vendor that I want to go to.
If I'm going through a process like that, I think that's the perfect setup for
us. So we, we aim to provide a service
that customers can trust in that way and eventually try
and help out even the largest of these vendors. And knowing
that, knowing that intention and knowing that there's an opportunity here in the market.
Where do you see fanfare in five years from now?
Where do you see it going or evolving into? Yeah,
like I say, any opportunity where you're
creating a moment around a product,
like a scarce product in particular, I think is a great
opportunity for us. And that goes beyond just online.
And I would love to venture out into in real
life experiences. Going all the way back to
live events. Having 60,000, 70,000 people
in a venue all point in their phones up to a sky to
attend some kind of product launch that's exclusive just to the people
in that venue I think would be really compelling. So I really want to create
experiences or just allow brands to create
interesting experiences around these. On sales,
I think about the moments in my past that really
have stuck with me, the things that I've bought in the past that have really
stuck with me. And it's been like a smooth experience, start
to finish. And it's usually like a brand created something
special. I think my earliest memory, I think was
buying Super Metroid limited edition for the Super
Nintendo way back. Like that still sticks with me. I
probably still gravitate towards Nintendo over
everyone else because they created such a cool experience. So I want
to help, help brands do do that in the future. We looked
forward, we got to look back. We started the journey today of, you
know, what was your interest? How did you get into this? So where you are
now, what would you tell your younger self or, or even somebody
who's thinking about getting into the industry, who loves the idea
of entertainment and providing services for people what would you tell your
younger self about this journey that you've been on so far?
Yeah, I think my advice would always be
trust in the process and keep going.
Right. I think anything that's worth doing
is always going to be challenging and it's always going to take significant
toil. And it's important to just believe
that you'll get there and just kind of break off
parts of the problem and just focus and work through and work through and work
through, and eventually you'll get there. I think that's. That's what
served me through my career is like trying to just
go above and beyond and just try and break problems down best you
can and just rather than try and swallow the whole thing, you can just
nibble off little pieces of it. So that would be my advice to myself. I
think, given what. Where we are with the tooling that's available
right now, I would say there are more and more problems
that people see out in the world that are addressable
by a smaller team. And you can create
something that's focused to a particular problem. You don't have
to create a large generic platform to solve
that. And I think all of the AI tooling makes some of
this just so much more approachable than it ever was before.
Like, I think starting a company, just starting something
from the very beginning, there's always enormous gaps that
you need to fill. And I feel like the tooling that's
available right now can just help you bridge those gaps
much more quickly than you would normally. So I would say for people
thinking about doing something like this, like, now is
an incredible time. I think there's just so much you can do
with a small team and there's so many problems that
you can go after that. I think even two
years ago, you probably wouldn't go after without significant
funding and so on. Awesome. Michael, it's been so
much fun. I have your website right here if you want to tell people
how can they check out Fanfare and
what's the best way to get in contact with you or maybe even talk to
somebody at the company about. They have an idea and they just don't know where
to go. Maybe Fanfare is the right solution for them.
Yes, Fanfare just integrates anywhere that you have a product
on sale so we can integrate into your product page. If you're a
Shopify vendor, there's a Shopify integration. You can flip the switch and
start using the service. So please reach out on
LinkedIn. You can usually find me for my sins at
all hours. On LinkedIn. So please grab some of my time
and head over to Fanfare IO. And in particular, we've started
creating case studies and blog articles around
drops that have gone well, drops that have not gone so
well and how you can avoid those headaches if you're thinking about
doing something like this yourself. So, yeah, please, please reach
out Fanfare IO. I'll have the links
in the show notes. Let's go back to that theme. So.
From the chaos of the crowd to the calm of the code
he's been there when the system explode.
Built. A platform for the fans to share a
better world of wide
click, click, click the fans can't wait
Midnight hits and the servers break from
meltdown moments to launch safe fame
Michael Star work Change the
game
now, Jeffrey. And Villa's got him here
on my guest tonight. Let's make it clear.
No bots, no breaks. Just hype done right.
It's always amazing to me how the song is different at the end of the
show than it is at the beginning of the show. You hear it the first
time, but then we covered everything, and then you hear the song again, you're
like, wow, we covered almost all of that. That is superb.
That's fantastic. Can't believe how
the lyrics, everything about it is amazing. So I'm
incredibly impressed. Impressed with the theme song.