Tickets.com: Building a $40M Profitable Acquisition Engine
Building something that acquires customers and generates profit, without cannibalizing the core brand.
Context
Ticket resale is a structurally competitive market driven by paid acquisition. Margins are tight, competitors frequently overspend on keywords, and brand bidding often becomes a race to the bottom over the "top 4 ad spots."
When Vivid Seats acquired the Tickets.com domain, it presented an unusual opportunity: a high-intent asset with brand equity, but no operating model behind it.
The mandate was simple: build something that acquires customers and generates profit, without cannibalizing the core Vivid Seats brand.
Product & Business Strategy
Rather than treat this as a marketing experiment, I approached it as a product and business design challenge.
The Key Constraints
- •We were consistently outspent on core brand keywords
- •Competing head-to-head would compress margins
- •We could not dilute or cannibalize the core Vivid Seats experience
- •Any solution needed to be low maintenance and scalable
The Strategy
The opportunity was to create a distinct acquisition engine with its own positioning, pricing logic, and conversion mechanics. Instead of fighting for top keyword placement at a loss, we repositioned the offering:
- •Premium pricing strategy targeting high-intent acquisition plans
- •A simplified, high-conversion product optimized for paid traffic
- •A differentiated brand posture to avoid internal cannibalization
This was not a marketing layer. It was a deliberately designed product ecosystem.
Four years of A/B testing learnings from Vivid's core platform, distilled into a lean, high-conversion product.
Homepage: Personalized Discovery
Paid traffic lands with intent but no context. The homepage had to orient, inspire, and move users toward purchase without overwhelming them.
Location-aware top picks, date filter chips, and a clean card grid surfaced the most relevant events immediately—removing the search step for most users.
Production Page: Ticket Selection
High-intent users needed to find the right seats quickly. Complexity in inventory navigation was the primary drop-off point.
Zone-based filtering, an interactive seating map, and social proof signals ("2,253 fans shopping") reduced friction and built purchase confidence simultaneously.
Checkout: Streamlined Conversion
Checkout is the highest-stakes surface. Any unnecessary friction—unclear pricing, delivery confusion, or trust gaps—costs revenue at the worst moment.
Minimal form fields, persistent order summary with a price-lock timer, 100% Buyer Guarantee trust signal, and multiple payment options including PayPal reduced abandonment at the final step.
Execution
As product lead, I owned:
- •Business model definition and pricing strategy
- •Product scope and prioritization
- •Headcount planning and cross-functional alignment
- •End-to-end launch execution
I secured dedicated design and engineering support and ran day-to-day product management, ensuring tight iteration cycles and metric ownership.
Beyond the front-end product, we stood up the full operating layer: retention and lifecycle communication channels, basic but functional social presence, customer experience training and workflows, and internal tooling to manage inventory exclusions and operational edge cases. This ensured the business was not just acquiring customers, but operating sustainably.
Building a Sustainable Acquisition Channel
- •Scaled from zero to $40M in annualized run rate
- •Built a profitable acquisition channel in a market where competitors were overspending
- •Established a differentiated brand and pricing strategy that avoided cannibalization
- •Ultimately transitioned to a strategic partner to maximize leverage and operational efficiency
Key Takeaway
Tickets.com proved that superior business outcomes come from treating acquisition channels as strategic product ecosystems, not marketing layers. By combining pricing strategy, product simplification, brand positioning, and operational design, we built a $40M revenue engine that strengthened—rather than weakened—the broader business.