How TryBooking quietly built a $1 billion ticketing empire

MEET the humble, Melbourne husband-and-wife team who’ve quietly sold more than 20 million total tickets — worth a tidy $1 billion — off their own backs.

IF YOU’VE been to a music festival or community event recently, chances are you’ve used TryBooking.

The Melbourne-based start-up has become Australia’s number one self-service ticketing engine, and its husband-and-wife owners just celebrated their first $1 billion in ticket sales, helping 10,000 events get organised every week.

But you could be forgiven for overlooking the company, which prefers to exist in the background of the gigs, fundraisers and get-togethers that are the engine of our social lives.

For Delma and Grant Dunoon, it’s been a classic case of an “overnight success” that was eight years in the making.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

The Dunoons were running their payroll software company while raising young children when they struck upon an idea.

“Our kids were in primary school and were members of various clubs,” Ms Dunoon said.

“When you’re trying to herd people in signing up to come to your gala dinner for a club, or registrations for your basketball team, we found that it was just taking forever.”

The mum-and-dad volunteers tasked with such chores were finding themselves spending long hours chasing potential attendees and filling out registration forms.

Seeing a gap in the market for a simple, easy and cheap online booking engine that could cater to small groups, the Dunoons built a prototype to test among their own community groups.

“We had to create a product that was going to be more cost effective than a volunteer,” Ms Dunoon said.

“It was an idea whose time had come,” Mr Dunoon said, “With technology like the cloud, that started to open up this as a possibility as a service and to be able to do it more cost effectively.”

Music festivals and community events are booked online in an instant.

MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR GAMBLE

The couple had to endure a nailbiting three years of zero profits — while pouring every cent they owned into the business — to get it off the ground.

“It was a pretty big gamble,” Mr Dunoon told news.com.au,

“We got to the point at one stage where we were literally getting close to living hand-to-mouth.”

The couple invested “several million dollars” in the business, which sprang from an idea hatched when Ms Dunoon was struggling to organise an event for her kids’ basketball team.

While it sounds like a lot, the bootstrapped company has managed to do with comparatively little what Silicon Valley tech giant Eventbrite has done with $176 million worth of venture capital funding — albeit on a local scale — using proceeds from the sale of a previous business.

“During the early days, because we had this model where we wanted to get the price point way down, we needed to get large volumes of people on the platform — and that took a lot of investment in marketing,” Mr Dunoon said.

“Then when you have enough people in the marketplace saying ‘we’ve used TryBooking, it’s great’, and one person that comes on board recommends it to three other people, then you start to see the growth.”

Reaching that tipping point took three-and-a-half years, but when things turned around “it happened fast — and that was a bit of a relief.”

A major coup came when the company started to secure corporate clients like Qantas and Optus, along with events like the Port Fairy Folk Festival and talks at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne.

The platform now has more than 50,000 accounts signed up and has sold 20 million tickets worth a whopping $1 billion.

‘MAKING EVERYTHING COUNT’

Launching the business right after the global financial crisis hit Australia was a nerve-racking experience, and the pair quickly learned they would have to run a tight ship.

TryBooking still doesn’t charge any fee for free events, preferring to let people get a feel for the platform in the hopes that they will eventually host ticketed events — for which they charge 30 cents per ticket to the patron and 50 cents to the event organiser, plus a 2.1 per cent credit card processing fee. The company also donates back its fees in full to charity event organisers.

Surviving the lean times meant having to cut the development team from 20 software engineers to just six, and costs like paying licences to use Microsoft and Apple products were cut from the budget.

“We had to make sure that every cent of spending counted,” Ms Dunoon said.

Using open source tools like Linux, Open Office, GIMP picture editor and Inkscape saved tens of thousands of dollars a year.

More than a pure cost saving, she said, the approach was about “a mindset of ‘we’re going to make everything count’.”

WHERE TO NEXT?

Now the goal is to grow the business further, with potential to expand overseas after licencing in the United Kingdom.

“We’ve got a good strong product that we could probably take anywhere in the world now,” he said. “The next focus is how do we leverage that into the global space.”

To do this, the pair have appointed an experienced executive team, with Jeff McAlister as chief executive and Brian Mills as chief technological officer, freeing the Dunoons up to focus on marketing and strategy.

“I was wearing three hats, so now we’ve split that role; you can’t be productive when you’re spread across those roles,” Mr Dunoon said.

Delma and Grant Dunoon bootstrapped Trybooking with “several million dollars” of their own cash.

A COSTLY LEGAL DISPUTE

TryBooking ran into its first major client dispute last year when a Victorian dance music festival organiser failed to secure the relevant permits.

The Dunoons are suing the Maitreya dance music festival in the Victorian Supreme Court over more than $400,000 of ticket revenue they say remains unaccounted for after they refunded patrons for more than $1 million worth of tickets.

The pair declined to comment on the matter as it is before the courts.

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Originally published as How TryBooking quietly built a $1 billion ticketing empire