Tech in nightlife

An industry ripe for technology adoption

Imagine booking a hotel room, flight, or restaurant reservation without Priceline or OpenTable. That’s where nightlife is today. Daylife has been served for 15 years but these technologies completely missed nightlife. If you want to book bottle service, you have to call around shopping prices and asking which DJ is performing that night. It’s archaic.

The next best thing to calling around, shopping prices, and figuring out which DJ’s are performing is contacting someone called a promoter. These type-A personalities use their clout in a market to influence people’s decisions. It’s a cut above the guys slapping call girl cards on the Vegas strip. They have limited reach and are hard to deal with. A term frequently heard is that “promoters hate promoters.”

Nightlife is a huge fragmented market that’s ripe for technology to make it more efficient. There are many inefficiencies in the nightlife industry.

Here’s a short list showing heavy points of friction in nightlife:

• Inefficient service. Customers wanting and willing to pay more for bottles and drinks but their waitress is impossible to track down. Waitresses having to fight through crowds to enter orders into a 20 year old point of sale system.
• Menu’s are hard to navigate. They are long and cluttered, especially bottle service lists.
• Unsold inventory and hard to access. Tables frequently go unsold due to broken promoter sales processes. It’s not easy to find a promoter. You don’t really know what you are buying.
• There is lack of personalization. Customer relationship management software isn’t being used. Data to reward loyal customers isn’t readily available.
• No mutual review system to hold guest and venue accountable for actions and service. 99% of nightlife isn’t using data to improve service or prevent bad actors from causing problems.
• Payments are anything but seamless. Credit and debit cards are collected and held while your tab is open. Splitting a bill is at least a 10min task and many waitresses won’t do it.
• Table management solutions suck. Promoters, customers, websites, and apps are all funneling reservations to managers whom typically organize their lists on excel or word documents. This clutter causes poor customer service.
• Guest lists are messy. A door man has to flip through 30 pages of names to find you and then asks for cover charge. This causes unnecessary anxiety for patrons.
• Lack of inventory tracking. Reordering isn’t easy and take hours for management to do.

Over the next few years many companies will emerge, trying to service the nightlife industry. Many have already failed and some are emerging as leaders in the space now. Some companies will close up shop. The opportunity is too big. So many other industries have been positively influenced by technology. This is one of the last industries standing that’s wide open. It’s nightlife’s time to see the light.