Two Houston businessmen have launched a new platform aimed at disrupting the sports and entertainment ticket resale market.
Blake Nethery and his father, Scott Nethery — president of Houston-based power technology company Energy Ogre — launched QuickAsyst, an automated mobile ticket resale application. For those planning to sell unused event tickets, QuickAsyst will automatically list and dynamically price their tickets on more than 15 major marketplaces, transfer the tickets to the new owner and release payments to the seller. The app is available on the Apple Store and Google Play Store.
“We wanted to create a seamless, easy way for people to sell tickets,” Blake Nethery said.
The company’s operations are based in Houston with three full-time staff members. Multiple additional team members are working on the platform on a part-time basis.
QuickAsyst seeks to gain market share in an industry that is dominated by the top players, such as Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid Seats — each of which have been growing recently. Ticketmaster renewed its deal with the NBA in 2021, while SeatGeek became MLB’s official ticket resale partner, and Vivid Seats acquired Vegas.com in 2023. Additionally, international ticket marketplace Viagogo purchased StubHub from eBay in February 2020 for $4.05 billion in cash.
Despite the competition, QuickAsyst believes it can be cash-flow positive from an operations standpoint in year one and start making a dent in the industry, Blake Nethery said. There’s a significant opportunity to address the resale ticketing market given that nearly 22.5 million tickets for professional sporting events in the U.S. go unscanned each year, he said. By converting those unscanned tickets to sales on QuickAsyst, he said he believes the company can scale quickly.
“I saw an opportunity where there’s so many people in this nation and in the world that have tickets to all sorts of events, but they don’t utilize them all the time,” he said. “I think this could be the future of ticket resale and really help people save a lot of money at the end of the day.”
The technology used for QuickAsyst is influenced by Energy Ogre, which finds consumers the best deals on electricity from available power providers, Scott Nethery said. Both platforms also share the same goal: to help people save money.
“We’re able to integrate a lot of technology that we’ve built (at Energy Ogre) to help customers in this vertical,” he said. “Blake is able to utilize some of it and expand on it to build what we think is going to be a seamless, easy, transitional way for people to sell their tickets.”
QuickAsyst — which stands for “assist selling your seats today” or “assist selling your season tickets” — operates with an upfront fee of 20% no matter which marketplace a user’s ticket sells on, Blake Nethery said. For example, for a ticket that resells for $100, the seller will receive $80 dollars and the company will earn $20. He said this is different than other resale platforms, which generally aren’t as transparent about fees and often have fee structures based on the value of the ticket.
Other than the ability to sell tickets, QuickAsyst also features a dashboard that allows users to track every sale they have made and filter it by teams and leagues. It will also consolidate the data for sellers to use when they need to file a Form 1099 during tax season.
The app intentionally does not allow users to price their own tickets, Blake Nethery said. The purpose of the platform is to be as seamless as possible, so if users need to do their own research and set pricing parameters, it defeats that purpose, he said.
If users are unhappy with the sales price, or they choose to give away the ticket or use it, they can automatically delist the ticket from each of the marketplaces, he said. Additionally, since the tickets are dynamically priced, users have the option to be notified each time the price of their ticket changes.
QuickAsyst is starting its launch in the U.S. and is focusing on tickets for NCAA men’s and women’s basketball, NCAA football, MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL, MLS and WNBA, he said. To begin, the platform will heavily target Houstonians with social media and radio advertising. As the company grows, it plans to include more events, such as concerts, UFC and golf, and expand to other regions internationally.
QuickAsyst does not currently work with any individual teams or leagues, but it plans to do so in the future, Blake Nethery said.
“Once we’ve made an impact here in Houston, we can go to wherever is next and have a great plan in place to be able to succeed,” he said.
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