BookMyShow

Understood the problem and defined BookMyShow's revenue streams from sports and music events. Compared two high-demand events and analyzed the occurrence of the same issue during ticket sales for both events.

For over 25 years, this company has weathered every challenge, proving its resilience and earning its legendary status. Now a market leader, it thrives on a trusted platform, solid relationships with theater operators and artists, and a robust tech infrastructure.

In 2023, India secured the rights to host the Cricket World Cup after a 12-year gap. In a cricket-obsessed nation, acquiring the ticketing rights for such a prestigious event was akin to hitting the bull's eye once again.

Sports events remain the highest revenue-generating category, with the market expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.2% year-over-year (TechSci Research, 2024).

Comparing two major high-demand events on BookMyShow, it’s evident that the platform faced similar challenges during both. These issues aren’t unique to BookMyShow but are also common on platforms like Amazon and Flipkart during surge periods, such as big sale days, highlighting a broader problem of managing high user demand efficiently.

The next step in the process is to define the actors involved in such events. Since we're focusing on music event tickets, let's consider the actors involved in organizing any high-demand event.

I noticed that low turnout has been a common concern for all actors involved, except for users and scalpers, as the actions of one actor negatively impacted the others. Eliminating scalpers would address the majority of scalping-related issues.

Although BookMyShow holds the throne when it comes to live event ticketing, Zomato, after acquiring Paytm Insider and launching District, has made a significant dent in BMS's market share. Zomato has also introduced a feature to tackle scalping.

The most important thing I focused on was mapping the lagging indicator with leading indicators. I realized that to increase customer satisfaction and the percentage of favorably rated sessions, I also needed to reduce the number of requests per session made by bots. You might be wondering, "Where did bots come from?" Well, many scalpers use bots to secure tickets. To maximize genuine user satisfaction, I had to tackle and reduce bot activity on the platform, as it directly impacts the number of tickets sold on third-party platforms.

If we could manage to cut down the number of concurrent requests made by bots we can easily decrease the number of scalpers by 95% (estimated %).

The JTBD framework

The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework emphasizes an outcome-driven innovation approach, and it uses the Importance vs. Satisfaction matrix to quantify opportunities for improvement.

We know where the problem lies and we know what we have to do now.

Defining a hypothesis is important because it provides a clear, testable statement or prediction that guides research. I validated my hypothesis with a user survey with 56 participants and did a lot of secondary research to store as evidence for my hypothesis validation.

Giving an identity to your user is important for understanding their needs, creating personalized experiences, aligning product decisions, and improving communication within teams, ensuring the product meets real user expectations.

The frustration of not getting a ticket was amplified when seeing it resold at 20x the price on a third-party platform with no regulation in place.

Until now, we've been focused on the problem space. Having broken it down further, we’ve now reached a point where we can work in the solution space. The more time we spend understanding the problem, the faster we'll be able to reach a solution.

After brainstorming I came up with three solutions and went ahead with the ticket market.

The implementation of market applying this system design.

That's how I solved the BookMyShow ticketing problem by applying the Lean Product methodology.