A New Way to Attend Festivals Feat: Ed Vincent

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Hosted by Dr. Dustin Steffey co hosted by Jaden row this is chopping fire the number one business and self development podcast on Apple podcast finds at WWW dot chopping wood fire.com Without further ado, enjoy the Episode

Hello, and welcome to an episode of shopping with fire. You're joined with your host today Dustin Steffey Jayden unfortunately couldn't make it because he is out there getting smart in class. So you guys are stuck with me today. That being said, let's go over a few things before I introduce our special guest today. First and foremost, our home charity, as you guys know is Cystic Fibrosis. That being said, if you guys can please go to C F F dot o RG backslash donate today. Every little bit helps. Again remember as Jane explains cystic fibrosis is a rare disease that causes breathing issues. It's very rare. It just is a detrimental like disease that we have no cure for but we do have medicine and advances based off of everybody's donation. So please, if you have not done so already, go to C F F dot o RG forward slash donate today. Also, Jaden and I announced last week, we are looking at having our second live event and our last live event for this year in the Fort Collins Colorado area. If you have not done so already, please book your calendars for the Saturday before Thanksgiving. That is when we are going to decide to have it. The topics being discussed at that live event will be solely based off of crypto. So that way we can help our listeners invest and make some money. Again, if you guys want to go please keep listening on as the week's come up, where we can give you more and more information. Lastly, if you guys have not done so already, please visit our website at WWW dot chopping with fire CHOPPINWITH F I R e.com. On our website houses all the guests we've had in the past with their profiles, and links to their websites and other important social media information and houses all of our episodes as well in case you don't have Apple iTunes or Spotify or any other major podcast platform. And lastly, it houses our blog and sponsors. So please, if you have not done so already, take a look at that website. And also follow us on social media for important and critical updates. With that being said, I'm excited to just dive right into it. I want to introduce our guest today. He's the founder and CEO of the festival paths. Ad Vincent, welcome to the show.

Hey, how you doing Justin? Glad to be here.

Good. How are you buddy?

Good, good, good. Just finally getting some reprieve in Austin, Texas with a little little better weather it's used it was over 100 degrees for a month straight. Now it's a little cooler.

Austin's my favorite place because it's so everybody explains it differently. For me. I liked the art. And I like country and culture part of it. So I love Austin. So

yeah, it's a good place I got here about two years ago from New York City. And I'm here to stay like it. It has a nice mix of all different cultures and a lot of music, a lot art, and a lot of good stuff a lot, a lot of beer gardens and good old country.

I'll just have to come visit us since I don't live there. So, absolutely. Sounds good. So tell me a little bit about yourself and, and the listeners of course, too. I I'm excited because again, festival paths when I when I think of it without you even going into any details. I'm like, sweet Burning Man, Coachella. South by Southwest, I'm thinking like big things here. Sure.

So I'll give you some context. The one thing I want to share even before we get into it is festival pass is not only festivals, it's, that's just the name. We have live events of all types, concerts, professional sporting events, college sporting events, small venue, music, Broadway theater, all the above. So I just want to put that little caveat there is everybody knows that it's it's much more than just festivals. I just believe everything's a festival in the big picture is when you get people together and have a lot of fun. Festivities happen. So I'll give you a little little the background is context as always help. I've been an entrepreneur for well over 20 plus years. Festival paths is actually my fifth company. I left investment banking in 1999, to start an E commerce company. And so that in 2001, and then for most of the 2000s, I spent time in experiential marketing I had about a 70 person agency in New York City. And we would bring big brands, to big live events, whether those live events were festivals or concerts, but really how to activate brands. In that capacity. We helped launch a couple festivals like the Vail Film Festival, as well as worked with other festivals like Sonoma Valley Film Festival, and even had our own down in Dominican Republic. We also built a pretty cool hotel with Maxim magazine down there for a little while up until the height of 2018 in real estate last where I don't think it continued thereafter, but very cool stuff. Fast forward a little bit, I had a SaaS business in the retail and franchise space, all that in 2014. And then prior to a festival pass, I founded a predictive analytics, which is a data and analytics company in the entertainment space. So a lot of big clients there like a&e networks, AMC Networks, all those lovely shows that your visitors might, your listeners might know Mad Men Breaking Bad, you know, walking, dead, all that kind of stuff. We've worked with a lot of film studios and in various film, and entertainment assets to really help them identify and understand their core underlying consumer audience. And then fast forward to today. So LAUNCH Festival pass about two and a half, three years ago, right before the pandemic, brilliant to launch it rather than its company before the pandemic. But there's silver lining to everything gave us a lot of time and energy to put forth into building the infrastructure, the business model and all the partnerships that bring us to where we are today with over 80,000 live events on the platform and 600,000 hotels that people can access and redeem their credits for to go to

excellent. I have a couple of questions. And I'm sure if I weren't, if I weren't asking them, someone else would be festival pass. Is this heart of the metaverse for crypto and, and all of that as well to where everything is kind of starting to go to web three or no?

Yeah, so it was built initially, as a web two company. It's a marketplace business. However, we are very, very much pro web three. And everything we've been doing over the last year, and we'll do into the future has web three elements. And we'll get into it as we keep talking. But in addition to the core underlying business model, we just this past week went live with the public meant for our lifetime NFT and I could share about what we're doing in that capacity. I think the big thing is, when we built the company from day one, it it was built upon web three, philosophical nature. So everything we've always wanted to do from day one was about membership and community. And the idea that if you come and become a member, whether you're paying a monthly subscription fee or an annual fee, you're a member of the festival paths community. And in that capacity, you're sharing your passions of music, your passions of sports, with other like minded people that are connecting, you know, before events, getting their tickets on a platform and then continuing that journey. At the event itself in real life, and then as, as web three became a little more popular alized and 2020 2021. With, you know, NF T's kind of taking off. There's obviously a lot more to work through love to get into it. I'm very deep in in web three. But what I loved about what it did for us is it took our current business model, and extended it to a place where the philosophical and technological opportunities are just endless.

Be careful what you wish for, because we do want to talk about web three, not today, obviously. So I'll just have you back to talk about it. Because it is a big deal. And there's a lot of people that don't know, right, and so you and I can probably address that a little bit today, and a lot of it on another episode for sure. Um, that being said, festival paths if if I were to enroll today, right, what does that allow me aside from being a part of a excellent community and sharing my passions? Does that afforded me the ability to actually get tickets and other things at a better rate where it doesn't sell out on me? Or is it cheaper? Or is this just community based?

All the above? So I always like to think about it in the sense of, you know, why does somebody join Amazon Prime? And if I asked 100 people that question 98 would come back and say, I do it for the free shipping. Right? And once you get free shipping, what else do you get, you also get discounts at the supermarket that Amazon owns Whole Foods, you get free movies across Amazon Prime and a host of other benefits. So I look at festival pass in a similar moniker and in the live event space is when people join festival pass, whether through a monthly or annual subscription. And what they do is they get access, they receive credits for their monthly or annual subscription fee. And they can spend those credits. Over 80,000 Live Events are up to 600,000, hotel room nights we have on our platform. So in doing so, the first thing that happens is they never pay an additional fee. So in the traditional ticketing world, what happens is people people get frustrated where they go to buy a ticket, and then all of a sudden, there's 50% fees on top of it by the time they checkout, that lack of transparency gets very frustrating. So what we do is the price that we're charging in credits is the exact price there's there's it's full transparency, it says the tickets 50 credits, when you check out it's 50 credits. And what that does in the overall picture, traditionally, it ends up being anywhere from 10 to 30%, less than you would pay elsewhere. And part of that is we're giving some of our margin or margin that a typical ticketing or secondary market might charge back to our members for for participating and being a monthly or an annual subscriber. In addition, when I talked about the hotels, you know, another benefit is getting discounted rates on hotels, right? So, you know, we usually get rates that are kind of wholesale rates, because it's a membership model. And we're not publishing discounted rates on the web, without a login or without it being translated into credits. So therefore, we're allowed to actually provide some good discounted rates to our members who then could just use their credits to book that room to earn

credit, is it all the same for every single member? Or does it just depend on the membership,

it does depend on the membership, the price you pay, right, so we have three forms of membership $90 a month, $49 a month and $99 a month, that's the gold platinum and then founders plan. So the higher you higher you sign up for on a monthly basis, meaning the more committed you are to the overall platform, the less you pay per credit. So for example, if you're a $99 a month member, you get 90 credits a month, and those credits roll over and accumulate. So you're basically paying about $1.10 A credit. But if you are only paying $19 a month, which is the gold plan, you're paying about $1.27 A credit. So to the really you do save more money by committing more. And the beauty is those credits do rollover. So you're able to just, you know, accumulate them at a good price so that when you're ready to use them, they're available to

how does it work for an annual member? Do you get all the credits all at once you

do, you do so. So you sign up and get your annual membership, not only to get it all at once, but you also get discounts. So somebody who signs up for the annual founders plan ends up paying $1 credit. So annually, that would be $1,080 and you get 1000 ad credits. So you end up paying $1 credit and you immediately get all the credits right up front, so you can then use them however you want. So if you really wanted to go to like Coachella or some other major festival and we happen to have it on the platform. You know, that might be three or 400 credits, because it's a big long weekend. So you might want to sign up for the annual plan upfront and get all your credits and be able to use it for a big event like that.

What happens to the customer or festival pass holder that decides to take a hiatus? Do the credits, stay on their account? Or do they disappear?

Yeah, so as long as you're a member in good standing, your credits will maintain. So as long as you still have a membership, if you totally cancel your entire membership, then the credits will go away. But if you sign up, and you just downgrade your membership, your credits will continue to be there, and they'll continue to accumulate. That's another great thing when we when you're ready, we can talk about the NFT, which is one of the most amazing deals in a century. And it will only last early early on in the NFT process. But but the NFT, the current NFT holder, the lifetime founding member, they receive that annual founding membership in perpetuity forever. So every single year, they get about $1,200 worth of credits, to go to any event they want to go to every year and it keeps refreshing every single year. And it's in an NFT form. And they own that digital asset. And they of course can trade that digital asset in the secondary market if they so desire. And as an NFT holder, they get access to quarterly bucket list events that we're curating for our members, you know, things like a huge, you know, a well known artist, playing for a very intimate show, or, you know, maybe going to a sport game in the luxury box and then hanging out the players after or getting a celebrity chef to cook a dinner for 50 of our NFT holders. Those are the kind of bucket list events that we're going to be doing. And only if you're an NFT holder, can you go. But it's an amazing deal to to own that NFT and then just continuously get this in perpetuity forever.

See, this is the cool part that we're still trying to outline to our listeners and trying to help them understand which is how vast this world is right now for NF T's and crypto and all of what the future is going to hold because like you said, you just took a business. And it was built for web two, but you guys changed. Obviously, with web three coming out and everything evolved it as any business should do that wants to be successful. And you're providing some good resources here as far as like, what what the future looks like. So I think I think it's a pretty sound model, in my opinion. I'm excited for it, I want to kind of take a look and see if it'll work out for me. Obviously, we're in a we're in a bit of a, I wouldn't call it a recession, but things have inflated quite a bit. And so people are cutting costs where they can't afford certain things. So that that's something that we have to be cautious about as well too. And I'm sure you're seeing well, you may be seeing an influx or you may be seeing it just stay status quo. I'm not sure. But for me, I know I'm seeing in my businesses that things are starting to dip a tiny bit because of inflation. Yeah, I

mean, just two things and our world, right is live events, in general was such a pent up demand during the pandemic that for the last year, people have been really excited to get out. And so there has been a tremendous amount of people going going to live events and using that as hey, I have if I have any discretionary income, I just actually want to be out and about and see people. So that's one thing, which is beneficial for this specific industry in general. You know, as opposed to the overall economy. And then and then the thing that I just love about the NFT space, right is is we're providing this opportunity to people to kind of get in early because the thing about NF T's is it's a limited selection. So we're only selling 10,000 Total NFPs and we're doing it in tranches. Right so the first, the first tranche is 1000 NF T's and we just launched that we've already sold over 100 of them. But once those 1000 Sell out, it goes to the second tranche, and the price goes up. So currently right now, that first tranche is point nine, five Aetherium. And we made it super easy for people that don't have crypto wallets, they can use a credit card to join so they can actually buy the NFT with the credit card pay in today's money. It's about $1,600 In theory and fluctuates. But for $1,600 today, they'll get $1,200 in credits every year for the rest of their life, of course until they want to sell the NFT and they can always sell the NF For potentially more than a month or

so potentially their lifetime members of festival pass if they buy the NFT.

Yeah, so $1,600 Today gets them $1,200 in their account every single year. So and the cool thing is, is that one year might go by and let's maybe they didn't get get to all the events, it doesn't matter, the next year comes in and flips over, and you're back to your full set of credits for the next year.

And do they roll over to add like, so if you only use 600, you have 600 left, does that rollover with the 1200 that you get yearly?

Not in the NFT world. The reason is, is that you gotta you have to understand is we have to protect our ongoing future liability, right? So you can, you can even understand the numbers, right? So with 10,000 people doing this, you're in this special club, where you're getting this constant lifetime value. And part of the model is everybody that can use them or should use them all. But if we allow them to rollover from an accounting perspective, it becomes too large of a liability in order to hold that and then it affects how the floor price might trade of the actual NFT in the secondary market. And you know, in without getting too deep into web three, there's, it's two values that always exist for the older, because that holder, it's an investment, they're all they're owning a digital asset, they're actually owning a part of the community part of the process. So obviously, they hope that the floor price meaning floor price means the price at which you can resell that NFT in the future, they want that to go up. And they want to get a utility, which is the credits getting every year and one of the things we're super excited about is there's almost no NFT out there that has anywhere near the amount of utility we have, meaning that you buy it and you immediately get credits to go to live events, very few NF T's actually have that kind of utility, it's usually something down the road that they may build for you. So we get super excited. And then anybody that buys the first NFT, the second, the first 1000, the second 1000, the price will go up and by the time the last 1000 of the of the 10,000 collection gets old, the price will be around two and a half to three Aetherium. So you're already two to 3x. You know value has gone up by the time the 10th tranche launches, and you know, that should be within three to six months.

That's awesome. That's good strategy and plan. I mean, it helps a lot. I like it. How event wise, what's the average amount of credits an event usually is?

You Yeah, it's hard to say that because we have so many different events on the platform. So like, you might have a local minor league baseball game for 10 credits, you might want to go to, you know, a big festival, like we talked about earlier, and that might be three or 400 credits, you might see, you know, pick your favorite concert. I don't know you like Justin Bieber, or her, or Rihanna or somebody coming through town will have seats at that same event, if they're in the high level seats, they might be $30. But if they're close and down to the stage, it might be 300 credits, sorry, credits dollars. So the point is, is that we have so many opportunities. And a lot of times we we always say we have about 80,000 live events on the platform throughout the year. But if you talk about the tickets in itself, every event has hundreds of tickets available. So so there's even more than that.

Because the festival paths slash NF T cover airplane flights as well.

Not yet. So we have hotels and we get tickets. We are in talks with some other potential providers of hotel travel, to be able to offer flights. It's not as easy to do in terms of, you know, managing to put it into a credit form, etc. But what we're looking at it, you know, one of one of our goals really is to provide opportunities within our ecosystem to fully facilitate those experiences. So live experiences is what we love, right? So right now it's mostly about concerts and sporting events and theater and all that kind of stuff. And when you go to that you might travel a little bit or you might go to you might live 40 minutes outside of the main city that concerts in and you might want to stay over and hotel. So we make all that happen. But again, yes, we'll continue to add unique opportunities for people to spend their credits on while they're experiencing that journey of that live event or that live experience.

Awesome. And if people want to do more research on this because it's such an it's such an awesome concept and it's still new for even me talking it through in my head Um, my wheels are turning, how can people do research, get a hold of you maybe take a look at opportunities and invest?

Yeah, so the on the NFT side, the simplest thing to do is go to family dot festival past.com. That's our, that's our website for the actual NFT project. And on there, it tells you everything about what the NFT gets you, it tells you all what the roadmap is, what we're building, and right right there, there's a button that says mint now. And you could use your credit card and mint and NFT. And one of the things that we like about what we're doing is that we're helping educate people and bring them into the world of web three. And it's a tangible concept, right? So they can actually, you know, do something they already like to do get this digital asset and from it, start learning about web three. So, you know, Soon thereafter, we have a whole kind of process to show that once you get the NFT, we'll teach you how to set up a Metamask wallet, which is a wallet that holds cryptocurrency, which then you can transfer your NFT into it, and then connect that to our platform and get all your credits go to live events. So that whole process just doing it. And I've done it personally to dozens of people, I know that one of the NFT and walk them through it. So it's a great way to really learn about web three and NF Ts. The other thing is on our website, festival pass.com There's a link to to festival pass University. So we have a whole section that teaches people about web three. So they can go in and they can watch videos about you know, what is web three videos on how to set up a crypto wallet videos on security, that kind of stuff.

I took notes so that way I can provide this to our listeners. So for our listeners, I will provide those two links in the episode description. So you all can easily go and do your research and for all my festival goers maybe even invest that being said and if they want to get a hold of us social media you have that Yeah,

yeah so for on festival pass get at get festival passes or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. For me personally, LinkedIn is probably the easiest to pay me on LinkedIn. You know I'm also most of my socials are ad bins in NYC it's one of those things I just haven't left it since I left New York but uh, so on Twitter and Instagram events in NYC so you can always DM me DM me there.

Excellent. That being said, thank you for coming on. I'm pretty certain we're going to have you in the near future for web three. But for right now, I want to thank you for talking about festival paths you've created, in my opinion, something that's amazing, something that I think is going to be while it is the future, let's be realistic, but something that's gonna be great for people that like to get out, go to festivals, enjoy life a little bit. I know I like concerts and festivals. So it's exciting, exciting stuff here. So I appreciate it and cool.

I appreciate it. Dustin thanks for having me.