We recently connected with Michael Saunders and have shared our conversation below.
Michael, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?
As the father of two teenage daughters, I found my household swept up in the Taylor Swift outrage over ticket prices in 2022. All of our attempts to get presale access had failed– (that in-and-of itself was an infuriating debacle on its own). So, on the day tickets finally went on sale to the general public, my family members stood lined up across the kitchen island each armed with a laptop and an eager trigger finger ready to hit refresh, if needed. Throughout the morning and well into the late afternoon, we waited. And waited. And waited. Until finally….beep! One of the four laptop screens flashed from waiting-room white to a more promising transaction page. Hope! We breathed a collective sigh of relief as the velvet rope of rejection was lifted and only the promised land of T. Swift tickets lay ahead. Or, so we thought. After several frantic minutes of clicking and typing, we bumped into an insulting litany of fees that had been strategically tucked deep into the ordering process. The price per ticket – which was already outrageous to begin with – ballooned by the time we hit the final checkout page. The figure was so high that an open debate broke out about whether we were better off spending that type of money on a beach town vacation vs three hours of entertainment at Soldier Field. In the end, Taylor Swift won, but it somehow felt like we had collectively lost. What the heck just happened?
Fast forward to 2023, my company https://xp.xyz/ has been working feverishly to replace today’s broken online ticketing model with a platform that is built for fans. Launched in November 2023, it’s called XP, which stands for “eXPerience”. At its core is a belief that greedy middlemen ruin fandom, and it’s time to take that power back. Using the blockchain to power the network, XP is a new secondary marketplace that ensures tickets to live events are more affordable, reliable and accessible than today’s alternatives. We have 30M+ tickets to over 110,000+ events nationwide with big plans to roll out membership programs with dynamic perks that create even better fan experiences. How do we know that we can improve on what’s offered today? Because we’ve successfully done this before. I’m Michael Saunders, an expert in building marketplaces. In my career, I sold a company for $50M, helped steer another toward a $2B IPO, and I teach at Northwestern University. I recruited the people that I’ve relied on in my past to help ensure that XP offers a pioneering consumer experience, and we’re determined to shake up the live events industry.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Michael Saunders. I am the CEO of Captain, a tech lab focused on applying Web3 technology to innovate online marketplaces and e-commerce. In November 2023, we officially launched https://xp.xyz – a first of its kind secondary marketplace for purchasing tickets to live events that’s built on the blockchain. XP boasts over 30M+ tickets to 110,000+ live events nationwide, including sports, concerts and live theater. Our mission is to disrupt today’s marketplace with an improved business model that provides dynamic fan rewards and significantly lower ticket prices.
My career started during college in 1997 when I founded Campusfood.com, the very first food online ordering marketplace. We specifically focused on college campuses because, at that time, public access to the Internet was newly emerging and universities were the only places that had reliable Internet connections. By 2011, we had successfully expanded onto 400+ campuses, which caught the eye of Grubhub. CampusFood was acquired for $50M, at which point, I joined Grubhub’s executive team and helped steer the company to its eventual IPO (2014) with a valuation that reached over $2B dollars.
Ready for new endeavors, I departed the company in 2015. Shortly after I left, I witnessed a series of disappointing choices that changed my views on corporate middlemen. I watched Grubhub hike up their rates on both merchants and diners with higher and higher exorbitant fees. I witnessed them refuse to share customer data with restaurateurs who rightfully deserved to know who their customers were. I saw Grubhub prioritize corporate chains over SMBs – all of which felt greedy and damaging to the hospitality ecosystem that I had once proudly help create. It reflected a disturbing trend that I more easily spotted across many Web2 marketplaces (AirBnB, Expedia, TicketMaster, UberEats): corporate middlemen extracting more value than they created. Could there ever be a better way?
Post GrubHub, my focus returned to then-emerging technologies, namely blockchain and AI. Armed with learnings from my past, I wanted to build a new framework around online marketplaces that better aligned merchants and consumers without the typical greed that corporate middlemen inject into their business models. Blockchain provided the necessary backbone. After watching the public’s outcry over the cost of Taylor Swift tickets, we knew ticketing was ripe for disruption so we launched XP.
By bringing tickets onto the blockchain, our hope for XP is to revolutionize fandom. Among many offerings, XP will feature a secure and transparent peer-to-peer exchange for safe transfer of tickets and payment between strangers – a needed service that Reddit and Facebook fail to safely provide today. Our membership and loyalty programs will reduce the overall cost of tickets. By accepting stablecoins – like USDC – as payment options at checkout, XP can reduce the overall cost of tickets by removing expensive credit card processing fees. Our blockchain-empowered technology will also unlock exclusive access to artists’ pre-sales, merchandise, keepsake collectibles – like commemorative NFT setlists – as well as create dynamic in-real-life events that only XP users can access. Most importantly, all the dynamic Web3 technology is pushed into the background so that fans enjoy a purely Web2 purchasing experience that is familiar to today’s standards. Sign-in with a phone. Pay with a credit card. With XP, fans get a more affordable alternative to today’s ticketing providers while enjoying the benefits of direct rewards.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
By choosing to build atop the blockchain, XP has willfully signed up to face sizable headwinds. Following the collapse of FTX, the public’s perception of crypto and blockchain became cynical, even outraged. Over 1 million FTX account holders lost a combined $8.7B in assets in one of the largest bankruptcies in recent years. Strike one for Web3. Layer in confusion about the terms and tools required for Web3 engagement – digital wallets, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and gas fees – and it becomes obvious that consumer adoption is a long way away. Strike two. Fortunately, XP is not anxious about building in this environment. Our team has seen this evolution playout before, yet we were able to achieve tremendous success. Here’s how…
In 1997, only 18% of households had computers with Internet access. Worse, mobile devices with Internet access would not even arrive until 2001. Nevertheless, we found success launching CampusFood.com, the first food online ordering platform in the United States, in 1997. At that time, we were faxing orders to restaurants on dial-up service using telephone lines. If two hungry diners placed online orders to the same restaurant at the same time, each order would hit the restaurant’s fax line only to find a busy signal. Neither order would transmit, and our support team would have to scramble to intercept and resolve these matters or else risk unhappy customers and angry restaurateurs. Those incidents occurred with such frequency that we began advising owners to add multiple phone lines to meet demand. Even then, daily operations were at the mercy of the technology of the day: the fax machine. Empty ink cartridges, paper jams and power outages could quickly sabotage an afternoon’s sales success. In looking back at the slow start of what ultimately became a multibillion-dollar industry, it’s comical to think that any one of these innocuous mishaps with the fax machine could have stalled out the hospitality industry as we know it today.
At XP, we take comfort in remembering how adoption trends work. While some lament the short-lived promise of blockchain (and crypto) because of hurdles during the last two years, XP is going to remain focused on its mission: pursue business model innovation around the idea of community coordination and membership so that fans can have the best live event experiences at the lowest possible price. In the years ahead, we believe XP will provide one of the best proof points for blockchain’s utility, offering a product that has real world value for today’s consumer. And we aren’t the only ones that see things this way. In February 2023, Bain & Company revealed that “investors have poured approximately $94 billion into web3 companies in recent years, most of it since 2021” suggesting that XP is once again ahead of the next adoption curve.
Ultimately, I think the headwinds of 2021 and 2022 proved helpful for companies like ours. It helped clear the way for legitimate projects like ours to emerge that could actually deliver on the promises of the technology and, in our case, helped us identify a proper product-market fit with real life application. With over 30M+ tickets to 110,000+ live events listed on XP at the lowest possible prices, we see an immediate pathway to success i
How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?
XP offers consumers a new way to declare – and get rewarded for – their fandom. Not only will it be easier to afford tickets to live events on XP, our membership program will serve as a bat signal to artists, stadium vendors and event organizers the caliber of someone’s fandom. All of this is made possible because of the blockchain.
The beauty of tickets as NFTs is that, unlike traditional ticketing transactions, NFT tickets aren’t merely receipts to enter a venue that simply get discarded when the event ends. They can unlock so much additional value because, as NFTs, they express enduring identity. Even folks that collect ticket stubs as memorabilia know that, unless framed or memorialized, paper ticket stubs get lost, misplaced or forgotten over time. NFTs, however, are digitally preserved in the annals of a permanent ledger, being the blockchain. They can be referenced again and again and serve as a proof point to an artist that you were at their show. Imagine a world wherein NFT proof could gain you access to a pre-show event, a discount on your beverage at the venue or savings when purchasing merchandise at the show. Further, these NFTs can be converted into beautified, digital commemorative pieces of art that a fan could decide to sell for profit or elect to trade with other avid fans or as proof of community. There are limitless possibilities.
Equally, XP expects to launch a peer-to-peer marketplace for safe, transparent exchange of tickets between casual event goers. Imagine having tickets to a great sporting event only to find out that your child has come down with an illness, and you can no longer attend. Powered by blockchain, XP can serve as an escrow service to validate that the tickets you’re holding are real and unclaimed so that, unlike Reddit or Facebook, there’s inherent trust between buyer and seller. XP keeps both parties accountable to the transaction. This helps ensure the safe transfer of a ticket sale without the frustrations of needing to meet in a shady parking lot and then hoping that the buyer actually arrives with payment or that the seller has not already sneakily offloaded the tickets to a different purchaser.
XP is meant to tap into the inherent value that blockchain technology provides but without the necessity of education needed to navigate today’s blockchain projects. We obfuscate all the technology so that consumers can focus on finding events they love at a price point they can afford, meanwhile, unlocking dynmaic rewards for having declared their fandom. We’re just getting started – so pardon our dust – but we’d love to capture feedback so that we can beat today’s incumbents with a fairer ticketing model that is truly fan-first!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://xp.xyz/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/xpticket
Image Credits
Ryan Teo