On line for a big ticket play

KyaZoonga. No, this is definitely not the next Bollywood blockbuster. But, if its founders have their way, it may well become synonymous with online buying of sports and entertainment tickets and merchandise.

Started in 2007 by Neetu Bhatia, her brother Akash and Arpita Majumder, KyaZoonga, says Neetu, is “unarguably the only ticketing company in the sub-continent that owns its entire intellectual property.”

During one of her visits to India from the US five years back, Neetu, an engineer-turned-career-investment banker based in New York, found to her dismay that there was no single place where she could find what movies were playing where, and even if she did manage to get that information, there was no guarantee that she would be able to get tickets.

Back in the US, she sounded out her brother who was working in the Silicon Valley whether they could start a venture that would aggregate and sells movie ticket online, to begin with. Both Neetu and Akash quit their careers in the US and returned to India with a new business idea. They then roped in Arpita Majumder, a management consultant, who is the start-up's chief operating officer.

Thus was born KyaZoonga.

What does it mean? “We were christened by adman Prahlad Kakkar. When we put the idea together he wanted us to adopt a name which was not too basic. We wanted to create an experience for the customer and give it a name that would stand out,” says Neetu, 37, who is working on her laptop in the busy lobby of the Park Sheraton in Chennai as we meet for the interaction.

KyaZoonga first started off selling movie tickets online. Neetu, co-founder, Chairman and CEO of KyaZoonga, admits that it was a bit of a challenge to convince the multiplex operators to give KyaZoonga their inventory of tickets.

The multiplex operators' dilemma was: they were competing with each other for seats, on ticket prices, content and timings. If this be so, how could Neetu and her team offer all the tickets on a single platform. Her answer was simple.

“Leave the technology to us, we will take care of that, as long as you give us your inventory.” Customers would benefit and hence the entire value chain too would stand to gain. One by one, the multiplex operators were convinced.

Big task

This was the way to go, says Neetu, especially for an entertainment crazy nation like India. The next big task was to sell tickets for sports events online. Which too they managed successfully. So well that KyaZoonga bagged the mandate to sell the 2011 cricket World Cup tickets. The World Cup was played in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India.

This, admits Neetu, was a big challenge, as it involved working in three countries, multiple locations and multiple currencies. There were two million tickets that had to be sold. Along with being the sole ticketing company for the World Cup, the International Cricket Council, which organised the tournament, also allowed KyaZoonga to sell merchandise.

That is, if someone was buying tickets for an India match, he or she could also buy the team jersey, cap and such stuff. “We ended up selling more merchandise as ICC's ticketing partner than ICC's own merchandise store did,” says Neetu.

Merchandise biz

The company then realised that selling merchandise, especially sports-related, was a big business opportunity. “We realised that we were sitting on this huge opportunity that we wanted to explore. After the World Cup, we started on this and added it to the platform,” says Neetu.

KyaZoonga is now also an e-store where one can buy merchandise related to movies, events, sports and games – DVDs, CDs, cricket gear and the like. The core, asserts Neetu, is ticketing. “We provide the access and all of the value adds that go with it.”

She declines to go into the company's financials and how much the founders have invested but adds that it raised a Series A venture capital funding in 2007 from King Street Capital, a US-based $22-billion hedge fund based out of New York.

Funding plans

KyaZoonga, she adds, is breaking even and turning the corner on profits. With the growth plans it has, she reckons that KyaZoonga will go in for the next round of funding in the next few months. The company has had a few enquiries, but how much to raise and from whom will depend on how its plans roll out.

Selling tickets online for entertainment and sports is a huge business. Neetu estimates that it will be around Rs 5,000 crore (a billion dollars). While a lot of multiplexes and movie theatres have their own Web sites selling tickets, KyaZoonga's advantage is that it aggregates all these on a single platform.

She reckons that about a fourth of all movie tickets are sold online now and this figure is only bound to increase. “The ticketing business itself, we are only scratching the surface.”

She feels that KyaZoonga has overcome the initial challenge, that of educating its clients on the advantages of selling tickets over the Internet. In the last four and a half years, the company has built trust.

“We collect the money. We are the custodians of our clients' money. Every single client of ours gets access to the report from the time the first ticket is sold to the time the final reconciliation is done. They will know exactly where the ticket was sold, how it was sold and who is buying it.”

KyaZoonga is also doing the ticketing for some of the IPL teams. It takes care of the tickets and the merchandise. Apart from selling tickets for the World Cup in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, KyaZoonga has handled an event in the Maldives. The growth could come from overseas also, which the company is confident of handling. As it grows, it will see its staff strength also increase from 40 now.

Please send feedback, comments or suggestions to >emergingentrepreneurs@thehindu.co.in

COMMENT NOW