By Nick Patience
As anybody who has tried recently knows all too well, a decent domain name, especially one comprising a single word is almost impossible to find in .com and the same phenomenon is likely to spill over into .net and other top-level names all too soon. Names are being snapped up at the rate of about 35,000 a day so it’s hardly surprising that anybody wanting a name who hasn’t thought about it – and registered it – about a year ago is left to trawl through the gamut of domain name brokers out there.
Rather than do that, Lu Cordova, chairman and CEO of TixToGo Inc, realizing the nascent business was saddled with a name that did not describe what it does and one that is not up to much anyhow, by the company’s own admission, asked around her friends inside the high-tech industry and beyond and offered to buy them a car if they came up with a good name. That then struck her as a good marketing strategy for an unknown start-up and so today the company will launch a naming campaign that will net the person that comes up with the chosen name a new Porsche Boxster, which retails for about $41,000 in the US. Cordova figures it’s worth the expense and will increase the company’s profile while also bringing the domain name brokers to TixToGo, rather than the other way around.
The San Francisco-based company offers the ability to book and register events and activities online. Cordova says it’s more than just the event-ticketing service offered by the likes of Ticketmaster, a unit of USA Networks. It is suitable for a much broader range of events, from private weddings, though safaris, skiing trips and company meetings – things that do not have formal seating plans, necessarily, but still need to bring together people in one place at one time.
The events are free to post and TixToGo takes a cut of any credit card transactions that are needed. Cordova says the cut averages out at about 5% and the company sends the event organizer a check by an agreed date, as well as reports. It is up to event organizer whether or not they want to swallow the charge or add a premium onto the price of tickets. TixToGo also makes money from accruing interest on the floats accumulated, and the millenium has inspired numerous events that have been planned long in advance and hence provide a valuable revenue source.
Cordova believes this is pure e-commerce rather than the box shifting of selling physical goods online, but she is not averse to a partnering with online retailers to bring in some more money. She says the partnerships are fairly obvious ones; a camping trip would be linked to camping suppliers; a skiing trip to sports equipment suppliers, and so on. She notes that as TixToGo knows some of the buying habits of people who buy tickets from its site and also knows the habits of the event organizer to a certain extent, that information can be used to target the right partners at the right consumers. However, the actual data would not be revealed to TixToGo’s partners, she says, and the company will not spam users, which means they will not be contacted about what TixToGo believes to be unrelated events.
There are other promotional revenue-generating opportunities with chat and calendaring companies of all types. She says that although the service is targeted at the business community, consumers will inevitably want to use it as well. Cordova says the web site does not need advertising to support it as it has intrinsic value of its own, but while the web site does not carry advertising yet, she expects it will to some extent in the future.
Cordova was one of the early employees at @Home Network Inc and was originally hired by Will Hearst III to run content. But that was before the network really existed so she wrote the first business plan for the @Work corporate version, which she says really took off when Tom Jermoluk came on board from Silicon Graphics Inc three years ago. She eventually got to run the online services division of the company, which included the public web site and the intranet. She also built the work.com portal.
Cordova says she had ambitions to do something to rival Ticketmaster years ago, but with a different business model to that of a central box office. She eventually jumped ship in May this year, having met company founder Ralph Marx last year. The company was effectively launched in January this year and Cordova acted as an adviser while still at @Home. The company employed about eight people and was running low on cash when she joined, so she raised a $2m bridge round and is the middle of raising $10m in series B financing at the moment. The company employs about 25 now and expects to have between 30 and 40 by the end of the summer. As for the Porsche, if you want to win you have to come up with a name by September 17, which will be judged on availability, as well as other features, so don’t go suggesting something like listings.com that would likely cost TixToGo most of its series B financing to purchase.
