One of the One Spark Creators that we were really looking forward to checking out was Local Ticket Sales. Local Ticket Sales is a marketplace for, you guessed it, event tickets. This alone is not all that groundbreaking, there are countless event websites and apps out there. However, the approach that Local Ticket Sales is taking is pretty remarkable.

The great bulk of the event and ticketing websites currently available rely heavily on aggregation. These event apps and websites crawl Facebook, Eventbrite, and Foursquare, among others, for all of their listings. While these aggregators are OK for finding events, there are still an incredible amount of events that are never listed on the Facebooks and Foursquares of the world; and many never listed online at all. This is the market that Local Ticket Sales is after.

The main goal for Local Ticket Sales’ fundraising efforts at One Spark is to acquire enough funds to hire a team of salespeople. Yes, salespeople. Not coders. Not designers. Salespeople. As everyone else is so caught up in building out apps and websites with more and more functionality, Local Ticket Sales is taking an old-school, time tested approach to building their business: boots on the ground, and old fashioned cold calling. Brian wrote about Local Ticket Sales in our One Spark Previews. One of his points really characterizes the approach of Local Ticket Sales:

Now while this isn’t revolutionary, it hasn’t really been applied in this space before. Startups in the past have relied solely on the aggregator, hoping to create the best back end technology to serve up the best events.

By taking the algorithms out of the equation at the onset, Local Ticket Sales actually has the potential to offer better listings. Other event apps and websites that rely on the algorithms and aggregation typically pull from eventbrite, foursquare, public Facebook events and occasionally an inbound listing, but what about the events from organizers that aren’t online, yes you’re shocked these exist, but they do. What about the venue that has an amazing event lined up but forgets to hit that one gold mine of a digital listing and then doesn’t get crawled or put into the mix?

By having real people help him with execution, Local Ticket Sales, has an advantage over other sites, real people can look at multiple sources and even get word of mouth events up on the site.

We had a chance to speak with James Sopchak, the creator and owner of Local Ticket Sales, during One Spark. He told us a bit more about the platform itself, and how they plan to expand:

To vote for Local Ticket Sales, check out their One Spark Creator Profile.