DealFlicks

Sean Wycliffe had the insight that 88% of movie theater seats sit empty every day—a massive inefficiency begging for a marketplace solution. After graduating from UC Berkeley in December 2010, he decided to build "Priceline for movie tickets." But it wasn't a straightforward path: Sean had dropped out of school five years earlier to run another business venture (selling long-distance phone service door-to-door with his brother), which eventually collapsed when their partner went bankrupt. By 21, he'd blown through Ferrari and Porsche purchases and had to move back in with his dad. That humbling experience taught him to play the long game.

The early customer acquisition attempts were scrappy and often hilarious failures. Sean and his co-founder Kevin tried putting fliers on bulletin boards at Walmart, standing outside handing them out until security chased them away. They snuck fliers into high school lockers (including girls' locker rooms, then running out). They even sponsored fraternity parties at UC Berkeley, bringing kegs in exchange for social media spam—which generated awareness but zero ticket sales because the nearest theater was three miles away. Kevin drank so much beer promoting the concept that he developed gout. Despite these efforts, they were selling only 20-30 tickets per month.

The real breakthrough came through direct theater outreach. It took them about a year and conversations with roughly 100 theaters before they signed their first partner. Theaters had no history of marketing or offering discounts; they relied on good locations, good movies, and studio marketing. Educating them on the value of filling empty seats with marginal revenue (even at a 15-20% cut to DealFlicks) required persistence and relationship-building.

Once they had theater partners, SEO became their primary growth engine. They strategically built landing pages targeting high-volume search terms like "movie ticket deals," "Minions coupons," and similar seasonal/movie-specific keywords. By July (the interview date), they were selling approximately 100,000 tickets and concession packages monthly at roughly $15 average price—roughly $1.5M in monthly transaction volume. Google, Yahoo, and Bing organic search drove massive traffic. They supplemented SEO with paid channels: Google AdWords and Microsoft Ad Center, spending about $20,000 per month on targeted ads.

Affiliates became another key channel, though with an interesting unit economics twist: DealFlicks was losing money on affiliate-driven transactions, paying $4 per conversion while making only $2. The bet was on customer lifetime value: they estimated customers would make ~4 purchases per year, and over three years a customer was worth ~$24 (potentially up to $50 with optimization). This allowed them to afford affiliate payouts while still scaling.

By the interview date, DealFlicks had grown to a $2.4M annual revenue run rate (with 2x year-over-year growth), partnering with over 600 US theaters including 13 of the top 50 chains. The 9-person team was split evenly: 3 engineers, 3 sales, and 3 operations/support. Sean, now 32, had learned hard lessons about humility, patience, and long-term thinking from his earlier business failures. He was traveling the country in a van with Kevin, doing direct theater sales, while maintaining a healthy work-life balance (8 hours of sleep, no alarm clock, full Saturdays off). Though not yet profitable, the company was gaining serious traction by filling theaters' empty seats and capturing 15-20% of each transaction.