Watch RushTix launch on stage here.

This interview with RushTix founder Jill Bourque was conducted by the team at Job Portraits during preparations for the LAUNCH Festival.

What are you working on?

RushTix is like Netflix for real life. For a monthly subscription you can go to unlimited local arts and culture events. It's a way to get more out of life by experiencing it in person, instead of watching it on a screen.

Tell us why you chose this problem, and why are you the person to be tackling it?

I have a mission to get more people to try new things. I think that as a culture we’re getting stuck because it’s so easy to let everything come to us. We're like "I want my Netflix!" and we’re getting passive and disconnected. My whole thing is to inspire folks to reach out and connect with others through arts and culture. I want people to experience more things in the real world. Hopefully that’s with RushTix, but please, just go experience life. Go try something new!

On the other side of things, I want to help artists and venues find an audience. I’ve been a performer and producer for 15 years so I know, especially if you're unknown, it’s hard to get people to come see your stuff. Amazing performing arts without engaged audiences can't grow and thrive. RushTix can help fix this.

What are you hoping to learn or achieve from launching at the LAUNCH Festival?

I want to see how the market responds to RushTix. We’ve been growing in a small, contained environment and now the stage will be bigger. It used to be that as a performer you needed to woo a few key members of the press to get noticed. But today you have to approach the market in a different way to build an audience. Everyone has some degree of influence; the trick is to find a way to get to the right ones with the right message. This applies to us launching RushTix, too. Once we’re out of stealth, you can bet I’ll be talking to the folks who are into to what we're about.

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