VENU - Transforming Hospitality Marketing with Personalised Rewards
James McArthur and Kieran Gardiner are on a mission to bring sophisticated marketing tech to independent restaurants, bars and cafés, with their new rewards club: Venu.
Venu is the first rewards club to work across different, independent businesses. Members earn Venu Points everywhere on the network, to redeem for rewards at their favourite locations. Soon Venu will be linked with your payment card directly on the payment terminal, with just a single tap to join the club.
Venu learns member tastes and behaviours as they spend across the network, to personalise deals, rewards, and recommendations in the app. This enables businesses to reach the right customer, with the perfect promotion, precisely when they need to fill their empty seats.
Venu was recently one of just two Kiwi businesses invited to join Startmate, a highly competitive Australasian start-up accelerator. Startmate received a record 550 applications this year, selecting just 10 companies for their Summer ‘24 cohort.
Venu cofounders James McArthur and Kieran Gardiner
SQL: Tell us about your background and how Venu came to be?
Kieran: I started out working in hotels and hospitality in Queenstown. Then, I moved into sales and marketing and, later, advertising. Again, I was focused on tourism and hospitality, and I spotted how difficult it is for small and medium restaurant and café businesses to market themselves. So that’s where the initial idea came from.
James: I’ve been a software engineer for close to a decade now. I’ve worked for places like Atlassian and Lightspeed – big software companies. I was looking for an opportunity at the other end of the spectrum, to really do something where I had some ownership in it. I got linked up with Kieran, and between his experience in the hospitality scene and mine at Lightspeed, it felt like a good fit.
SQL: How did you get involved with Startup Queenstown Lakes?
Kieran: I’ve lived in Queenstown for close to ten years, and I got involved in the start-up scene about five years ago. My first exposure to Startup Queenstown Lakes was being asked to mentor at one of their start-up weekends. I’ve mentored at three events since then and that’s how I’ve got to know Jinene, Marco, Monette and the team at SQL.
It’s a great opportunity to meet other founders, and it’s good inspiration. A big piece of it is knowing that SQL are building that ecosystem here. James and I live in this area because we like the lifestyle, but the tech ecosystem is quite small – so it’s great to know that they are there and advocating for start-ups and building the community.
SQL: How has the SQL community impacted your business?
Kieran: It’s given us the confidence to establish a start-up in the Queenstown Lakes District. We’re looking at getting venture funding, and we’re what you’d call a high-growth tech start-up – and that sort of start-up wouldn’t typically be in regions like this. They’d be in the cities like Sydney and Auckland.
The region has been advocating for a long time for that not to be the case. With the work that Council and Peter Harris (Economic Development Manager, QLDC) have been doing on diversifying the region, too, it’s all coming together, and that gives us the confidence to base ourselves here.
SQL: What are the next steps for Venu?
SQL: What are the next steps for Venu?
Kieran: We launched Venu a few weeks ago (March 2024) in Queenstown, and we’ve just gone live in Wanaka. The response has been incredible – we already have 21 venues signed up to the platform. So, the next step is to build the member base, we’ve had strong sign-ups so far with 147% average weekly growth.
We’ve also just opened our capital raise with investor commitments in already. We’re offering anyone in the SQL community access to our Startmate Syndicate deal, so please reach out if you’d like more information.
SQL: Why did you decide to found your business in Queenstown?
James: It’s about the lifestyle. I moved down from the ‘Big Smoke’ (Auckland). There’s everything you want down here – everything is on your doorstep. And more and more it is becoming a hub, attracting similar people who are ambitious and want to build things. There’s a lot of opportunity.
SQL: Describe SQL in one word
Both: Community.
Email kieran@venuhq.com for more information
Story written by Startup Queenstown Lakes.