Ignacio Bachiller: Live Entertainment's Operating System

Charlie Melcher:

As many of you know who listen to this show, I’m an experienced junkie. I love going to all the coolest, immersive art, theater, dining, and gaming experiences, but how does one find the coolest things to do, especially when you’re visiting a new city? The answer is Fever. The leading live entertainment discovery platform that’s doing for live experiences, what Netflix did for film and TV. Their platform is a win-win for both consumers and creators. It allows users to find curated events that are tailored to their interests and locations, while also giving event producers the opportunity to use data to grow their audiences, expand to new markets and improve their offerings.

 

Fever is now in over a hundred cities around the globe and has more than 125 million users. Last year, it raised $227 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs, and it’s currently valued at well over a billion dollars. As the demand for immersive, personalized, and memorable experiences continues to grow, Fever is filling a valuable niche in the market and striving to become the operating system of the live entertainment industry. That’s what makes our guest today, Fever’s CEO and co-founder Ignacio Bachiller, a real expert on the experience economy in action. I’m excited to sit down with Ignacio to learn about what’s made Fever so successful and how they’re trying to help creators expand the market for live and immersive entertainment. Please join me in welcoming Ignacio Bachiller. Ignacio, welcome to the Future of StoryTelling podcast.

Ignacio Bachiller:

Thank you very much. Very excited to be here. It’s been a long time coming.

Charlie Melcher:

I know. I’m so excited. I’ve been looking forward to this for many months. Well, I wanted to start by asking you about the origins of Fever. How did you start that company?

Ignacio Bachiller:

Yeah, so we launched the product in late 2014. I graduated from MIT as an in mechanical engineering student some months before. And really what got us excited when we launched the company was, on one side as a user, mind blown by the fact that there was no discovery platform for curated live entertainment. There was a lot of ticketing softwares out there, none of which really thought about it from a discovery standpoint. No one was really going to any of those platforms to decide what to do.

Charlie Melcher:

Just transaction, really.

Ignacio Bachiller:

Pure transaction, which by the way is a necessary part, maybe could be done better, which was also something that we thought that we would try and resolve. And then on the organizer or event creator side, we also try to put ourselves in their shoes and we’re thinking if I were an event organizer, aside from the transactional part of the ticketing, which is important, but it’s one thing out of many where technology can play a role and influence and support event creators. And so we started to think about all those different layers where we could with technology and data, help the event creators and all the stakeholders involved in live entertainment, whether it’s venues, whether it’s IP owners, whether it’s event creators, designers, producers, promoters. And that’s where we thought we would start, which is to build a platform where we could really distribute live entertainment, create high quality content, and be a marketing platform for these amazing experiences happening around the world.

Charlie Melcher:

And I thought I had read that you had started originally with a slightly different idea and you ended up pivoting as many companies do when you sort of discovered where maybe the real opportunity was, is that not right?

Ignacio Bachiller:

I would say rather than pivot, it was more of an evolution, a natural evolution, which we were not aware of at that time. So maybe that can also be considered a pivot, but I think it’s more an evolution. So we started off purely on the marketplace approach, distributing and curating content and really working hard to become that reference platform for users to go to, to find high quality events in their home city. Over time we realized that we were building such scale both across categories as well as geographically, that we were in a very unique and privileged position whereby we could see firsthand how trends were evolving, where there were gaps in supply. And with that information and a lot of investment into a high quality engineering team and content analytics team and so on, we could actually start helping event creators beyond just driving demand, but also in predicting potential success of a new format that is in the making or even in helping them understand whether or not there would be demand for their experience in a city beyond their home city.

Charlie Melcher:

And describe what the Fever product is now, in case some of our listeners haven’t had the pleasure of going on it yet.

Ignacio Bachiller:

I would think of Fever as the go-to live entertainment discovery platform in your city. So if you are thinking of doing anything outside of home, other than maybe going to the local bar for a beer, Fever is the place to go to. It is a destination platform to really understand what’s happening in your city, what are the high quality experiences that are attracting a lot of attention, and also the platform where you can not only discover but also buy those experiences. That’s how I would define it in a nutshell. There’s of course different elements that we provide, especially on the creator side, but as a consumer, that’s what I would think is the easiest description.

Charlie Melcher:

You talk about helping people to discover live experiences. What is it about Fever that actually helps them to discover it as opposed to just having a listing or a kind of catalog, if you will?

Ignacio Bachiller:

So there were always catalogs of things to do in a city. The challenge that we saw with those prior catalogs is that the way that they were curated was mostly dependent on the criteria of a certain expert who may or may not be in tune with what you get excited about. If we want to be the destination platform for discovering and purchasing experiences in your city, we want to make sure that we’re doing this across all categories. Because you as a user one day will want to go to an immersive Van Gogh experience, another day you’ll want to go to a candlelight experience, and then another day you’ll want to go to the X Games, but it’s the same user. So we really only become helpful to you if we can help you across all of those.

Charlie Melcher:

That helps to explain what was going to be another question of mine, which is that when I first became aware of Fever, I heard you just be described as a immersive entertainment discovery platform, and now I hear you describe it as a live entertainment platform discovery platform. What is the difference between those two?

Ignacio Bachiller:

I would say the former describes more whatever the trend is that is currently most relevant. And so given that we do a pretty good job at serving content that is relevant to people at any given point in time, perhaps during a certain period, given the boom in immersive experiences we had, and continue to have a lot of immersive experiences because that’s what is getting a lot of excitement, but that is not all that people are consuming. There’s a lot of other verticals and a lot of other types of experiences that are not immersive and are equally exciting that we are also distributing on our platform. So it’s more about what is the trend, and hopefully that will always be the case whenever there is a specific trend that is very relevant. A lot of users will see us as the platform to discover events that are in line with that trend as well as a lot of other things. So I think that’s probably the difference.

Charlie Melcher:

And I like the way you describe it as a trend in immersive experience because I certainly think about that back when, say those immersive museums were all the trend, the Museum of Ice Cream and Color and All Spice and all that, and then it became the art exhibits, the Van Gogh and many others, and it just feels like there is an evolution taking place in the world of immersive entertainment. I wonder if you could comment on how you see it evolving and where you see it heading.

Ignacio Bachiller:

So I get this question a lot because there’s some level of expectation that as a CEO of this live entertainment discovery platform that I have some level of insight that others perhaps don’t. The reality is that I don’t know where it’s going. What I do know is that we will be the first to know where it’s heading.

Charlie Melcher:

Let’s talk about predictive analysis. That’s one of the things that really differentiates what you’ve done at Fever and you referenced Netflix. We had a guest on the podcast a while ago, Todd Yellen, who spoke of Future of StoryTelling from Netflix, and he taught me something about how it used to be that people would think you could understand somebody by their zip code. Oh, you live in that swanky zip code, we know what you’re going to want to watch. And of course, it turns out that that’s not true and that in fact the best predictive tool is what you’ve actually done already. So obviously being able to track the things they have watched and getting very sophisticated about understanding the distinctions and things you put in your queue are also not necessarily things you’re going to watch. You might put that important documentary in your queue with the intention of watching it, but instead ended up with that comedy or action movie. How does that play out in the world of live events? How are you observing how somebody interacts with that content?

Ignacio Bachiller:

Well, so we’ve built a destination discovery platform, and so when people are coming to you time and time again to discover what to do in their city, they’re revealing to you what it is they’re excited about what, and that’s how we get a good understanding of trends, just what are people interacting with, what do they swipe over, what do they observe, what do they share, and so on. And that is much more helpful than what they actually end up perhaps buying or what they end up liking on social media.

Charlie Melcher:

You are in about 100 cities now, is that right? Or more?

Ignacio Bachiller:

Slightly more like 130.

Charlie Melcher:

130. And you’re able to see these different interests and trends. Does it vary greatly what people want to do in different cities?

Ignacio Bachiller:

Yeah, it does. I mean, you’d be surprised that there’s a lot of trends that are much more global than you’d think. Then there’s always of course a localization for… And even for the same experience, there might be things that you want to tweak on a local level to make it more appealing or more relevant, but there are a lot of trends that travel, much like you would see the success of a TV show being relevant in more than one market. And so in live entertainment, that was maybe less obvious, but what we’ve seen is by providing this global platform through which we can very quickly pick up on a trend and help that trend travel by skating that experience to more markets and it being very successful in doing so, that’s when you realize that actually a lot of trends are very global.

Charlie Melcher:

But you’re trying to help that producer really know whether it’s going to work before they pick up their show and move it to another country. Do you do that by AB testing or by pre-orders?

Ignacio Bachiller:

No, it’s more to the point that I mentioned before about observing. So given that we have such a density in all these markets around the world, and we have a very good understanding of what those trends are, it’s quite easy for us to predict whether or not something would be successful if it were to travel to a certain city based on the understanding we have of the user over there. It’s not super specific, yes or no, but it gives a very good indication. And the reality is that in the live entertainment space, it’s been purely in… Those decisions have been purely intuition based, so being able to de-risk and provide some insights on that has been very helpful.

Charlie Melcher:

About 20 years ago, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore wrote the book, the Experience Economy, where they predicted that we were moving into an age where people would value experiences over products or services. Are you an example of that? Is that a trend that you really see happening and accelerating?

Ignacio Bachiller:

Definitely. So one of the things that we were betting on as well when we were building the business is that tailwind of change in customer behavior and spend patterns. So we care much less about owning goods, about buying cars, buying houses, and what you really care about at the end of the day is whether you are enjoying life in the moment and creating memories, creating unique moments with friends, with loved ones, and that’s what people are really willing to pay for. When we think about, I don’t know, buying an online app for gaming, the reality is people struggle a lot with paying even $1 for an app on the App Store, which is a pity because a lot of work goes into creating those apps. But when you think about live entertainment, people are willing to spend a lot of money to create those memories and those unique moments. And so that’s definitely something that we’re seeing.

Charlie Melcher:

Where are some of the best places in the world for immersive?

Ignacio Bachiller:

A lot of the origination of the first immersive art experiences, for example, were in France, in Belgium, which kind of makes sense because there’s a lot of art and there’s a lot of culture that is stemming from those markets. And that’s where we saw that there was a lot of very interesting content that we were seeing and what we ultimately then helped scale to international markets. So the reality is that there’s different types of immersive experiences that we’re seeing are stemming from different parts of the world. And there’s some markets that are good originators of content. For example, if you think about a market like Korea, there’s a very strong culture in general in Korea, and there’s a massive opportunity to help export that culture. Spain, for example, there’s a great experience that we’re working on now where we’re helping Flamenco travel the world and that’s beautiful. And this again, in line with this mission of helping export culture.

Charlie Melcher:

Tell me something funny or interesting that you learned about differences in different cultures in terms of experiential entertainment.

Ignacio Bachiller:

In some cultures, for example, people enjoy dressing up, dancing and being very out there. And there are other countries where that same experience, people might show up and behave completely in a different manner. And so that has happened in the US for example, or in the UK, people are familiar or excited about going to an event and knowing that there’s going to be participation and that you’re going to be called out in the audience and that you’re going to be sort of put on the spot. In other markets, especially when you go to Asia, there’s some countries where that’s just not something that people will want or enjoy. And so it’s very important to be sensitive to those things and identify them before you take an experience internationally. You learn a lot in that sense, and that’s why we also put in a lot of effort of sharing those learnings very quickly amongst ourselves so that when we’re working with a partner that is going through that journey of taking their experience to different countries, that they don’t have to go through those same learnings.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m wondering what you see as some of the pain points for the producers that you work with.

Ignacio Bachiller:

So first of all, and this was one of the key drivers for us to launch the business was driving demand. And so, one thing is to produce, build, create an experience, and another is to communicate about that experience in such a way that you sell out. But regardless of size or scale of the producers and the experience they have, there’s always more learnings that we can bring to the table because of that cross-category knowledge we have. Another big area that I would consider a pain point is how to scale as a producer and get to the next level. How do I go from one event to five events, from one city to five cities? That’s a super risky move for an event organizer. If you have an experience that is generating your bid down a yearly basis, why would you risk destroying all your years of hard work by following your ambition of wanting to do that in a new city? And that’s what we’ve seen as been a bottleneck to growth.

Charlie Melcher:

Another thing that I’ve certainly noticed is that a lot of these projects end up being site specific and the possibility to travel to them, it wasn’t an option when they were building them, so they didn’t build them with that in mind. They’ve got everything invested in this unique piece of real estate and now the lease is up or it’s not up, but it prohibits them from picking it up and moving it anywhere else without incredibly large upfront costs. And I wonder how you feel about the need for a system of movie theaters. Hollywood didn’t thrive until there was some standardization for the movie theater.

Ignacio Bachiller:

Yeah, there’s definitely a need for sites for these experiences. The formats have evolved. The rate at which these experiences are changing and traveling has also evolved, and the current real estate availability has not adapted to that. And you’re completely right. So we’re starting to see more flexible spaces. And by the way, some experiences are built very successfully by investing and building a space and staying there forever. And then they just are constantly renewing or bringing new attractions or reasons for people to come to that show and come back on a recurring basis. But we are seeing that finally a lot of the real estate developers and a lot of the spaces that were already there are adapting and being more flexible so that there can be that churn of content.

Charlie Melcher:

I wonder about the types of people that you see bringing together. Is Fever playing a role of helping to foster innovation and new connections between different types of creators and technologists and storytellers?

Ignacio Bachiller:

100%. That’s one of the things that as we’ve grown our presence globally and as we’ve grown our presence across different categories, we’ve helped that cross pollination between sectors. So maybe creators who were typically only working on the creative of a certain category, suddenly they are now being connected through Fever to the producer doing something in a different category. And to your point, those lines between categories are sometimes being blurred, and that’s really exciting to see. And someone who has a very good expertise doing something specific for an event can very easily translate those into other categories. Or even people who have typically been doing work for hire as creative consultants or as creative agencies are now suddenly realizing that they have the means through Fever to build an experience that they can themselves own and benefit from versus just providing those services.

 

And so given that we have this international presence, we find ourselves in situations where the organizers and producers we work with, they’ll come to us and say, I want to do something in this country. Who can I partner with? And we try to be that friend that accompanies them in that journey, and more and more we’re being that connective tissue.

Charlie Melcher:

So we really are in this era of a transition from what I would call sort of traditional media where it’s fixed and linear and passively consumed and mostly geared towards our eyes and our ears, to an age where we are embodied and immersed and participatory and social, and it’s two-way or interactive. And so there’s a lot of experimentation going on and a lot of opportunity to reinvent old forms or create new ones. I’m interested in any example that you’ve had from the work you do at Fever in helping to discover some new form or new appetite for a kind of experience that’s different from an older one.

Ignacio Bachiller:

When we think about music and the way in particular, classical music has been consumed over centuries, I was going to say decades, but actually centuries, that format was delivered in a specific way, and there’s a specific audience that is interested in that type of content. What we saw and tried to resolve was, or even ask ourselves the question of is it a matter of the format which is not appealing to users within a younger demographic, for example, or is it just that people don’t care about watching a string quartet performing? And that was a very interesting one because we really wanted to push that further and run some analysis and play with the format. And that’s how our classical music concerts, kind of like classical music concerts were born.

Charlie Melcher:

And how are yours different?

Ignacio Bachiller:

They’re different in the sense that they are much shorter. So instead of going to a four-hour opera, which it’s one of those things that you probably should do at some point, but maybe it’s not an every week sort of thing. That was one of the things that we identified was a problem in a certain demographic, that big time commitment price, and then also having to dress up. The formal atmosphere around a lot of these experiences, almost like what happens with wine. Sometimes I don’t even want to look at the menu because I’m going to make a fool of myself, or similar mindset in classical music. And so we really wanted to democratize in a way how classical music is presented, how it’s distributed, how it’s communicated about. Then that is a very good example in my opinion, of how we were able to influence format from the very beginning.

Charlie Melcher:

These are the candlelight concerts?

Ignacio Bachiller:

Correct.

Charlie Melcher:

So you also added candlelight to the concert.

Ignacio Bachiller:

Yes. That was another big thing, which is the atmosphere. The proximity to the artist, the atmosphere that the candles, the beautiful venues bring to the experience. That was also a key element of it, of course.

Charlie Melcher:

One criticism that I’ve heard about Fever, and tell me if this is true or not, is that if you’re a producer, you don’t necessarily get to have control of the data of the ticket buyers. They obviously are working through your system, and that works very well because you get to use it for predictive analysis and they’re benefiting from that use of data that you have from other events. But is that true? Is that a concern for some producers?

Ignacio Bachiller:

Not at all. The reality is that by working with us, they have access to more data than they ever had. So when we’re working together on experiences, any data that they need or would like to get, they can have. In fact, we find ourselves a lot of times being very proactive on providing all sorts of insights and access to data, much more than any producer organizer could consume in a way. And so what we’re doing is turning these into recommendations, into insights that they can act upon. But I would say very confidently that Fever is a platform that provides the most data to any organizer.

 

I mean the look on a lot of our partners eyes when we show them the dashboards that we have, that they can access, where they’re seeing the demographics, they’re seeing where people are buying from, they’re seeing the behaviors over time when they’re buying, all these different insights that they can have access to, there really is a lot of exciting stuff that you can learn about your customers. And one of the things that we’re getting better at is delivering that in a way that you can act on.

Charlie Melcher:

Do you see other larger, big brands making a move into immersive and live experience?

Ignacio Bachiller:

That’s a very good question, and the answer is yes. Anything that can be considered an IP, that has a fandom behind it, that is somewhat global, has the opportunity to leverage that IP and deliver an experience to users across the world. If you think about sports teams, sports leagues, artists, these are all different forms of IP that have a following and that are only able to do a physical performance, whether that be a game or a show at any given point in a specific time. For now, people can’t clone themselves. And those are all realizing that they can use their IP, which is very powerful in their fandom to connect with their fans around the world in a meaningful way through experiences. And of course, other categories and verticals of IP are realizing that they can do something similar.

Charlie Melcher:

I remember reading in American history during the Gold Rush out in San Francisco that the people who made the real money were the ones who were selling the pickaxes and the shovels, not the people who were doing the prospecting. And I wonder if there isn’t a little bit of that here for Fever. I feel like you guys are providing a kind of infrastructure and set of tools that will enable so many different creators and producers to be able to be successful with immersive and live events. Do you feel that way? Like you’re providing the infrastructure, you’re providing the tools to feed this whole growth industry?

Ignacio Bachiller:

Yeah, definitely. We see ourselves as the operating system of the industry in a way. That’s what we’d like to achieve. We want to be seen as the valuable and helpful partner that with technology, with data can help any relevant stakeholder that is responsible in some shape or form for delivering a professional high quality experience. So the reality is that our incentives are always very aligned with the incentives of our partners. And in the case of the originals, we are always doing this alongside a producer. So that’s something that culture is very important for us in the company, which is we want our partners, our network globally to benefit from our success as well. And that’s something that is constantly coming up in internal conversations, is we want to be seen as that value add partner that is sharing in the success.

Charlie Melcher:

And basically the whole industry, right? Because all rising waters raise all boats. And one of the pain points we didn’t talk about is that there are not enough people experienced in the space yet.

Ignacio Bachiller:

Yeah. No, there’s definitely a professionalization of the live entertainment industry, some categories more than others, but in general we like to think that we’re helping contribute to that. So you can’t get away at least through Fever with delivering a bad experience. If you’re a bad organizer and you are cutting corners and you’re not delivering a good experience, people through Fever at least will not want to come back to your experience, and we won’t want to work with you if that’s the case. And so we are in a way making more visible those who are providing good experiences versus those who are not. And that’s why we also make sure that we keep a curated platform, so we’re working with professional event creators. This is not a platform where you can simply upload your house party, as cool as that may be. And that’s something that we stand by quite firmly.

Charlie Melcher:

Ignacio, it’s really such a pleasure to get to spend some time and learn, and I’m so excited for what you’re doing. I really do believe it’s going to make a huge difference, already has and will continue expanding the world of live and immersive entertainment. So bravo and [inaudible 00:30:44] and thank you.

Ignacio Bachiller:

No, thank you. It’s been great. It’s always exciting to take a step back and have a conversation, especially with someone as experiences as yourself in the industry. There’s always a lot to learn. So very excited and thanks again for the opportunity.

Charlie Melcher:

Thank you again to Ignacio for joining me on today’s podcast. To check out the Fever website or app, please see the links in this episode’s description. Again, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of The Future of StoryTelling, and I just wanted to say thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to the FoST podcast. I’d also encourage you to sign up for the FoST newsletter, which is filled with useful information and articles for storytellers, creators, and marketers. It’s free and you can find it on our website at FoST.org. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts and Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.