Clicking on Ticket to success

Brayden Kehler may not be pursuing a career in music like he once did, but he’s still in the live entertainment business.

The 25-year-old entrepreneur is a co-founder, along with Ethan Toews and Jaden Martens, of 3Common, a Winnipeg startup that wants to change the way event-driven businesses operate.

The company aims to help businesses juggling various tasks including ticketing, email campaigns and advertising by offering a platform that unifies ticketing, customer relationship management, marketing automation, analytics, websites and payments.

“It’s meant to be a one-stop shop for live entertainment businesses,” Kehler said.

The company makes money by selling subscription packages and by collecting a service fee attached to every ticket sold.

Last year was a big one for 3Common. The company raised $1.3 million in a pre-seed funding round and tripled its annual revenue. (Kehler declined to disclose the exact figure.)

Along the way, business newsletter the Peak included Kehler on its 2025 Emerging Leaders list, which highlights leaders younger than 40 who are shaping Canada’s economy.

“It’s really fun and meaningful to go through something that was kind of started from nothing and slowly see it change and evolve, and bring more people into that,” Kehler said.

Once an aspiring electronic dance music producer, Kehler studied accounting and marketing at the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business. Martens and Toews earned computer science degrees from the U of M and University of Winnipeg, respectively.

The three co-founders are childhood friends who grew up together in Steinbach. They started building what would become 3Common in 2022.

Around that time, Kehler said, he became fascinated with payment-processing platform Square and its ease of use for small-business owners. At the same time, as someone who loves live events, Kehler wondered if he and his co-founders could create an online ticketing platform that was better than the incumbents.

The founders launched 3Common in early 2023. Toews and his fiancée were the first customers; they sold tickets to their wedding social via the platform.

“I remember the day that we processed the first payment,” Kehler said. “It was really exciting.”

Today, 225 event businesses across Canada and the United States run on 3Common.

The company’s primary customers are live music venues, comedy clubs, festivals, mid-sized conferences and theatres.

Park Alleys in Winnipeg’s South Osborne neighbourhood is one of those customers. In addition to offering five-pin bowling, the business hosts live events five nights a week, including two that are ticketed, said manager Jamie Monck.

Park Alleys switched to using 3Common two years ago, in part because its fees are lower than the platform the business previously used, Monck said. Using 3Common has allowed Park Alleys to more easily collect customers’ email addresses and market upcoming events, he added.

“We have a broader reach because of it,” Monck said, adding he appreciates working with a local company. “If we’ve ever had an issue, I can text them and they can figure it out. They’ve just been so responsive.”

Research suggests the online event ticketing market was worth around US$50 billion in 2024 and is evolving at a compound annual growth rate of around 3.5 per cent.

Kehler said 3Common is aiming to quadruple its revenue this year.

The company is well-positioned to meet that goal, said Iain Crozier, founder and managing partner of Trillick Ventures Inc., a Manitoba-based early-stage venture capital fund that has invested in 3Common.

“It’s such an elegant product and creates such an elegant user experience,” Crozier said, adding 3Common has an opportunity “to become one of Canada’s biggest tech success stories.”

“It’s that big of a market with that much opportunity there if they do it well, which they’re absolutely executing on right now.”

3Common has eight full-time employees and Kehler said he is in the process of hiring a ninth.

The company occupies a 2,500-square-foot, third-floor office in the East Exchange District.

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca