Founded in 2015, this mobile-first platform was created by Puerto Rican programmers
By: Cynthia López
Published: June 5, 2019, The Weekly Journal
A message pops up on your phone. You’ve got mail. Tickets are now on sale for Grammy winner Ileana Cabra´s concert “Against Everything” (Contra Todo) on August 17 at the Puerto Rico Art Museum. In a haste, your fingers move across the screen to buy tickets through a blue app and on the day of the show you scan the digital ticket stored in your phone as you walk into the venue.
No extra line. No paper ticket. No hassle.
Fangig is a Puerto Rican ticket selling digital app and website that allows its users to purchase tickets for concerts and other events with just the stroke of their fingers. Contrary to other platforms, with Fangig the buyer doesn’t need to print or redeem the ticket the old school way: showing an ID or credit card at a selling point or at the box office before the concert.
The process is simple. When users enter the app or website, they choose a location: Puerto Rico or Jamaica. Once accessed, they can browse the list of upcoming events. From tickets to the Olimpia Water Park in Salinas in the southern part of the island to Venezuelan duo Mau and Ricky’s concert in Vivo Beach Club in Carolina, buyers can select among a diverse range of activities on this mobile-first platform.
In an interview with THE WEEKLY JOURNAL, Fangig’s Chief Revenue Officer José Villares said that the platform offers advantages to both, users and event producers.
For ticket buyers, the service fees are lower than the costs charged by the competition as they go paperless. Villares indicated that the charges oscillate between $3 to $5. For concert or event producers, it means free access to a mailing list comprised of 900,000 subscribers to Gustazos, its popular parent company.
“We are not a passive box office. We actively help the producers advertise their events,” Villares pointed out.
Founded in 2011, Gustazos is an e-commerce platform that offers customers discounts on a wide array of products and services, as well as cost-effective digital marketing tools for companies seeking higher sales and business growth.
“When we started, eight years ago, few companies were advertising on Facebook and other digital channels”, Villares explained. “We started with tickets that were hard to sell in other places.”
With knowledge and experience gained, four years later, Fangig was born to promote ticket sales in what was still considered a nontraditional space. The gamble payed-off.
Gustazos expanded to the Canary Islands, Panamá, Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Now Fangig is following the steps of its older brother by expanding operations to Jamaica. With hopes of continued expansion, Fangig recently started selling tickets in the Dominican Republic and it did so with a big bang: offering tickets for Bad Bunny’s concert, whose tour is among the 20 most lucrative worldwide, according to Pollstar.
“The code for the app was created by Puerto Rican programmers,” Villares emphasized.
This is the first local digital box office to export its operations to countries outside of the U.S. border like Jamaica and the Dominican Republic,” he concluded.
