Why I'm Building This

I've been a fan for a long time (first show was Virginia Beach '99). One of the things I've always loved about the Phish community and the broader jamband community is that it's highly egalitarian.

Access has never been about who has the most money. In real life, access is earned through reputation: showing up for friends, helping someone out when they're ticketless, selling a ticket for face value even when you know you could make more elsewhere, and sometimes, buying a ticket for face value when you could find it cheaper. That reputation is built slowly, over time, through relationships and behavior, which is why we joke about being wooks with so much affection.

I didn't set out to build a ticket marketplace. I just happen to be good at building software, and over the years friends kept coming to me with the same problem: the online secondary ticket market in this community is broken.

Ticketmaster is designed to maximize revenue. StubHub is designed to maximize resale value. Both do exactly what they're meant to do but neither reflects the values of this community. Cash or Trade used to fill that gap, but for high demand shows it's effectively broken. When a ticket is listed, sellers get flooded with hundreds of messages instantly and are left to choose blindly. Buyers end up with odds that feel worse than a lottery and have to pay for a gold membership to even have that chance.

That's the gap I'm trying to address.

Face Plus Fees is an attempt to mirror how tickets actually move in this community. Tickets go first to people who have built trust. People who show up. People who do the right thing when it counts. And when someone sells a truly in-demand ticket for face value—especially when they could easily make ten times more elsewhere—that should matter. That should count for something the next time they're on the other side of the equation.

At the same time, this can't become a closed system. New fans deserve a chance too—especially for once-in-a-lifetime shows like Phish at the Sphere. Reputation should help, not gatekeep.

The hard reality is that demand will always exceed supply for high-demand tickets. To avoid the chaos of inbox floods and unfair selection, the only workable solution I can see is a capped, paid queue, for the right, but not the guarantee, to buy the ticket.

I don't love that queue entries must be paid for. But a small fee to enter a capped queue—with transparent odds—is more honest than pretending everyone has an equal shot when they don't.

Here's how it works

• Queues are limited in size
• Buyers can purchase one paid entry
• Reputation influences priority
• Final selection includes randomness so new users still have a chance

And to keep this clean: all ticket transfers happen through Ticketmaster. No screenshots. No PDFs. No barcodes. No off-platform payments. If it can't be transferred officially, it doesn't happen. Fake tickets ruin weekends.

This is an experiment

I want to be clear: right now, there is no full marketplace behind this yet. I'm testing two things:

If the answer to either is no, then this won't work and that's okay (Back to CoT we go! 😀). But if enough people show up, I'll build it properly in time to get tickets in hands for the Sphere run. So if you support this idea, please join the waitlist and help spread the word.

A final note on money. Queue entry fees help fund the platform. Those fees help keep the platform running and allow me to spend the time and care required to build this thoughtfully. We’re also exploring whether a portion of those fees should be shared with sellers in high-demand situations, as a way to encourage more people to list tickets at face value. The goal is simple: keep the system fair, sustainable, and aligned with the community's values.

Tickets are emotional. Especially when such great shows are on the horizon. I know this won't be perfect on day one. But we have time to get it right. My goal is simple: get tickets into the hands of real fans—new and old—so we can keep seeing this band, and others like them, for many years to come.