Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show, heard on the radio and seen online at http://www.TheBusinessMakers.com. It's guest time on the show, and I guess I should call it repeat guest because with me once again is Cliff Kurtzman, founder and CEO of My City Rocks. Cliff, welcome back to The Business Makers Show.

Cliff: Thank you, Russ. It's a pleasure to be back with you.

Russ: You bet. So I looked, and it was like about two, two and a half years ago when we featured the story of My City Rocks, and I gotta say it was still one of the most unique businesses that we've had on the show. But go ahead and share the story with our audience.

Cliff: We started My City Rocks back in 2005 as a different type of a company. We saw what was going on with social networks and MySpace and Facebook and how people all over the world were connecting and making new friends, and we realized that the people who were connecting over social media were going to want to do stuff out in the community with their new friends, and we came up with the idea of My City Rocks as a way to give them information and get them out doing fun stuff in their city. So My City Rocks is about three things. It's about, one, having fun, getting people involved and enjoying local art, music, culture, theater, all the fun stuff going on where they live. Two, it's about giving back. It's showing them ways to support local philanthropy and make their part of the world a better place to live.

And then the third piece of it is what we call representing, showing people how to show pride and spirit in their community and in their city. And in conjunction with all this, we run a very popular marketplace that people use to buy and sell tickets to events, to rock concerts, sporting events, theater events, and the commerce that goes on through that marketplace is the engine that drives our business.

Russ: Okay, and it is a for-profit corporation.

Cliff: Very definitely for-profit.

Russ: You bet, and so now it'd essentially be six years old. So this creative yet eclectic mix of models is working well for you.

Cliff: Generally, it has. We went through three really incredible years. 2008, 2009, 2010. 2011 has been tougher for us. It really has. The recession has hit the concert industry in a number of ways, and it's created some challenges for us.

Russ: Well, let's hone into that commerce part right upfront. It's not a place where - you don't go out and buy tickets and resell them. Correct?

Cliff: No, no, we don't. We run a marketplace kind of like you would think of an eBay. So if my daughter wants to see Taylor Swift this weekend at the Toyota Center and wasn't quick enough to get on in the first 25 seconds before the event sold out, there's probably somebody that bought a ticket that isn't going to go that wants to sell that ticket through the site. So we make it possible for a parent to fulfill the dream of their child or their loved one that wasn't there the minute something went on sale, but we still want to go, and we give them a marketplace where they can go in and buy it. Sometimes, they will pay more. Sometimes a lot more. Sometimes they'll pay less. Somebody might have had season tickets to the Houston Texans, and decide they're not going to go to a few games and be willing to sell their tickets for less than what they paid for them.

Russ: Well, those types of commercial sites have always impressed me how many tickets there can be available at particular times. So do you open it up to any entertainment venue that a ticket is involved, or is it just rock concerts, just Taylor Swift, just Texans?

Cliff: It's mostly sports, concerts, and theater, but if Bill O'Reilly is giving a political lecture or George Bush is talking or Bill Clinton or a magician or Joel Osteen is around and somebody has tickets that they want to resell, we'll let them be posted in our exchange. We have right now in the order of ten million tickets listed all over the world.

Russ: My goodness. Okay. So that was my next question. You say all over the world. I remember you started right here in Houston, Texas, but you do business everywhere now.

Cliff: The ticket marketplace is global. Anywhere there is a market for the reselling of tickets. So at the Beijing Olympics, we were there. At the South African world cup, we were there. But the rest of the year, we might not do too much in South Africa.

Russ: And when you say you were there, that means that people that had tickets posted them for sale on My City Rocks.

Cliff: Yes, and people will buy them.

Russ: So you didn't go to the Olympics.

Cliff: No, I didn't go to the Olympics.

Russ: Now I know you have been traveling a lot, and we'll get to that in a minute, but when you answered the question, you said on the ticket exchange, yes. What about these three cool, neat components of your model upfront that you champion local events and you give back? Do you do that in all cities?

Cliff: Right now, we're doing most of that primarily in Houston. We've made some forays out into other cities. The issue there is how to scale it at a cost that's reasonable, and we still haven't got it down. But we feel we're making progress on it, and what we're looking at doing is going out and bringing some capital into the company that will give us the money to set up the upfront infrastructure costs. And then once that's in place, we'll be able to go out and run it in a manner that will be self-sustaining and profitable.

Russ: Interesting. Now you know we have kind of a smart business audience of entrepreneurs and innovators. And they are probably curious, what's involved in the infrastructure for a new city? You know, the way you described it to me, it could just be kind of a social media interchange, although I've seen thousands and thousands of photos on your site wherever - and apparently, My City Rocks is attending events in all the - particularly in Houston.

Cliff: It's a coordination and an information dissemination. I mean there's a lot going on in any big city at any one time. People really want to know what's cool, what's the place to be going, and to see feedback and see the pictures, as you said. So some of it is somebody having a good handle on what's going on in their community, synthesizing it, and then distributing it out to others. Setting up forums through the Facebooks and such that people can interact and share. Because it shouldn't just be us to them. It should be all of us to each other. It really becomes much more when that happens. So someone needs to be the orchestra conductor, so to speak.

Russ: Okay, so you kind of like need a branch manager in the city in order to really do it.

Cliff: Kind of, yes, you kind of do.

Russ: But as you implied, there's no problem with people getting online and selling and buying tickets in multiple cities all over the world.

Cliff: Right, that's in place now.

Russ: All right, well, one of the things that I think is so cool about your business is your preparation for this, and I would roll all the way back to your education. You actually have a PHD. Right?

Cliff: I do. I went from rocket science, where my doctorate is in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from MIT. So I went from rocket science to Rock It science with My City Rocks. And the pass way there was I came out to Houston and joined an entrepreneurial company that was trying to commercialize industry and outer space called Space Industries. Then I went from there to my first company, which was in a NASA tech incubator, and they were encouraging us to take NASA technology and spin it out commercially, and I saw then how NASA was one of the first organizations in the world to use the web to tell people what they were doing. This was back in early 1994, and I said, you know, the businesses are going to want to have websites, too, some day. It's obvious to me before anyone else was thinking about that.

Russ: Which was very forward thinking in 1994. I gotta tell you.

Cliff: And we decided to launch the first online marketing company in the world, wrote a little press release, sent it to The Houston Business Journal, and within days, we were on the front cover, and the business took off, and then I was in The New York Times, and then we did the first Harley Davidson site on the web, and we were on CNN, and that got me into interactive and online marketing. From outer space to cyber space.

Russ: All right, great, great story. Okay, so back to commerce one more time. You're not the only person in the world that's offering a market today to buy and sell tickets. How do you compete?

Cliff: That's a good question. There's lots of people that are in that place. There's really only one company that people seem to know. And that's Stub Hub that has built a brand. We have competed primarily through connecting with people through social networking and through search optimization, because I have my background in the online marketing industry. I know more about search optimization than most people in the world, and that has enabled us to reach and gain a lot of people that are searching for tickets to events, but our next step is to go out and try to challenge a Stub Hub as a branded entity on a global basis. The market is much larger if we do that, and we do that by telling a different story than they do.

They come at the business as a ticket marketplace, first and foremost. We come out into the industry as someone that is trying to make our community a better place and provide people options for community entertainment that go beyond the ticket business. And we do a lot constantly to give back and support local charities, sometimes with money. We've been a big financial supporter of Lemonade Day helping young entrepreneurs, for example. But also with a lot of promotion and publicity of any time Muscular Dystrophy Association has a rock concert, we will promote that, get people to come out and support and give money that will help the organization. So we are tied deeply into the community in a way different than others are.

Our prices through our marketplace tend to be less, and we approach it as fans that go out and shoot pictures of the bands and such and feed that back through not just as someone with the ticket marketplace.

Russ: So when you said that you're going out there with a branded identity, that doesn't mean you're coming out with a new URL and domain name that's more focused just on tickets. It's exactly the opposite. Right?

Cliff: That's correct. It's just to start thinking about doing things that will get us in front of the consumer in many more ways and telling our story and getting out than just doing the search optimization in the social network.

Russ: Okay. Now hasn't this e-commerce initiative been quite a journey from when you started to today? I mean if you think about it, your story about just announcing what you were going to do and getting front-page coverage right here at The Houston Business Journal then to The New York Times, it's not as easy nowadays at all. Is it?

Cliff: No, it's not. There's a lot more noise, but if you are ahead of the wave, there is always an opportunity, and I've had that happen to me twice in my career. Once where I knew that web design and development was going to be big before anyone else knew that, and I became at the forefront of that industry, went around the world, lecturing at conferences and so on about building websites and why that was important for businesses. And then once, when the social networking came into play, and again, I was going around everywhere, telling people, "Someday, MySpace and Facebook are going to be a huge part of our lives," and people looked at me when I started doing that thinking I was nuts. But because I anticipated the trend, I was able to get in there and create awareness before others did.

Russ: Really cool, Cliff. Well, before I let you go, let's imagine that we have a young, aspiring entrepreneur that's tuned in and hearing you telling your story and is totally fascinated by it, what general advice would you give him or her?

Cliff: I would advise them to a number of things. To, one, it's a lot of work and it's a lot of pain, and you've got to be ready to deal with that pain because you will fail ten times for every time you succeed. Hooking up and connecting with people that can be mentors and colleagues like I do through my membership in the entrepreneurs organization, like I've done in the past through the Houston Technology Center, finding people that can help you through the critical phases of your business is really critical and really important. Building connections and building bridges. I can't say enough about how much that can help you. You're not an island to yourself.

Russ: Great. Well, Cliff, I really appreciate you coming in and sharing your story and giving out that great advice.

Cliff: Thank you, Russ. It's been a pleasure to be back.

Russ: You bet. That's Cliff Kurtzman, founder and CEO of My City Rocks. This is The BusinessMakers Show heard on the radio and seen online at http://www.TheBusinessMakers.com.