Picatic, a newly launched crowdfunding platform for ticketing and event management, wants to make event planning less risky.

Consider this: organizers can spend countless hours and dollars setting up an event, be it a conference or a concert. Some bad luck or imprecise planning, however, can result in a poor turnout, losing the organizer money and time. Picatic’s developers offer a crowdsourced solution for this problem.

It’s no secret that crowdfunding works in part because of its market research capabilities. If consumers want to ‘pre-order’ a product, they pledge a certain amount. Once enough potential customers donate money, a product gets made and is then distributed out to the backers. Since the number of pre-orders is known, the manufacturer doesn't need to guess how many units to produce, reducing the risks involved. Picatic is essentially using the same concept to crowdfund events.

An organizer can create an event with a target ticket sales goal -- the break-even amount, for example. The pre-order tickets are then sold at a discount (and with potential added perks) to drive up the number of sales. Once they meet their target, organizers can get the money to pay for the venue, speakers, and all other expenses, knowing that they will at least make some of the money back and have an audience. The organizers can then sell the rest of the tickets at the original price, hypothetically leading to a plump profit.

Aside from providing a platform to promote and sell tickets for an event, Picatic also offers a number of tools to research the customers' needs and manage the guest list. One of these tools is an app to keep track of the inventory and attendance list on mobile devices. There are also back-end management tools for accounting, polling, inventory management, and more, co-founder and CEO Jayesh Parmar told Crowdsourcing.org.

For its services, Picatic charges an average of 2.35% per ticket sold, including payment processing fees. The exact pricing, however, is on a "sliding scale," Parmar said, dependant on a variety of factors. The CEO did make clear that Picatic doesn’t charge for free events and “only makes money if [it sells] a ticket for you first.”

“It’s a zero-risk platform,” he said. “The only time we make a little bit [of profit] is if we make you a lot first, that’s our mantra.”

The platform launched only a few days ago, and Parmar said he and his team are focused in the short term on growing the number of customers. Once Picatic begins to handle more transactions, Parmar will look to expand into the Latin American and English-speaking European markets.

Picatic is not the first company to crowdfund ticket sales. We recently highlighted Togather, which crowdfunds book tours, and HelpersUnite (which was acquired by EarlyShares) also allows crowdfunded ticket sales. The success of these platforms will depend on how precise the inventory management tools are and how quickly they can build up their customer bases. It seems Picatic has figured out the inventory management part; increasing its number of users, however, may prove harder yet.