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Enjoying the Good Seats
Denver-based SuiteHop wants you to live the high life, without having to fork over a year’s paycheck to do it.
Having spun out of Sports Shares in October, SuiteHop announced today it closed a $1 million round of funding. The money will be used for strategic hires, including a new developer and marketing manager, and for marketing initiatives. More hires are likely in the next few months.
The Suite Life
SuiteHop is a marketplace for suites (from one chair in the suite to the entire suite itself) for a single event. Typically, sales for suites are restricted to single or multi-year contracts, leaving most sporting fans and concert-lovers in the cold (or in the nosebleed seats). SuiteHop’s CEO Todd Lindenbaum knew there was extra inventory out there, going unused and burning a hole in someone’s pocket. His company allows both sides to win: those with extra spots in a suite can earn back some money, while sports-fans who typically don’t have access to suites can spend a few hours in the good seats.
Once a very successful product within Sports Shares, SuiteHop is a departure from the former’s business model. While Sports Shares holds a portfolio of suites for its clients to use, Suite Spot is a marketplace. “It’s a very different business from sports shares. It serves kind of the same market but in a much different capacity,” said Lindenbaum.
It’s an easier model to scale quickly, according to Lindenbaum, because the team doesn’t have to take on expensive inventory in new cities. As SuiteHop grows around the country, Sports Shares can piggyback on that growth to find new clients and potential customers.
Got an Extra Suite?
The marketplace is straightforward. Those with access to extra suite inventory can put list tickets/suites on the site. That inventory is then made available for others to purchase. Users can buy a single ticket in a shared suite, or go all-out and reserve an entire suite. Inventory mainly comes from teams and suite owners, although some ticket brokers are also involved. “There’s never been a marketplace just to help market suites,” said Lindenbaum.
Tickets aren’t cheap, after all, these are still premium spots.
$5 Million in Inventory
The website is up and running with more than $5 million in inventory across Denver, Atlanta, Washington DC, LA and other cities, but the team plans to continue improving the site over the next quarter. “We built this application from the ground up and everything is being built in house,” said Lindenbaum.
Over the next six months, Lindenbaum hopes to get more people selling on the exchange. The team is still working on the back-end of the site, which will allow sellers to directly input their own information; work on that should be done in the first quarter of 2015.
The site offers suites for concerts and sporting events. For example, sports fans might be interested in 20 spots in a suite for the Denver Nuggets game against the Miami Heat tomorrow night. The 14-person company is expanding as it sees its $1 million in revenue grow.
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