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Seamlessness is key to music discovery app WillCall’s strategy: make the prickliest nightlife transaction bottlenecks pain-free and gorgeous to boot.
When consumers win, so do the venues. (Little known fact: venues make up to 70 percent of their revenue at the bar.) The company’s end-to-end enterprise solution streamlines event promotion, ticketing, on-premise sales and loyalty analysis under one slick interface.
“There’s a consistent lack of data on live music patrons," said co-founder and CEO Donnie Dinch. "We lean on things like Google Analytics and MixPanel for insights, [which] isn’t really an option for live music venues. The larger vision for WillCall is to become the data backbone for the industry, surfacing real, useful data on audiences to help venues and promoters optimize operations and increase revenue.”
San Francisco-based WillCall is expanding thoughtfully, averaging one city per year since 2012 and engineering in-app feature experiments in real-time while backstage at select shows. This approach seems to be paying off. The app currently boasts an industry-high 13 percent purchase rate and a doubling of users every month.
It’s encouraging that the team has put some serious skin into the game before touching down in the entertainment hub that is LA — a city that’s been no stranger to music and venue ventures (LuckyPennie, ScoreBig, Loudie, VenueCast, TopSpin, Pitch Fade, ShowScoop, Contender, TwentyTwo.fm, to name a few).
The nine-crew effort consists of Dinch, technical co-founders Julian Tescher and Patrick Tescher and a strong gathering of sharp minds with experience at Zynga, Facebook, TaskRabbit and Ticketfly. The company raised $2 million in seed funding from the who’s who of music and tech, including Sean Parker, Coran Capshaw, Sam Shank, Garrett Camp, Joe Gebbia and SV Angel, as well as LA’s own Universal Music Group, Oliver Luckett (theAudience) and John Frankenheimer (Loeb & Loeb).
Want to test drive WillCall (and BarTab) for yourself at their launch party on March 27? Here's a special offer for Built In LA readers:
The first 200 people to install the app and use redemption code BUILTINLA will score a free ticket to their launch party on Thursday, March 27 at Bootleg Theater. Performances by Miami Horror (DJ Set), Plastic Plates and Wunder Wunder.
