About

KIS Technologies is a ticketing company bootstrapped by Weldon, Williams, & Lick: a goliath in the ticket printing industry. Underneath KIS Technologies, I was responsible for two product lines: KIS Ticket and KIS Kiosk.

KIS Ticket is a general admission ticketing app for Android and online ticket sales. KIS Kiosk is a kiosk ticketing application that could be integrated with KIS Ticket, or other major ticketing platforms such as Ticketmaster.

Challenge

With the advent of modern ticketing applications, the digital ticketing sector has grown rapidly, while the paper ticketing business continues to shrink. In the fall of 2016, I was approached by one of the world’s oldest ticket printing companies, Weldon, Williams & Lick, Inc., to develop a ticketing application for general admission events.

The goal was to build a mobile app that could replace a series of obsolete ticketing machines that they were sunsetting. In addition, WW&L wanted to enable online sales and credit card transactions: features that their old device did not have.

Solution

I started the project by conducting extensive user and market research, including interviews with stakeholders at WW&L as well as users of the existing KIS Ticket machines.

Although the original KIS Ticket Machines (pictured below) were reliable, they could not process credit cards, required extensive programming to set up an event and had limited reporting capabilities. They could not sell tickets online and were all around pretty clunky. My goal was to take the best aspects of the old machine (simplicity and reliability) and bolster it with the added benefits of modern-day ticketing platforms.

Results

After 3 months of development, we launched our app at the Arkansas-Oklahoma State Fair. The main workflows of the system performed beautifully and the clients were impressed by the ease and speed of the system.

However, we quickly discovered gaps in the ticketing system. We were not able to reprint or re-email tickets for customers who lost their order. We also faced issues with connecting the printers and powering the tablets simultaneously, and our reports were not as easy to read as our customers would have liked.

Gathering this feedback, we worked on a feature to re-email users their tickets and an option to reprint. Additionally, we revisited our reports feature and vastly improved our reporting dashboard based on user feedback.

With our improved product, we were able to secure a spot selling parking tickets for State Fair of Texas, the world's largest state fair by attendance.

In the following year, we also managed to:

• Grow our ticket sales from around 35,000 to 400,000
• Grow our ticket fee revenue 1,000%
• Secure a second round of funding for $5M
• Secure a contract with the Texas State Fair (the largest state fair in the US) for parking
• Receive qualitative feedback from customers on the simplicity and ease-of-use of our system

Conclusion

By conducting thorough user and market research, and adapting to the needs of our users, we were able to scale KIS Ticket and KIS Kiosk from 0 to 1 to 1000, ending the project with millions of dollars in processed revenue for our clients, and receiving upstanding reviews of our platform. After leaving the company in 2020, our team went on to provide ticketing for the Los Angeles Auto Show and completing an integration with Ticketmaster, scaling to millions more in revenue.