The irony — and the agony — was not lost on Dan Ross-Li.
He had recently moved to the Bay Area with his young family in November 2019, as they were about to walk into the San Francisco Zoo. Luckily, he had pre-paid for his tickets after buying a season pass. The other parents who were looking to buy day-of tickets were not as fortunate.
“I just remember that we had gotten our son in the stroller, and we're pushing him,” Ross-Li told me. “We're exhausted. He's been awake for four hours already. I just looked back, and I saw the ticket line. And I saw all these parents with children in this 50-minute long line. And I thought 'That's miserable. I can't imagine if I had to stand in that line.’”
At the time, Ross-Li had just begun working for ticket marketplace behemoth StubHub — in the heart of the tech world — as a manager for a new “sell it now” function that offered customers the option of selling their tickets directly to the company, instead of listing a price themselves.
A month ago, Dan-Li and his co-founders did a beta launch for their new ticket-purchasing platform, Affinna, with the goal of eliminating that and other pain points by offering a more streamlined ticket purchasing experience that should take no more than 20 seconds in an industry that is worth tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone.
“Working as an insider, you can see how terrible the experience is for other people,” Ross-Li said. “You look at all the service industries, and it's one of the worst experiences I think out there — in general — and it's probably one of the easiest that can be automated."
Ross-Li moved to Louisville a year ago with his family as a relocating spouse, making him a relatively new face in the local entrepreneurial scene. In spite of his brevity in Louisville, he has enjoyed building connections within the community.
“I'm very supportive of the Louisville tech scene and I think there's a lot of potential for growing a business here,” he said.
The company is completely remote, consisting of Ross-Li, the other two founders and an intern. It is in the process of expanding, as it looks for engineers, web designers and developers.
The company, which has been bootstrapped since its inception in May 2021, initially focused on ticketing analytics under the name of TheRealSeat, before shifting to its current platform a year later.
How the platform works
Affinna runs completely on a mobile friendly site with no app to download. There is also no need for a password. Customers simply use their cell phone number to log in and then are texted a code to serve as the password. Customers also do not have to jump to other sites or go through emails to accept tickets.
When users log in for the first time, they instantly see a “My Scan ID,” which is a QR code that can be used for any tickets they have purchased.
Affinna charges a 5% up-charge fee plus 35 cents per ticket, which includes the payment processing. This is about six times less than the up-charge fees that other ticket resellers use.
Those who want to post tickets on the site can choose their own cancellation policy, similar to the host cancellation policies found on Airbnb. In addition, users can transfer tickets to other users both with or without an initial payment.
“If you have to cancel your airline tickets, [the airline] doesn't say, 'OK, you can't fly? Then relist them,'” Ross-Li said. “It's only in tickets where they put the onus on you to bear the financial risks of reselling.”
Affinna has control of the full lifecycle of the ticket, allowing it to supply a list of the people who are attending to those running the event. Ross-Li said approximately 66% of people who go through the turnstiles of events are not the initial buyers of those tickets — and that number increases when dealing with sporting events, due to the amount of brokers involved.
