Note from the CEO: Why we built Cymbal

When Pear VC invited Collin Price, Jae Lee, and myself to join their accelerator program, PearX, I knew we wanted to build something valuable for the concert industry. As many consumers know, the live event industry faces no shortage of problems. Outdated software providers have struggled for decades to solve the core issues that plague the industry.

At Cymbal, our goal is to help the individuals who do the most to make concerts an incredible experience: venues, promoters, artists, agents, and producers of live events. Creating immersive experiences is their bread and butter. That is why our vision is to simplify and automate the busy work that keeps them from focusing on what they do best.

Before Cymbal, I worked as a software engineer within the live event industry. As an avid concert-goer, it was eye-opening to see the inner workings of this industry. Concert venues and promoters face numerous challenges unbeknownst to the average consumer: booking shows, managing inventory, handling lights, soundchecks, food and alcohol sales, security, and marketing. There’s no shortage of responsibilities that a venue or promoter needs to be on top of. This is why we need a software solution that makes their lives easier.

Cymbal is a vertical software platform for concert venues and promoters. We simplify and automate the tedious parts of promoting events - saving time, and driving higher, more predictable ticket sales.

Marketing

Our first product is an integrated marketing platform that automates a venue’s email, SMS, and social campaigns. Every successful show needs social media posts, ads, multiple emails, and text messages in order to ensure it gets the attention it deserves. Before Cymbal, a venue was required to draft the copy and content for every post, ad, email, and text. With Cymbal’s marketing platform, we take this work off of the venue’s plate and have it happening in the background while we ensure that they’re equipped with best practices. Essentially, Cymbal is a world-class marketing team in a venue’s back pocket.

We achieve this by directly integrating with a venue’s ticketing provider and website while leveraging breakthrough advances in artificial intelligence. With access to a venue’s complete data set, we know specific information about their customers: what type of music they like, what shows they’ve attended in the past, their willingness to pay, etc. And with AI, we can automatically segment their audience and generate marketing content that matches the venue’s tone and messaging.

SMS

Our flagship marketing feature is SMS. Although texting has existed for decades, it is still a nascent marketing channel, especially within events. Only in the past few years have major brands started to explore SMS as a constituent engagement tool, and we’re seeing promising results. SMS gets a 98% open rate compared to 20% for email. Further, SMS has a 10x higher click-through rate.

At Cymbal, we’ve built a first-in-class SMS marketing platform for concert venues and promoters. Every venue gets a local area-code phone number and contact card with the brand’s name, logo, website, and address. This provides personalization and significantly improves performance on every metric. We also are able to collect subscribers at the touchpoints that matter to our customers: their website, ticket purchase checkout, printed QR codes at their shows, and even within their email campaigns.

Email

Cymbal also provides a fully automated email marketing suite. Staying true to our ethos, Cymbal takes all of the design and busywork off the plate of the venues. Our customers don’t want to be burdened by deciding whether or not this email looks good in dark vs light mode, whether the fonts or colors render on Outlook vs Gmail, or if they are meeting CAN-SPAM requirements. Cymbal removes these decisions from their process and runs completely in the background.

Building an email campaign is as simple as selecting the show(s) the venue wants to promote and clicking send. We ensure all copy and content is automatically populated and renders well in any device or email client. Event images are expanded to the proper aspect ratio using an AI model. And through automations, Cymbal can send weekly newsletters and individual show announcements without clicking a single button.

The Future

This is where we’ve started, but we’re not stopping here.  We have many products currently in development, from automated social media ads to web services and more.  We envision a complete software suite that gives venues and promoters control over their digital presence and the levers to sell more tickets.

This is why we brought on Evan Floyd as Head of Growth to help us make it a reality. With his experience as an artist, label manager, account executive, and go-to-market specialist at Eventbrite & Lyte, we leveled up our team by bringing in someone who has seen all of the core problems that face the industry.

When we raised our Seed round in the fall of 2022, we knew this space was ripe for opportunity. Since ticket sales were brought online in the early 2000s, there hasn’t been much meaningful innovation. Venues and promoters are responsible for the best nights of our lives, so they deserve better. That’s why we are determined to help them continue to put on incredible experiences and make more “best nights” a reality.