Welcome to Dingo and thanks for taking the time to visit our site. My name is Paul and I am the co-Founder of Dingo. Almost a year ago my friend Phil and I decided to build a Fan2Fan ticket exchange. In this first blog post I want to explain why we did this and what we are trying to achieve.

The fact that you are reading this page probably means we share a few things in common. You probably attend a fair number of live events; be it sport, music concerts or festivals. What’s more, you have probably experienced problems when trying to buy or sell tickets to these events… maybe you found yourself at a loss when your mate dropped out at the last minute and you couldn’t sell their ticket. Perhaps you had to pay 3x face value to see your favourite band. Or worse still, maybe you were the victim of fraud when trying to buy tickets to a sold out sports event.

Well, you’re not alone.

The secondary ticket market in the UK is worth £1 billion a year. High demand for tickets and low supply naturally leads to a large black market. Buying on the black market is fraught with problems, from dodgy websites and fake tickets to haggling with aggressive touts outside of venues. Selling tickets can be equally problematic, when you need to sell at the last minute but don’t know how. Desperate social media posts are often the only resort.

The idea for Dingo came about after being the victim of fraud myself. I was so desperate to see Kings of Leon at the O2 that I made a poor decision and dealt with a tout I met through Gumtree. I ended up with a fake ticket (it looked bloody real!) and was turned away from the venue on the night of the performance. My pride took a serious knock but at least it gave me the energy to do something about it.

The way I see it the problems with the secondary ticket market are quite straight forward. Dingo tries to address these problems in a simple way:

• We ensure that all tickets are sold at face value or below
• We integrate social media to make buying and selling transparent
• We hold payments until the tickets have been verified by the buyer
• We have a customer service team on hand to handle any issues or disputes

Its not rocket science but we hope we have built something truly useful for fans. As we approach launch our biggest challenge is winning users and having a large number of tickets for sale on the app. Dingo will work best the more people that join in. My ask, therefore, is that you download the app, share it with your friends and help grow our community.

My email is [email protected] and you can contact me directly with any feedback, questions or thoughts.

Thanks again for your support.