Magic is real.
The earliest memory I have of the magic is foggy, but I was 2 or 3 and standing anxiously on my seat in an auditorium, waiting for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to appear! In person! I have just a couple faint memories of the show, but I do remember the electricity, the anticipation, the awe that we were all about to see something special.
ou know that feeling.
For me, it hasn’t changed much since then. Maybe it’s not Dopey I’m there to see anymore, but the feeling’s the same.
If I had to explain Goldstar in a few words, I’d say this:
“We are people who want you to go out to live entertainment so you can love that magical feeling as much as we do.”
Our story
Here’s a bit of our story. We started in 2002 with $1000 in the bank, put there by me and my co-founders, Rich Webster and Robert Graff. With a little help from our friends, we built the website ourselves and launched on Valentine’s Day.
To be in the ticket business, you need tickets to sell, and we didn’t have any. We knew nobody in live entertainment, but we changed that quick. With the help of people like legendary marketer Jim Royce (then at Center Theatre Group), Russ Stanley at the San Francisco Giants, and Wendi Lebow, then working for TMG promoting Broadway shows and now the head of our venue team, we built thousands of relationships with venues, producers and teams who gave us a chance to prove we could help their venues and shows by bringing them a new audience.
To do that, we had to build our own audience, and a little at a time, we did. I was the entire Customer Service department for our first year of business, and gradually figured out what it meant to help people go out more: making it easier, providing responsive service, offering more event choices, delivering great value, sending reminders of upcoming events, following up after the event to make sure things went well, and always looking for a way to help, to say yes, to remove the barriers to our members getting out of their homes and into venues to see great shows.