CEO
CashorTrade
Years with Company: 16
Address: Burlington, VT
Web: cashortrade.org
E-mail: brando@cashortrade.org
Clients: The String Cheese Incident, Disco Biscuits, They Might Be Giants, Leftover Salmon, Gov’t Mule, Underoath, The Big E, Billy Strings
BACKGROUND
Brando Rich and his brother Dusty are live music enthusiasts who one day got tired of the predatory secondary ticket market. Instead of just complaining, they decided to do something about it. Their solution, a fan-focused space to trade or resell tickets at face value, exploded in popularity. Last year, CashorTrade processed north of $35 million in concert tickets.
Phish Slap
My brother and I started seeing live music in 1993. We ran away from home to see the Grateful Dead, slept under a bridge, and played in drum circles with the Hare Krishnas. It was a transformative experience. We saw as many shows as we could. It was early 2000s and the Internet was getting started. I knew the world was going to be about the web, so we built a web design firm. In 2004, Phish stopped playing, but when Phish came back in 2009 and we went to buy tickets, they sold out immediately and were going for $2,000 online.
Fanning Out
We were like, what happened in those five years? The answer is everything turned online. The brokers were now using sophisticated software tools. It ruined the experience. Being web designers, we built a web platform on the road, literally stopping at Starbucks coffee shops to add features during the day. And during the night, we’d set up our tent in the parking lot with a table and bulletin board so people could post notes saying what they had and what they wanted, if they were willing to trade or just looking to sell. It became a safe spot for people to congregate and buy, sell, and trade tickets.
Going Pro
By the end of the summer, we had 5,000 users on the platform. In about 2018, we decided to sell the web design firm and turned full-time to CashorTrade. We raised $400,000 and in 2019 hired a support person, a marketing person, and a developer. At this point, CashorTrade had 150,000 users. We realized there was a market for the average fan looking to sell a ticket and who doesn’t want to play businessman or be charged 15 percent only to see the buyer’s being charged 35 percent.
Doing Honest Business
Tickets go on sale a long way out these days. When you buy a ticket nine months out, do you know that you can go? Something comes up and you’re just like, “I want my money back.” And it’s a perishable good. You might only have two weeks or a week to sell it. In the end, you’re like, “I’ve got to get rid of these.” People turn to CashorTrade and sell them for face value and get their money back. And the buyers purchase a face value ticket, so they’re psyched.
Buying Second-Hand Tickets Securely
There’s a 10 percent platform fee that allows us to protect the purchase; we have an escrow and insurance platform service to offer a 100 percent money back guarantee. If buyers want to use CashorTrade more than once a year, they can become a gold member and avoid that 10 percent for $4 a month.
Trustworthy Connections
In 2005, there was the Web 2.0 revolution. We saw sites like Airbnb, Uber, and eBay, where people had a face, a profile, and reviews. We felt that was missing in ticketing, because there’s no trust. We wanted fans to trust one another, so we built tools so people could see and choose who they want to buy and sell with.
A New Era of Partnerships
When we started, the fans got it. The industry couldn’t understand it. “How do you make money? That’s never going to work.” We kind of lived in this space of—if you build it, they will come. Fifteen years later, the ticketing industry and those who put on events are fed up with the predatory secondary market. Promoters are putting up hundreds of thousands of dollars and taking massive risks to put on these events. It burns them to see their tickets being scalped, where they don’t get a dime of that markup. And then the fans are pissed. Your whole business model is to provide the best fan experience, and you have this predatory model that’s tarnishing the whole thing. These events are coming to the primary ticketing companies like, “Can you help stop scalping? Can you just give a space for people to resell tickets?” So now, primary ticket companies and events are partnering with CashorTrade.
The Great Unifier
Music touches pretty much everyone’s soul. If you’re a human being, you probably like a song. You probably hear a song that brings back a memory and gives you chills. It fills your heart, makes you think, lifts you up. Music brings emotions and ticketing is very complicated. There’s code, servers, databases, and all the technical details. But what I love about this space is that the end result is somebody going to an event and getting that feeling. I’m glad we can spend our lives being a part of that.
Legislative Solutions
We’ve been on the steering committee of Fix the Tix for about two years, kind of communicating what we see from our standpoint. A lot of people on those committees are promoters and venue owners. But we’re in an interesting space, because we’re in the secondary space yet we’re non-predatory. We feel there’s something to be said about our vision and perspective in the industry, because it doesn’t have to be anti-resale. And the events don’t want to take on providing refunds. So, we’ve been presenting that point of view to offer advice towards the language in the bills.
The bills right now are focused on speculators, such as brokers who are listing tickets they don’t even have. They haven’t even gone on sale. They’re artificially inflating markets. I think there are other things in there about deceptive marketing, like when you search for a venue, and you come up with the venue name plus tickets dot com. It’s not even the venue company. It’s a broker site.
The CashorTrade App
This new app uses an entirely new infrastructure. It’s built to scale. We have a number of features coming. One of the biggest is we are doing API integrations with primary ticket companies. They can validate a ticket and the order price right in the UI, so we can really keep things at face value. Then, once the buyer purchases, we’re transferring the ticket directly in the app. They don’t have to open up a different app to do the transfer. It all happens seamlessly.
Brando’s Version
We’ve worked with artists like Tyler Childers in the country space. We’ve done ticket drops for Sylvan Esso. We’re working with The Disco Biscuits. We’ve worked with Phish. Billy Strings has been a partner in the bluegrass space. We’re excited about diversifying our partnerships and building that diversity across the platform. We did sell a few hundred Taylor Swift tickets, so we were happy about that. We were a little late to the game in telling people about it, but we’re hoping that on the next tour we can elevate CashorTrade in the Taylor Swift community.
