Campbell : “ To become the best software firm in the world for tech conferences”
Tito, an online ticketing technology company founded by Paul Campbell and David ‘Doc’ Parsons, has handled $70 million of ticket sales internationally in just two years.
The Dublin-based start-up, which employs just three people, is handling ticket sales of up to €200,000 a day as news of its innovative booking systems spreads virally.
Thirty-one-year old Campbell told The Sunday Business Post: “We are following the Facebook model of getting Harvard first (technology and coding conferences) and then going from there.”
Conferences for programmers using most of the world’s biggest coding languages like Java, Ruby and Go are all now using Tito to book tickets rather than traditional more expensive and clunky ticket booking systems.
Events using Tito’s ticketing service range from the World Business Forum in New York, which features keynote speaker Richard Branson, to the Web Summit in Dublin.
“My goal is to become the best software firm in the world for tech conferences. We are not there yet but we are very close,” Campbell said.
“Absolutely yes we want to [disrupt Ticketmaster],” Campbell said. “People are very frustrated. They are doing a bad job as a monopoly so there is a huge opportunity there.
“Our focus is on user experience. We believe fees should be part of the operational cost to the organiser and never shoved onto the end user,” Campbell said. “If you see a ticket price on a Tito page apart from tax that is the price you pay. There is no surprise fees or bullshit.”
Campbell, who previously worked with Eoghan McCabe, the chief executive of Intercom, and angel investor Eamon Leonard, said he expected Tito would process over $50 million in ticket sales this year.
“We are aiming to have revenues of $100,000 a month in six months and are currently growing by about 20 per cent a month,” he added.
Campbell, who began coding at seven, worked for aviation leasing entrepreneur Domhnal Slattery two days a week while he was 16 and in transition year.
He designed the website for International Aviation Management Group in 1999, a business which two years later Slattery sold for tens of millions of euro to RBS.
