Eventbrite | Customer Story

It all began in 2012, when Learn With Bricks founder Chad Collins’ seven year old daughter, Jordyn Collins, asked if they could make LEGO videos for YouTube. In eighteen months, they made more than 500 videos that had been viewed more than 12 million times.

In 2014, Collins realized there was no LEGO event to meet his tens of thousands of subscribers in person. “That was the ‘aha moment,’” Collins says. “We thought, ‘Well, if nothing exists in our area, let’s create one.’”

24,000 people showed up to the first Brick Fest Live, which was designed to inspire, educate, and entertain LEGO fans. But Collins didn’t slow down for a minute to celebrate the success of the first Brick Fest Live: he was already hard at work at the second.

“Once we sold the first 5,000 tickets to the first show, we started thinking, ‘If we can impact this many people in one city, how many people could we have a positive impact on nationwide...or even globally?’” Collins says. “Before we had the first show, we’d already booked a venue for the second.”

But Brick Fest Live wasn’t built into a nationwide phenomenon overnight. Even with a number of successful events under their belt, Collins and team still faced critical challenges. While they had a strong online community, they fought to build awareness in their target cities. And operational efficiency was an ongoing difficulty. Collins and team struggled to make time for strategic decision-making, while stretched thin by managing the logistics of multiple events.

It didn’t help that after launching Brick Fest Live on Eventbrite, Collins had tried a different ticketing company for their next events. “The first show we ever did was with Eventbrite,” Collins says. “We moved away, then wondered why we ever left and wanted to come back.”

– Maximize their marketing efforts as they entered new markets

– Free up time for their leadership team to make strategic decisions

– Scale their operations as they expand into new events

Learn With Bricks was born out of an internet community, and online marketing remains their most powerful channel for growth.

“We leverage the power of the internet for marketing, and Eventbrite makes it easy for us to do that,” Collins says. “We wanted to find a ticketing partner that understood internet marketing just as well as we did, and knew how important it is.”

“Facebook is our number one marketing channel, and Eventbrite’s tight integration with Facebook is huge,” Collins says. His team can create a new event on Eventbrite and immediately push it to create a Facebook Event in one click.

Then, “by putting our Facebook pixel code in Eventbrite, we can retarget people who have seen our checkout page but haven’t yet checked out, and serve them with a targeted ad.” On the reporting end, Eventbrite pushes their sales data to Facebook Ads Manager so they can track conversions and adjust spend to the best performing ads.

As Learn With Bricks grew, Collins knew their old workflow wasn’t sustainable — especially as they had to make important strategic decisions about the future

“From a leadership standpoint, I knew that the tasks our leadership team were managing could be managed by new hires,” Collins says. “We needed to hand off the work that was preventing us from growing and scaling the business.”

Collins set out to hire support staff, customer service, and event producers to build their business. Today, his team hires new staff every week.

“The number one reason that we came back to Eventbrite was that it was easier for us to onboard new hires,” Collins says. At their rapid pace of hiring, spending hours training each individual on a convoluted ticketing system wasn’t sustainable for their team. “We want new hires to come in and have an interface that’s intuitive, and that’s where we really felt Eventbrite rose to the occasion.

“We had confidence that we could hand off all this manual work to someone new coming in, because we could set up the right permissions so they can only do and see certain things. Eventbrite frees us up to do what the leadership team should do — strategize, grow, and scale the business,” Collins says. “There’s no doubt we have more time now. It’s absolutely worked.”

With more time at his disposal, Collins has turned his sights to expanding the Learn With Bricks business beyond Brick Fest Live — and beyond U.S. borders.

"First up: expanding the two new events they launched in 2016. The second Young Innovators Fair, a STEM education expo, took place in June 2017. Minefaire, a Minecraft convention, is taking place four times this year. (The first Minefaire set a new Guinness World Record for the largest attended convention for a single video game, with more than 12,000 attendees.) And Collins is already planning on expanding both concepts more in 2018.

“Instead of getting in front of a computer and checking each event one by one, it’s super helpful to go into the app and see the stats in real time,” Collins says. “We can see if one event isn’t performing like the others, and find out what’s not working properly.”

Because most of Learn With Bricks’ sales events (presales or early bird discounts, for example) occur on weekends, having this information easily accessible on mobile has been paramount. Collins can understand how the business is doing when he’s on-the-go, and quickly take action if an event’s sales are falling behind.

Of course, Collins isn’t satisfied pioneering three new successful events in the United States. Next, he plans on expanding Learn With Bricks globally, without losing the educational, family focus that makes Brick Fest Live and its sister events so impactful.

“Each new event is like building another company,” Collins says. “Each event has their own unique ecosystem. It’s almost like your children — they’re special in their own way.” By using Eventbrite, Collins has been able to manage all of events’ complex needs in one streamlined platform.