How Aries Tickets Automates Student Payouts (and Wins Back Hours) with Dots

TL;DR

• Manual Venmo nightmare → one-click automation.
• Hours per week saved is time now spent on product, growth, and marketing.
• Happier sellers & buyers thanks to flexible payout options (Venmo, PayPal, ACH, gift cards).
• White-glove support that feels like an extension of the Aries Tickets team.

Meet Aries Tickets

Aries Tickets is a student-ticket marketplace for college sports. Founding team Agam Jain (Purdue), Bryce Hartzel (Penn State), and Sidd Subramanyam (Purdue), saw classmates drowning in Facebook groups and GroupMe chats, trying to unload or snag student tickets. They built a dedicated platform so buying and selling happens in one trusted place, without sellers being overloaded by DMs and without buyers getting scammed by bad actors.

“We thought there’s got to be a better way to centralize all this, and we created a platform and that turned into Aries Tickets.” – Agam Jain, Cofounder

Today the startup has moved from hundreds of users, to thousands, and now into the tens of thousands range, all through organic marketing and without a single formal partnership with universities.

The Payout Bottleneck

Life Before Dots

• Aries Tickets wanted to pay student sellers exclusively via Venmo to match students’ existing habits. This way, payouts could be sent without forcing students to connect sensitive info or add new bank accounts.
• Each night, the founders opened the Venmo app on a phone and sent every payout one by one.
• This workaround required up to an hour every single night.
• Updating the database and reconciling transactions were also manual chores.

“Literally from our phone, through our business Venmo account, we would send out Venmo payouts one by one. It took 30 minutes to an hour just setting up Venmos.” – Agam

Discovering Dots

A late-night Google search for “Venmo payout API” surfaced Dots. The team realized they could automate Venmo and unlock additional rails (PayPal, ACH, gift cards) through a single integration.

“We did not even necessarily realize a concept like Dots existed where you could automate payouts of a lot of different formats.” – Agam

Implementation was straightforward: Aries Tickets swapped nightly spreadsheet gazing for a few API calls, allowing users to receive sales proceeds directly.

Results

BEFORE DOTS:

• Time spent on payouts: 60 minutes/night
• Only Venmo supported for payouts
• The team’s focus was taken up by manual operations

AFTER DOTS:

• Time spent on payouts: 0 minutes/night
• Diversified payout methods via Venmo, Paypal, ACH, gift cards, and more
• The team could focus on product, growth, and marketing

What Changed for Sellers

• Flexibility: choose payout rail, collect one-by-one or in bulk.
• Reliability: funds arrive without hidden handoffs.

“Sellers have shared a lot of feedback around ‘wow, the payouts are very flexible.’” – Agam

What Changed for the Founders

• Reclaimed multiple hours in a week
• Freedom to scale: manual Venmo simply wouldn’t survive the jump to tens of thousands of users.
• Fewer fires: no more flaky Venmo-for-Business logins or frozen funding sources.

Support That Feels Like Team-Augmentation

When something goes sideways, Dots’ support jumps in, sometimes on video calls the same day.

“Your team’s ability to have such dedicated support… that support is a little thing that goes a really long way. I really don’t know what we’d do if Dots disappeared. All of the other productive things we’re doing, building, marketing, launching, would really take a hit.” – Agam

Looking Ahead

Aries Tickets continues its push into new campuses, navigating industry constraints, and focusing on details that delight students at scale. With payouts on autopilot, the founders can obsess over those details instead of nightly payout marathons.

Want to See It in Action?

• Buy or sell student tickets
• Automate payouts like Aries Tickets