New startup ideas · Consumer and commerce · Commerce and marketplaces

startup idea

Aftergate

An agent that resells your tickets everywhere for two percent, not twenty-five.

Aftergate is a self-serve agent for consumers holding tickets they cannot use: it reads the ticket, prices it against live supply across every resale venue and the primary seller, lists it in all of them at once, pulls listings when one sells, handles the transfer rules of the specific venue and pays out.

AI agent as a service
Consumer
$10-100B market
Collapses a cost 10x
Global from day one

4/5

venture judge

similar startups, last 2 years (0 all-time)

94%

of 2 nearest real companies still alive

sector

21 public grants in this sector, none matching the idea's terms

Test it before you build it

$400 · 4 weeks · 30 prospects

Prove that 10 season ticket holders will pay a $25 reservation and hand real tickets to a stranger who resells them everywhere for 2 percent, in 4 weeks for $400.

Riskiest assumption · A season ticket holder who resells 5 or more games a year will hand a stranger control of listing and transferring their tickets for a 2 percent fee, and the primary platform's transfer rules will actually let a third party move that inventory.

1Focus group: who and where

A season ticket holder for the Cubs or Phillies - 81 home games, a household that attends 30-40 and resells the rest - who already lists extras by hand on StubHub or the team's Ticketmaster resale and complains in fan threads about the combined 20-25 percent take.

where to find 30 · The weekly ticket exchange threads on r/CHICubs and r/phillies; the Cubs and Phillies ticket buy-sell-trade Facebook groups where the same sellers post every home stand; the Chicago and Philadelphia Craigslist tickets sections, where holdouts avoiding platform fees already list; the September home stands at Wrigley Field and Citizens Bank Park as the live inventory window.

2Sell first, build later

Founding-seller membership: every ticket the holder cannot use this season is priced against live comps, listed on StubHub, SeatGeek, Gametime and Ticketmaster resale simultaneously, pulled everywhere when one sells, and transferred by Aftergate - for a flat 2 percent per completed sale, locked for 12 months, starting with the next September home stand.

the ask · 2 percent of the sale price per completed sale, plus a $25 refundable founding-seller reservation

a real yes · A real yes is a paid $25 reservation followed by a real ticket handed over for listing; not a yes: upvotes, 'I would definitely use this', or sellers who reserve a slot but never transfer a ticket.

3Small experiments

The first one attacks the riskiest assumption; each ends with a number that says whether to run the next.

1. Hand-run cross-venue resale
$200 · 14 days
Recruit 10 Cubs and Phillies season ticket holders from the subreddit ticket threads and Facebook groups. One founder manually prices one game per seller against live comps, lists it on StubHub, SeatGeek, Gametime and Ticketmaster resale at once, pulls the other listings the moment one sells, and walks the transfer through. Payout flows directly from the venue to the seller; Aftergate invoices 2 percent afterward.
keep going if · 7 of 10 tickets sell with the transfer completing on every venue used, and 0 double-sells
2. $25 reservation page
$150 · 10 days
Put up a one-page site with the founding-seller offer and a card checkout for the $25 refundable reservation, then make 30 direct asks in the ticket threads and groups where the recruits came from. Count paid reservations, not signups.
keep going if · 10 of 30 direct asks pay the $25 reservation
3. Internal buyer pool first look
$50 · 14 days
Collect 30-50 ticket buyers from the same threads into a text and email list. Before each hand-run ticket goes to the public venues, offer it to the list for 24 hours at a price that splits the fee gap with the buyer. Track how many clear inside the pool.
keep going if · 3 of 10 tickets clear inside the pool at a net-to-seller price at or above the public venue net

4Collect a deposit up front

Tesla took $1,000 refundable reservations for the Model 3 and $100 for the Cybertruck before building either: the deposit is the measurement, not the revenue.

$25

per prospect, refundable

how · A $25 refundable reservation taken by card checkout on the signup page; chosen because the seller is a consumer buying a slot in a service, and a card payment is the only filter that separates fan-forum enthusiasm from intent to hand over inventory. set up: Stripe Checkout ↗

what it reserves · One of 20 founding-seller cohort slots and the flat 2 percent fee locked for 12 months

refund · Refunded automatically if the first ticket does not sell within 21 days of listing, and on request any time before the first listing.

target · 10 paid reservations from 30 direct asks within 21 days

before taking money · Check Illinois and Pennsylvania ticket reseller registration rules before charging fees, and never hold seller payouts in your own account - route money buyer to seller through the venue's own payout rails to stay clear of money transmission.

Go: build it if

7 of 10 hand-run tickets sell and transfer cleanly across venues, 10 of 30 sellers pay the $25 reservation, and 3 or more tickets clear inside the buyer pool before touching a public venue - build the agent for these two cities.

Kill: stop if

Ticketmaster transfers fail or are locked for the pilot sellers' inventory, or fewer than 4 of 30 sellers pay $25 - the fee wound is real but not worth $25 of trust, or the inventory cannot move at all.

5 Scripts to run itoutreach message, landing copy, deposit terms · click to open

outreach message

You post your extra Cubs tickets in this thread most weeks, and when you sell on StubHub or Ticketmaster instead, 20-25 percent of the price disappears into fees. I am running a founding cohort of 20 season ticket holders: I price your seats against live comps, list them on every resale venue at once, handle the transfer, and take a flat 2 percent when they sell. Holding a slot costs a $25 refundable reservation. Got 20 minutes this week for a quick call?

landing page

Resell your season tickets everywhere for 2 percent $25 refundable reservation: a founding-cohort slot with the 2 percent fee locked for 12 months Reserve your slot - 20 founding sellers, starting with the September home stands

deposit terms

Your $25 reserves one of 20 founding-seller slots and locks a flat 2 percent resale fee for 12 months. It is refunded automatically if your first ticket does not sell within 21 days of listing, and on request any time before your first listing. The cohort starts with the September home stands at Wrigley Field and Citizens Bank Park.

Would you run this test?

One tap. The yes-share feeds the Demand pillar of this idea's score; nobody sees who answered.

Budgets are out-of-pocket estimates for a team of one to three, US market. Size the deposit to the deal, and check the terms before taking money in a regulated line.

Scorecard

One score that balances how trendy the idea is, the demand for it and its potential for 100x, with competition measured relative to every other idea in the catalog. Recent startup trends first, government priorities second.

Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 24.4 x 1.61

Open

competition: more crowded than 6% of ideas · headwind x0.97

+0.0

government priorities, secondary (0 matching grants)

Trend

Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.

Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)23
Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector8
Sector direction (live batch)0
2026 trend analyst25

Demand

Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.

YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)0
Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)0
Operator judge: real pain50

100x potential

Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.

Venture judge75
Market size axis67
Moat axis100
Technologist judge25

Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 272 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were resells, tickets, everywhere, percent, not, twenty-five, self-serve, consumers.

The idea in full

What: Aftergate is a self-serve agent for consumers holding tickets they cannot use: it reads the ticket, prices it against live supply across every resale venue and the primary seller, lists it in all of them at once, pulls listings when one sells, handles the transfer rules of the specific venue and pays out. It also handles the buy side, so a user searching for a seat is matched against sellers already inside the agent before anything hits a public resale site. Fees are a flat low single-digit percent on a completed sale, against the twenty to thirty percent combined take of the incumbent resale venues.
Why now: Ticket Wallet (yc X25) is funded on AI-optimized ticket resale, and Taming Lab shows the mechanic works in another category: its re-commerce engine returns sellers 90-105% of typical C2C listing prices with a transaction success rate above 70% by routing to more than 20 secondary resellers across four countries. The routing pattern is proven; nobody on the radar has applied it to a market where fees are this high.
Wedge: first customer and entry point: Season ticket holders for a handful of clubs in two cities who already resell several times a season, acquired self-serve through the fan forums where they currently trade by hand.
Path to 100x: Global secondary ticketing runs at tens of billions of GMV a year against a $10-100B live events spend, and cutting the take rate tenfold moves volume to whoever can guarantee a sale, not to whoever has the biggest brand. Every additional seller deepens the internal pool that lets buyers skip the public venues entirely, and that two-sided pool is the winner-takes-most asset once it clears enough events per city.
Ceiling: Transfer restrictions and per-venue compliance force city-by-city and league-by-league operations, turning it into a regional broker with margins that never justify a $1B outcome.
Closest real companies, as the generator saw them: Ticket Wallet is the closest, working on AI-optimized ticket resale; Aftergate differs by matching buyers and sellers inside its own pool first, which is what makes the fee collapse rather than merely optimizing a listing. Genghis sells gift cards and game keys with no KYC; Aftergate is fully identity-checked because transfer rules and consumer resale law require it.
Main risk: Primary ticketing platforms lock transfers to their own resale marketplace and the agent loses the ability to move inventory at all.

Five judges

Each judge scores every idea in the catalog with a named rubric; the venture judge decides whether a card is shown at all (4-5 is venture-grade).

Venture investor
4/5
Cutting a 25% take to 2% across tens of billions of secondary GMV is a power-law wedge, with the internal buyer pool as the winner-takes-most asset.
Bootstrapper
3/5
Sellers already hand incumbents twenty to thirty percent, which is a real paying wound, but per-venue transfer rules force slow city-by-city ops.
Operator
3/5
Sellers demonstrably pay twenty-five percent today, but primary platforms control transfer rules and can lock inventory out of the agent entirely.
Technologist
2/5
Cross-listing and transfer-rule handling is integration plumbing that primary ticketing platforms can shut off by locking transfers to their own resale.
Risk
1/5
Primary ticketing platforms control transfer rules, so Ticketmaster locking resale to its own marketplace removes Aftergate's ability to move any inventory.
trends
2/5
Twenty-five percent resale takes existed in 2019; a funded competitor in Ticket Wallet plus a proven mechanic elsewhere is imitation, not a fresh window.

Similar startups in the directory

Companies whose pitch matches most of the idea's terms (resells, tickets, everywhere, percent, not, twenty-five, self-serve, consumers): 0 all-time, 0 from the last two years. Same matching as Idea Check.

Nothing in the directory matches this idea's terms: an open space, or a wording nobody uses yet.

Run this as an Idea Check →

The generator's reference companies

Real companies the model named as closest when it wrote the card, with their fate. A check mark is a company the radar could verify in its directory.

Public money in this direction

US federal grants, SBIR/STTR awards and open opportunities from the radar's public-money feed, matched to the idea's terms; the sector totals give the context.

grants and programs matching the idea

startup-relevant grants in Commerce and marketplaces

$20M

awarded in the sector, tracked

opportunities open now in the sector

All public money by sector →

Market signal

What the radar sees in Commerce and marketplaces: new companies by cohort year, the forming YC batch, and outcomes since the February snapshot.

Commerce and marketplaces · 145 → 119 → 130 → 67 → 34 new companies 2022 → 2026 · 87% aliveYC F26 live: 0 in this cluster, 0% of the batch (was 2% in S26)Since February, of 419 YC companies here: 4 acquired, 7 shut down, 28 rewrote their pitch

Commerce and marketplaces: companies, trend and grants →

Design attributes

The card is one cell of a designed set: every axis below was chosen before the text was written, and the text had to realize it.

Buyer: Consumer
Business model: AI agent as a service
Path to 100x: Collapses a cost 10x
Market size: $10-100B market
Capital intensity: Capital-medium (ops, field teams)
Speed to revenue: Revenue in 1-3 years
Technical depth: Real engineering
Go-to-market: Self-serve
Moat: Network effects
Geography: Global from day one
Regulation: Heavily regulated
Vibe: Hot space