Attending on-campus sporting events is integral to the college experience for many students nationwide. Whether they go to bond with friends, to cheer on their school’s best student athletes or simply for the love of the game, thousands of students will once again flock to stadiums across the country when the college football season begins in approximately one month. Others, though, will fall victim to ticket scams — bad actors who take advantage of students just to make a quick buck.
Snapchat, Facebook and GroupMe are three of the largest platforms used by students to buy and sell tickets, but none of these platforms are explicitly designed for ticket resale, meaning buyer protections are nonexistent. If a malcontent infiltrates a student ticket resale group, innocent buyers often find themselves out of tens or hundreds of dollars with no ticket to show for it.
“Most of the people I know have been scammed via bot accounts that impersonate students,” senior Indiana University Kelley School of Business student Mihir Ved said. “I’ve had friends send money to these people through Venmo or Zelle just to lose their money and immediately be blocked by the ‘sellers.’”
Taking note of the perilous student ticket resale market, junior University of Iowa Tippie College of Business students Josh Cohen and Brady Stein founded SeatStock, a student-only ticket exchange platform that seeks to provide students nationwide with a safe avenue to buy and sell tickets. Students must use a valid university email address ending in .edu to sign up and exchange tickets on the site.
Cohen is the CEO and Stein is the COO, while fellow Tippie student and co-founder Adam Hasan is the Chief Business Officer and handles the company’s finances. SeatStock processes payments through Stripe, a third-party payment platform used by over 2 million customers worldwide. While Hasan also handles some of the company’s legal workload, most of it is offloaded to lawyers to help the company remain as transparent as possible.
Iowa computer science student Brandon Egger is the company’s Chief Technology Officer. The platform is built entirely from scratch and will be available at numerous Power Five schools this fall, including Big Ten schools like Iowa and Indiana. Students can earn ticket discounts and rewards such as memorabilia through SeatStock’s referral program, which is also set to roll out in the fall.
Students wishing to sell a ticket on SeatStock can do so by listing it on the marketplace, either by selecting a preset price or naming their own price. Tickets are sent through the seller’s ticket portal and payment is processed through SeatStock.
Buyers can bid on tickets or purchase them outright and SeatStock ensures buyer protection by acting as a mediator, holding onto the buyer’s funds until the ticket is received. The company collects a 10% fee from both the buyer and the seller, with the money going toward operating costs such as website hosting.
If the ticket is not received, the funds are returned to the buyer. In their customer discovery process, Cohen and Stein surveyed 400 people and found that 25% — approximately 100 — had been the victim of a ticket resale scam on platforms like Facebook and GroupMe.
“There’s no security on those platforms,” Stein said. “We realized that this is a big problem that needs to be solved.”
Cohen said he hopes to connect SeatStock with Paciolan and Ticketmaster, which oversee ticketing for most Power Five schools. With the current landscape of student ticketing, individual athletic departments and their ticket offices have very little control of the market — it mostly falls into the laps of Paciolan and Ticketmaster. Cohen and Stein said they hope to continue building SeatStock after graduating from Iowa in May 2026.
“I wouldn’t see us passing this down,” Cohen said. “We built it from the ground up. If we’re helping students out and creating value for ourselves, we’ll continue working on this and growing it.”
Hasan added that the founders’ experiences with ticket exchanges put them in a unique position.
“We are students who have faced this problem,” Hasan said. “We built this platform to reflect that. We’re trying to build a safe marketplace from a student’s perspective.”
Cohen emphasized SeatStock’s focus on buyer protection.
“If something goes wrong on other platforms, there’s no one there to help out,” he said. “On our platform, we guarantee that you get your ticket, or we give you your money back, no questions asked. The best thing we provide is a great experience for any user that visits our site. We want to make sure you go to the game.”
