How this started

I'm Roland Sarlot. My wife and I ran magic theaters for twenty years. We grew to four cities at once before we sold the business.

Not advising anybody. Running them. Filling seats, watching the numbers, living through the good weeks and the bad ones.

Running four cities at once showed me what one theater never sees. The same show, in rooms the same size, could sell out in one city and struggle in another. Some weeks sold out early. Others sat until the last minute. Marketing that worked one season stopped working the next.

None of it was luck. It was a pattern.

So I stopped guessing and started testing. Prices, show times, how many steps a buyer has to take before they can pay. Hundreds of tests. I read everything I could find, from Amazon's internal memos to PhD dissertations. I have degrees in applied math and physics and did university physics research, so I tested it the way I was trained to.

What I kept finding was that every tool I needed to sell tickets already existed, but each one lived in its own box. None of them talked to each other, and none could tell me which one actually sold a ticket.

So I started Web Savvy Oracle with Bryce Kuhlman, who has a master's in electrical engineering. At Motorola he wrote early-warning software for satellite systems. His job was to spot a failure before it happened, because once a satellite breaks, nobody is going up to fix it. That's how we watch your shows. He runs the tech. I run the theater side.

Other platforms build their own tools around their ticketing. We did it the other way around. We started with the best tool for each job, and built our own ticketing because it was the only way to get them all working as one. Every sale reports back to all of them on its own.

On top of that, our system reads everything, every day. It spots what's working and what's slipping, makes suggestions, and keeps getting better. It watches every show while there's still time to do something.

Four cities at once taught me what a control tower knows.

A pilot sees one plane. The tower sees them all.

I've always watched every show closely. Today I have the tools and the team to see what no single theater can: where each show is heading and what's in the way.