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Interview by Michael Zaro

Dallen Allred is the Founder of Stubtopia.com which is a website that provides a marketplace for buyers and sellers to exchange tickets for sporting and concert events.

Zaro: After you built Stubtopia up and claimed some fame, you started a new venture. Tell me more about it.

Allred: It’s in a similar space, I’ve been in the industry long enough that I feel like I can kind of see some market trends. And the market is definitely trending towards ease of printing and rapid dissemination of tickets. You may not know this but tickets have been printed on little pieces of paper or cardboard and bought and sold the same way for over 200 years. Recently online purchasing coupled with “email and print” tickets came along and really radically changed the market. Right now, about 50% of non-season tickets are printed from home. It makes a lot of sense because to have a company ship you the tickets costs like $15 because they need to have you sign for it.

Zaro: So what’s your angle on this new venture?

Allred: This is a new play on smartphone saturation since they’re projected to have between 80 and 90 percent market penetration by 2015. People are going to start using smartphones to buy their tickets. The technology has been around for 5 or 6 years and even Delta has been using it for boarding passes but nobody has really made an aggressive play in the live entertainment side. And part of that is probably because ticketmaster controls about 70 percent of live entertainment across the US. They’ve had to take on various forms even to skirt anti-trust laws. In a nutshell it involves being able to buy a ticket, get a scan-able code that you can then show at the venue for entrance. There’s a lot more we’ll be doing with it but I’ll leave it there for now.Zaro: Why do you enjoy being an entrepreneur in Utah?

Allred: Well, I was born and raised here and I love the area. Plus, I started Stubtopia while I was still in school at BYU so I kind of had to be here.

Zaro: Does that mean that you’ll leave to build your next company out of state?

Allred: No way. I love the culture here too much. We have a really smart and educated population here and they’re generally very honest and hard working which is great for starting a company. There’s just so many people in the area that you would feel comfortable starting something with, so I think I’ll most definitely stay here. I do wish that there was more access to capital here but I haven’t tried to raise capital outside of Utah so I may not be comparing apples to apples. It seems like it’s pretty tough to raise more than an angel or maybe a series A round here, so if you need some VC money you’ll probably have to start looking out of state. And you know, that could be a good thing or a bad thing, i mean, it would be nice if there was tons of money floating around but the lean startup model we all seem to stick to here seems like it keeps us out of the bubbles that Silicon Valley seems to be playing with. But to each his own.

Zaro: As you’re building the team for your next venture, where do you look and is there enough talent here to support a tech startup?

Allred: Honestly, for stubtopia we didn’t really have a “team” per se. I hired some guys to do contract work, some outsourced work from India built some stuff for me, I hired some students to build some of it, and we never really had a CTO. Looking back, we probably should have because it would have saved us a lot of headaches. So right now as I’m looking for a team, I’m looking for somebody who isn’t necessarily an engineer or developer, but more someone who understands their jobs and can manage the development team and make sure everyone is hitting deadlines and moving forward together. So I guess more than just coding skills, I look for more of an entrepreneurially minded, management minded computer scientist. Especially here in UT, there is so much talent that developers are almost a dime a dozen, and it’s not very difficult to find someone who will code your stuff for you, it IS hard to find someone who can code it, and make sure that it’s something that the customer wants, and that will be a good face for the company and possibly help raise money in the future.

Zaro: What resources did you draw on as you built your first company and do you think you’ll look to the same places this time around?

Allred: Yeah, one major resource we leveraged was the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at BYU. Being a student I had access to dozens of high caliber mentors who were willing to hear out my ideas and help me form them into something that had a good chance of success. There was specifically one mentor named Ben Peterson that came and spoke in a class that I was in and was talking about automation and streamlining and making sure the founders could remove themselves from the workflow chart or something like that and I took that lesson to heart. So because of that we made some tweaks to our software and I hired some coders to automate our ordering process, our fulfillment, our shipping and all of that kind of stuff and that was what made it possible for me to run Stubtopia and still stay in school. We had an RSS feed that would automatically send out the necessary information to our distributors that meant orders were automatically coming in and the shipping fields were all automatically populated so I could go to class for three hours and as long as someone was there to answer the phones during that time I could come back and all of the orders would just be sitting in a queue. And it was a pretty small office so I could just put them all together and ship them all out at once.

Zaro: So what advice do you have for other entrepreneurs who are looking to build the next big thing?

Allred: I would say bootstrap as much as possible and don’t just run out and raise a bunch of money. Well, maybe bootstrap isn’t even the right word, I would say, test at a small scale before you go out and spend a whole lot of time and resources building out a product so that you can prove out your assumptions quickly. Always make sure you are proving your assumptions and testing early and often. I mean this whole lean startup thing that everyone is talking about, especially around here at BYU, I think it’s right on the money. And having not been around tech startups my whole life and being relatively new in the space I’m honestly kind of surprised that this is as ground-breaking as everyone says because it seems like common sense that you should talk to your customers before you spend a bunch of time and money trying to guess what they want. I’m really glad we’re starting to get rid of business plans though!