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A couple of Somerville entrepreneurs are early players in a nascent segment of the online ticket reselling business.
Dan Haubert and Tom Davis launched last week TicketStumbler.com, a website that aggregates the information of 10 ticket reseller websites such as StubHub.com. TicketStumbler uses a search engine that works like the airline ticket website Kayak.com, which puts consumers in contact with vendors without conducting a transaction itself.
Haubert said he and boyhood friend Davis, both Toledo, Ohio, natives, began working on the concept in February. In April, TicketStumbler Inc. applied to be one of 22 business plans being developed this summer at micro venture capital firm Y Combinator, which operates six months in Cambridge and six months in Silicon Valley.
Ticket resellers share their prices with TicketStumbler in exchange for 6 percent to 16 percent of the ticket processing fee per referral.“The (reseller) companies are open to it because they just want the (visitor) traffic,” Haubert said.
About 60 users participated in a beta test in July, and when the service launched publicly last week, it attracted about 4,000 unique visitors during its first day, Haubert said.
Y Combinator invested $15,000 in TicketStumbler. Paul Graham, a Y Combinator partner, said the ticket reseller search engine business is still in its infancy, making it ripe for a company with a quality website to emerge as the dominant player.
“The way you win is to just be good,” he said. “You don’t have to spend millions of dollars on marketing.”
Competitors include Tickex.com and Oyaka.com, both based in the United Kingdom, and Ticketwood.com, which is based in California.
Some of the websites have branched out to include items such as VIP club passes or parking passes — something that TicketStumbler wants to avoid for the sake of simplicity, Haubert said. “What we’re trying to do is make the listings very clean,” he said.
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