Alp Savrum of Savrum Solutions

"Every ticketing platform in the world can tell an organiser what they sold. None of them can tell the organiser what they nearly sold." That is how Alp Savrum explains why he started Savrum Solutions, the company behind HiBilet: not a ticketing platform but an audience acquisition platform, whose product is insight into who bought and who dropped off at the last moment.

Nine hundred tickets and zero names

Alp entered the event industry as a student in Istanbul, where he built and grew a nightlife ticketing app that became the third biggest in Turkey. He saw how it worked from the inside: you sell out a room, nine hundred people, best night of the year, and the next morning the dashboard only tells you how many tickets and how much money. Who those people were, who almost bought and walked away at the last second: that did not exist.

"I did not come up with it. I ran into it, and then I spent years accidentally collecting the pieces to fix it." Games taught him how people decide, the event industry showed him the problem from the inside, and a stint at a large Turkish bank taught him how money actually moves. At some point he stopped seeing three careers and started seeing three halves of the same thing.

The salesperson he never asked

His first pitch centered on cheap pricing and the idea that customers keep their own data. Both true, both worthless, since he eventually counted thirteen competitors using that exact same line, including the biggest ticketing company on earth. A difference your competitor can say just as easily is not a difference.

What he regrets more is his own silence. He put a salesperson in front of an early version of the product, it did not sell, and he never asked why. He assumed the market was hard and moved on. That salesperson had heard every objection firsthand. "A failure you do not interrogate is just money set on fire."

"A failure you do not interrogate is just money set on fire."

Fifty-eight seconds

The ticketing market is, in his words, more saturated than he ever expected, consolidating fast, and even has free competitors. Winning on price is no longer an option for him. So he focuses on what nobody else measures: the time before someone decides.

His own data shows a median time of 58 seconds between a buyer's first visit and their purchase. Whoever hesitates longer is the one you eventually lose, and whoever sees that happening while it happens can still do something about it. Nobody can build that from the outside, he says: you have to own the checkout yourself.

A favour is the highest interest

His grandmother was a banker and used to say: "A favour is the debt with the highest interest." Alp takes that literally. Every customer is a favour to him, not a deal won, and he pays it back in attention and time.

The money from every ticket sale also goes straight into the organiser's own account, never through his, not even for a day. That sounds like giving away leverage. For him it is the opposite: whoever holds nothing of a customer's earns the most trust.

The golden tip

"Arrange your first customer before you build anything." His second piece of advice: do not quit your job unless the business can pay your current salary, not because you think it will probably work out, since desperation shows across a table and gets priced into every deal. And the third: the value lies in the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing, in the place your competitor cannot reach because of their size, their contracts, or their old code.

"Arrange your first customer before you build anything."

Somewhere tonight a room full of people is watching an artist they love, and he is one of the reasons they got through the door. As long as that is enough, he knows things are on track.

What HiBilet needs next is not another feature, but a commercial partner who knows the Dutch or German venue world from the inside. Anyone who recognises themselves in that can reach Alp at ags@hibilet.com.

Final thoughts

Entrepreneurship is an adventure with both highs and lows. For Manuel Krähe of Notion Digital Growth, this was no different. Discover the challenges and successes in the full story.