A Non-Profit with a Sustainable Business Model - Adam McCurdie of Humanitix

Imagine Eventbrite and Ticketmaster but with lower booking fees, highly competitive technology, an incredible customer service team, and not to mention, has an amazing cause. That’s Humanitix, a ticketing registration platform that donates 100% of its profits to education programs around the world, and Humanitix CEO and co-founder Adam McCurdie is here today to talk to us about how Humanitix creates a meaningful impact and why Humanitix is one of the frontrunners, if not the frontrunner, in the events ticketing space.

Something interesting about the Humanitix co-founders Adam and Josh is that they actually shared Josh’s salary while bootstrapping and building Humanitix. Adam shares that this definitely required a lot of trust in each other and included setting some rules and boundaries in their friendship in order to make it work. Apart from having a great partner, he also told us how integral having a good team is. A testament to this is the fact that despite not being able to provide equity, they have zero churn with their engineering team, which is one reason they’re able to constantly innovate and offer the best quality product in their field.

So much was discussed in this episode, including how they raised initial funding from philanthropists and what they promised them in exchange for their money, how they convinced event hosts to make the switch to Humanitix, why people use their product not just because it’s impactful but also because their technology is exceptional, and so much more. You won’t want to miss this episode.

Adam’s key lessons and quotes from this episode were:

• “We've created the biggest no-brainer in events ticketing, and I think that's the main reason for our success and growth to date.” (7:51)
• “To get an event host to switch to Humanitix, particularly the bigger, more complex, sophisticated events that have more booking fees as a result, we have to come to the party with a very compelling piece of technology, not just a far more ethical model.” (9:22)
• “You can, as we've proven, run a beautiful company that creates phenomenally high-quality products, that produces a lot of profit, and as a result, achieves all this impact and funds the organization itself.” (18:34)
• “How important are shareholder values and wealth in the grand scheme of things? It's not the be all and end all of the capitalist engine. It's just one aspect, but it doesn't have to be everything.” (44:49)

In this episode, we also talked about:

• How Humanitix works (5:27)
• Why they choose the 501(c)(3) nonprofit model for Humanitix (16:21)
• The most important lessons Adam learned on his journey to creating Humanitix (23:05)
• Battling COVID (38:30)
• Compassionate capitalism: How Adam sees the world in 10 years (43:51)