This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, hello, welcome to Side Hustle School. Your host, Chris Guillebeau here. I hope your week is going well. I hope your month is going well. First month of the year, of course.
I hope you've been able to stay on track with those New Year's resolutions for goals for the year. And if you haven't, well, we've got a new month coming up in just a few days. It's always a good time to make progress on something that's important to you, even if it means making some changes, maybe turning some things around, tweaking, whatever you need to do. And today we have a listener question. We have a call, in fact, from Stillwater, Oklahoma, a listener who has recently dipped her toes into ticket reselling.
I don't think she's literally dipped her toes. That's just kind of an analogy. But she saw some success with Taylor Swift tickets, buying and reselling T-Swift tickets, sparking an interest in exploring this a bit further. However, she is now grappling with a common concern in the ticket reselling game, which is basically like the risk of being left with high price tickets she can't sell, which I think is an important concern. I think this happens a lot where somebody is able to sell some concert tickets or something else.
And they're like, oh, I'm just gonna keep doing this. I'm gonna scale this up. And now I'm gonna make my living from being a concert ticket reseller, or again, it could be some other item. And there are various pitfalls, like things that can go wrong along the way. So you definitely want to mitigate that risk as much as possible before you go all in on a project like that.
So let's talk about the risks of reselling concert tickets and what you can do to maximize your advantage, detailed question and my answer coming up in just 30 seconds. [Music]
Hey Chris, this is Lila from Stillwater, Oklahoma. I bought some Taylor Swift tickets last year and resold them for a $400 profit. Not every tour is as big as hers, of course, but I see potential. However, I'm concerned about something going with the ticket reselling at scale.
How can I avoid getting stuck with a bunch of high price tickets that no one wants to buy? [Music]
All right, so if you want to get into the world of ticket reselling, this is exactly the concern you should pay attention to. You want to find ways to acquire inventory that is in demand and not inventory that there is a great supply for, right? It's a very simple supply and demand question. You're going to make money if you buy tickets that people want and they can't access and you're going to lose money if there is great supply available or if additional supply is released later.
You can't completely avoid this risk, but you can get kind of scientific about it and I think that is the key. So platforms like StubHub and Ticketmaster, they will actually give you some of this data. They provide market insights and demand predictions for various events. You want to look at some other sources as well because of course, you know, these platforms have their own incentives, but utilizing these tools can help you gauge which events are worth investing in. And then sometimes there's some pre-sale opportunities.
So join fan clubs or use credit card pre-sale benefits like American Express, for example. They often offer early access to concert tickets for card holders. Those tickets can be resold. So sometimes there's an opportunity there. I think the main thing is you just don't want to put all of your money.
If you have, you know, X amount of money, like a few thousand dollars you want to devote towards this, don't put it all on one event. Like spread it around, treat it like a business. There's some other dynamic pricing tools like Price Labs and Beyond Pricing, which are adapted from the vacation rental market that can help you adjust your ticket prices based on real time demand and of course the competition. So basically what you want to do is you want to study this world. You want to get familiar with these tools and you want to diversify.
And by strategically doing this, you're going to minimize the risk of unsold tickets and make more informed reselling decisions. Hopefully you're going to profit, but at least you're not going to lose money. So that's my goal. Like first goal is not lose money, second goal is profit. I hope you achieve both of those goals.
I'm cheering you on. Of course, listeners, if you have a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. New episode every single day. Thanks for being out there. It's completely free.
My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
