Matt Caldwell had enough to worry about already. Last summer, he’d just been hired away from the Florida Panthers to become the CEO of the Timberwolves and Lynx. A new home and time zone is plenty to navigate, but on top of that, the clubs’ transition to emerging ticketer Jump had started in earnest.

“Starting a new job, new city, all this was definitely in the back of my mind. I was like, ‘Oh, man, I got to go through a whole ticketing change,’” Caldwell told me. What he found, as he locked into this role, was a system already in rhythm and ready to grow.

When I took over the ticketing beat for SBJ, my first column came from a Minnesota trip where I spent time with the Jump crew around one of its first regular-season games with their biggest client yet in the T’Wolves. So it only seems right, now with the 2025-26 season over, to revisit Jump’s debut in the NBA with an exclusive look at their case study.

First things first: New revenue

The biggest takeaway, by far, is the estimated $5 million-plus increase of new revenue streams.

This came through a few avenues, perhaps the most significant through open distribution work between the T’Wolves, Jump and inventory distributor Automatiq. Cutting brokers out of the process and posting tickets across Jump and all secondary marketplaces registered a seven-figure boost by creating a more direct line between the team and buyers.

“I’m just not a fan of giving our inventory to brokers, and I know teams still do it, but to me, it’s our tickets, it’s our content, our experience,” said Caldwell, who also went the open distribution route with the Panthers. “And then if [a broker is] buying, even if it’s a thousand tickets off us at the season-ticket price, the only reason why they’re buying it is they think that they’re going to make a profit off them.”

Jump CEO Jordy Leiser shared that when he helped found Jump with Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez (who are also part of the T’Wolves/Lynx ownership group), he didn’t see open distribution as such a big opportunity for Jump. The work with Caldwell showed the major payoff for all involved: fans paid fewer fees regardless of whether they purchased through Jump (which doesn’t charge ticketing fees) or a secondary, while the T’Wolves accrued 90% of its additions to its ticketing database this season with zero investment as interested basketball fans found their way to purchase.

“This is a huge, unprecedented unlock for sports teams,” Leiser said. “And this applies to everybody.”

The platform and AI boost

Caldwell joked that it was often the T’Wolves holding back Jump, which was hungry to show off its capabilities. And as the season went on, Jump rolled out more AI capabilities. With Jump’s agentic suite of tools, the startup shared that the club increased their AI use (the T’Wolves went from three staffers regularly using AI at the beginning of the season to nine) and cut down task time significantly. Jump’s AI Assist helped the team handle dynamic pricing on a per-game setup and release bulk seating for playoff games, to name a couple use cases. AI automated more than 200 tasks, with most (if not all) of that coming in the second half of the season and playoffs.

Just as notable as the efficiency for the T’Wolves? The ease of use the fans experienced with the app. Team surveying showed that 95% of fans preferred the Jump-produced app over its predecessor.

Getting creative with offers

Premium seats are the worst types of inventory to sit empty. But over the course of a season, it happens. Jump quickly rolled out in-game upgrades (it actually demoed this for me during my October trip), which ultimately became a repeatable play that turned those empty seats into some revenue by offering them to fans already in the stadium.

This sat alongside some other deployments, like a win-back activation to entice one-time buyers of the upper level to return with special deals. The messaging associated with that campaign led to a 41% click-through rate of the offer, with 11% of those messaged buying a ticket in the 24 hours following the in-app/push notification outreach.

Leiser shared that as all teams and their vendors become more zeroed in on direct-to-consumer relationships, Jump’s mission has been to constantly turn the data produced into actions for the benefit of the franchise.

“Just connecting the dots — that drove real revenue for the club, too,” Leiser said. “And again, this is just blocking and tackling — the way they do it in every other industry. … It’s just this true idea of ownership.

“Who owns the fan? Who gets to control the communication and the messaging? It should be the club, not the ticketing company.”

To see Jump’s full case study, click here.