From side hustle to startup: How Ludus expanded to all 50 states

Ludus, a Michigan-based all-in-one platform for performing arts events ticketing, marketing, fundraising, and volunteer management needs, started as a side hustle.

While attending college, Zachary Collins, CEO and Co-founder of Ludus, worked with his high school theater director to build an online ticketing platform for events. The director, using the platform Zachary created, sold $40,000 worth of tickets to his Phantom of the Opera show in 2016.

From 2016 to 2020 the company grew slowly, but it saw real growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. With fewer live events, Ludus was forced to adapt, Zachary says. The company created a streaming platform for virtual events and had an automatic seat buffering tool to accommodate social distancing when in-person events resumed.

“It [the pandemic] pushed a lot of competitors out of the market, and a lot of customers into the market,” Zachary says.

Today, Ludus has 35 full-time employees and its technology is used in all 50 states and more than 3,000 venues. It targets small- and medium-sized arts organizations like K-12 schools, colleges and universities, community theaters, and performing arts centers, says Zachary.

To continue its growth, Ludus uses customer feedback to inform new products and features. Ludus prides itself on its customer support — the team’s average response time is five minutes, with a real person. The company takes the learnings and feedback from customers and its online community and works quickly to implement improvements or entirely new features.

We can quickly build and adapt, Zachary says. Ludus works on three-week sprint cycles with a one-week cooldown. While the company has a roadmap to shape features, Zachary isn’t afraid to add new things.

“We very much stay away from business school thinking,” he says. “If we have a cool idea, if our gut is saying ‘Let’s do it’, we just try new things.”

That’s part of Ludus’s modern approach that sets it apart from its more static competitors that don’t release new features and often have hidden fees in their business model.

Ludus’s mission is to bring people together for shared experiences. Selling tickets is a byproduct of that, Zachary says.

“It’s not about the bottom line, there is a much bigger goal,” he says. “It really comes down to people coming together, regardless of who you are and your background. It's important for people to have live experiences and forget about the outside world — to laugh at things and cry and share in those experiences together.”

This mission informs the company’s culture, too.

“Our core value is to give a shit,” Zachary says. “It’s about passion for life in general and it plays into our culture quite a bit. We want people to be excited about what we’re doing.”

As Ludus plans to expand its team in the near future, they’re looking for people with that passion and ‘give a shit’ attitude, who want to be a part of a fast-moving startup and are willing to adapt to change.

“We move fast,” Zachary says. “We try new things and see what sticks. We have a longer-term vision. If it fails, it fails.”

Another tenet of their culture is employee-first.

“You always hear, ‘The customer is right, customer first’,” Zachary says. “That’s great but in reality, you have to put your employees first to put your customers first. Employees are 1 and customers are 1.5.”

Ludus is taking its employee-first, passionate culture to Grand Rapids, Mich. this fall as it moves its offices from Holland, Mich. Grand Rapids offers a more centralized location, making it easier to attract talent. Plus, Ludus wants to be a part of the city’s thriving tech scene. With help from The Right Place, Ludus found an office and has made connections in the area that will help get the Ludus name out there, Zachary says.

From its new home in Grand Rapids, Ludus will continue its mission to bring people together. With plans to expand internationally — first to Canada — and additional products for venues outside of ticketing, Ludus wants to be in every performing arts organization one way or another.

Discover more about Ludus’s product, and see what it’s like to work there.

This post originally appeared on Purpose Jobs.