Michael R. Bock

SPaaS — Surge Pricing as a Service

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Michael R. Bock
Hi - let us know if we can answer any questions about SPaaS. SPaaS is an API that helps any business owner algorithmically adjust prices to respond to spikes in customer demand. We envision use cases from concert tickets (imagine Outside Lands *not* selling out in minutes) to limited-run art pieces (imagine an artist who doesn't know how to correctly price his pieces).
RocketClub
@michaelrbock Any customers so far? I was looking to do something similar last year. Spoke to a tonne of gaming and ecommerce companies during customer development and didnt find any takers
Michael R. Bock
@angeladopter We got a couple of leads but didn't really take it much further than a hackathon project. I did find this company that is doing the same thing though: https://ventata.com/
RocketClub
@michaelrbock yeah Same here. Found ventata.com. To be fair, i remember browsing through the shopify plugins, dynamic pricing wasnt the easiest sell.
Ryan Hoover
This makes a ton of sense, @michaelrbock, and can create a more efficient marketplace. Other than the concert example, what are some other strong use cases? P.S. thanks for the reminder about Outside Lands. I need to snag a ticket. :)
Michael R. Bock
@rrhoover thanks for the props! My partner, @the_jozen_one, and I think that any marketplace with limited supply makes sense to start. Here are some examples: 1) Airbnb could help its hosts by automatically price their listings based on seasonal demand (or for instance if there is a conference in town that weekend), 2) a small movie theater with 90 empty seats on a Wednesday morning could heavily discount their prices to try to sell more (showing a movie has only fixed costs), 3) if creating new products requires significant capital investments such that producing new supply is extremely costly.
Osman
This is very cool. Duetto (http://www.duettoresearch.com/) is doing something similar in the hospitality space.
millisecond
Great idea and it's awesome that you all used the @goroost API as part of it!
Julian Ozen
@millisecond Yes! @goroost made it easy to send notifications when surges end to desktop
Tyler Howarth
Pretty sure i just figured out the model because this helpful graph with no x axis is it.
Michael R. Bock
@tylr Haha :) that's just a landing page "feature". The actual model is a regression model.
Julian Ozen
@tylr hey, that's proprietary!