This week we speak to Trishanth Chandrahasan – co-founder, alongside William Xue – of Whatslively, a smartphone app that advises music fans of tour dates as soon as they are announced for every concert happening in the country. The app advises of tour information before tickets go on sale and sends a notification minutes before tickets go on sale so fans can click straight through to the box office and obtain tickets.
ISB: What was the inspiration behind WhatsLively?
TC: William and I were working at a fintech company who placed us on projects together – me as product manager and William as product engineer. We bonded over our love for product design, and realised we shared the same heroes across music and art such as Steve Jobs, Kanye West and Walt Disney. When you work in the fintech space you are always looking for opportunities, so we decided to create something together for ourselves and WhatsLively was born.
We both value the profoundness and value live music gives to people, and realised people don’t experience it enough. We wanted to develop a technology that broke down the biggest barrier that prevented people from getting out to more live music – knowing when and where your favourite band, DJ or performer is playing, so you can plan to go and see them. Hence our motto/slogan, “more live music”.
ISB: You are completely self-funded – why is that and what is your plan to scale the business?
TC: We have a unique vision for our product that we don’t believe any investor out there in Australia can truly resonate with. This is a vision where we highly value design, technology and having a consumer-first focus. First and foremost, we are all about helping Australians get out and enjoy the magic that is live music. Investors or investment companies will see the value in the service and our visions, but their decisions and guidance will have a different motivation. We want to make Whatslively a sustainable business without venture capital, the old-fashioned way.
Over the years we have seen countless technology firms, several in music tech, secure funding from venture capital funds, only to go out of business a few years later. Some of these businesses were great and loved by consumers but ruined by the fast and unorganic venture capital route. We are open to meeting investors and happy to our mind’s changes on this, but we just don’t see it in Australia, as investors here are not interested in the long game but, rather, short-term returns.
ISB: You have partnered with all the major ticketing outlets – was that a challenge to set up?
TC: We have engineered and designed our own sophisticated and bespoke CMS system to facilitate and capture all live music listening in Australia. Our whole system is a sophisticated CMS that connects to all ticketing outlets in Australia. This is one of many challenges as we must keep our data correct and comprehensive. WhatsLively is connected to, and integrated with, every major ticketing agency in Australia including Ticketek, Ticketmaster, Moshtix, Oztix and Eventbrite. One of many challenges we have is keeping our data correct and comprehensive.
WhatsLively takes feed from venue websites, promotion websites and ticketing agencies in Australia to create and administer those automations multiple times a day – no one else in Australia has this system that took us to years to build and to create a maintenance system for.
ISB: What makes your app unique in its field?
TC: We are the only comprehensive live music listings company covering Australia nationally, and the only app of its kind in Australia.There are concert tracker apps that share some of our features, but we provide more comprehensive service and value to the live music fan in terms of discovery and planning.
On top of being a comprehensive listing of gigs and helping fans get alerts and reminders, our platform is the only concert guide in the world that allows users to filter concerts by intimate settings, theatres, large arena shows and music festivals so they can pick the experience, setting and type of music they want to see live. We all have different tastes and WhatsLively recognises and caters for those experiences. The app also links to users Spotify and Apple Music account to intuitively inform of upcoming concerts from fans’ playlists.
ISB: How do you envision WhatsLively growing and developing in the next couple of years?
TC: Once we nail monetisation here in Australia, we will flick the switch to the Americas and Asia. We will investigate financial investment at that point, especially for market the size of the US. The good thing is there is nothing really like WhatsLively there. We are working closely with the ticketing agencies as affiliates to help us achieve a technology and business model that can be taken overseas.
Over the past 12 months we have experienced skyrocketing growth following our investment in the app and launch of the website. Part of that success can be attributed to improving functionality, adding new features and the aesthetic of both the app and website which make them easy to use.
We have built WhatsLively as a fan-first business and that will continue to lead our research and development, improvements in our offering and our aim to traverse international borders.
