South African online ticketing startup Quicket has a “massive focus” on expanding to other African countries next year as it looks to create a truly pan-African solution for events.
Launched in 2011 and now profitable after seeing exponential growth, Quicket was formed in 2011 by James Tagg, James Hedley and Michael Kennedy.
The online ticketing startup can be used to sell tickets both online and offline via channel partners or print for any event of any size.
“We empower any event organisers to take charge of their own ticketing by offering state of the art tech and transparency and fairness in pricing. We also handle many other aspects of the event life cycle, such as access control, staffing and tech, such as cashless and RFID at the events themselves,” Tagg told Disrupt Africa.
Quicket has grown exponentially year-on-year since inception, with the startup now having 15 staff in South Africa servicing over 1,000 events every month.
“Every event we run brings in another and our growth has been entirely through word of mouth with little to no marketing. Our product is slowly becoming a household name like Computicket,” said Tagg.
Now the startup is focused on expanding across Africa, having already established a branch in Uganda.
“We’ve seen a fragmented and mostly unaddressed ticketing landscape in the more developed African countries and we believe we can bring world-class ticketing technology to these countries,” Tagg said.
“The problem really lies in unifying the multiple payment collection methods as well as establishing trust and strong relationships. Our technology combined with our local partners networks has given us an opportunity to create a pan-African solution for events which we will look to expand throughout 2018 and 2019.”
Quicket is already selling physical tickets and online tickets through its local partners in Uganda, and Tagg said it is “looking seriously” at other East African countries.
There are plenty of ticketing startups across the continent, but Tagg believes Quicket has differentiated itself – especially in South Africa – by how well its products works.
“It’s the only system in the country that allows you to run your event without ever filling in any paperwork or dealing directly with us. It’s a cloud solution that simply allows you to do it yourself,” he said. “We specialise in events ranging anywhere in size from about 10 people all the way up to stadium sizes of about 80,000.”
He said the system has been built for people who want to be able to control the entire event process without waiting on human interaction.
“Our system is designed to be so intuitive that someone running their very first event is able to figure out how it works. Most ticketing systems are incredibly complex and this is why you have to wait on a human to load your event up for you instead of being able to have it live within an hour,” said Tagg.
Though Quicket’s competition includes the likes of Computicket and Webtickets, he said the startup does as many events as them every single month in spite of its smaller staff complement.
“Our platform is able to scale for high availability with limited interaction from our staff which frees up the team to focus more on the product and automation resulting in improved service delivery,” he said.
Growth has been so impressive that Quicket secured funding from KNF Ventures earlier in the year. Tagg said the company’s business model simply takes a percentage of the turnover of each event it runs.
“We also offer full use of our entire product for free for free events. For example a large annual event uses Quicket to issue over 20,000 free tickets for the weekend. The company is growing at a good pace and is profitable,” he said.
