Introducing Event Temple's Venue Management Software!

Venue Management Software For The Future - Our Story

I wanted to write this blog to introduce a new software product that we've been working on now for a little over 2 years, but has most recently hit a chord with our venue customers over the last 6 months. Event Temple, is an investor-backed software company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and I've been lucky enough to have been part of the founding team. Since I have a very strong background in weddings because of my last company, Airwaves Music, we initially started by building Event Temple with the notion that we were going to serve all wedding business owners, such as photographers, DJs, wedding planners, wedding venues, etc. We raised an angel round of investment and me and one of my best friends (who happens to be a rock star software engineer) got to work building the project. We got some initial traction after our first 6 months of building and on our launch we got over 100 paid customers within a 4 day period. It was quite an amazing feeling. Soon after though, we started to realize something was wrong. 

Too Many Redundant Features

We realized after speaking with many of our customers that if we were going to serve them, we would end up doing the exact thing we set out to never do - build a program with hundreds of features and do a poor job of all of them. We wanted to specialize but by serving so many different types of businesses, it became apparent that this would be nearly impossible to do and pull off without sacrificing the integrity of our product. We had basically built a very powerful sales tool, complete with email tracking, integration with all of the major email providers (gmail, outlook, office365, godaddy and more) and now they were asking for all kinds of things. Some of the features were requests that we even felt would affect their businesses very badly. We also realized that a large set of our customers were part-timers and we didn't relate to them nearly as much as the full-time business owners using our product, whom we felt were more passionate about their success. We decided to create a new value for our business: We wanted to help people who deserve to win, win.

An example of our current sales automation pipeline - the most powerful in the industry for venues

Our email template builder - you can create a sequence and send automated, personalized follow up emails to potential customers for just about evert

In order to serve the core group who were working full-time at their business, giving it everything they had to win, we couldn't continue serving all of the old customers, so we were faced with a difficult decision, we had to narrow our business down to the select few whom we felt really had a strong drive to take their company's to the next level. We realized fairly quickly that these were our venue clients. At the time, these were nearly all wedding venues. Our wedding venue customers seemed much more in touch with where their leads were coming from, what they were spending on advertising and where they were losing business. Most importantly though, we felt that if they didn't have this information, they really wanted it and they worked with us tirelessly to get the solutions they required so that their businesses could continue to grow. With passionate customers facing real problems on the other end of our daily phone calls, we quickly began working harder than ever to serve them and the features no longer felt redundant but instead felt mission critical to our venue partner's success. 

Working With Venues

As a result of working with wedding venues, we soon got to know wedding venues whom also had a restaurant, or who were all-inclusive, or some also had a small hotel on the property. Other wedding venues also happened to be private clubs or golf courses. This opened up our eyes to the problems of larger and different venue types such as hotels and restaurants. We soon landed our first major hotel (The Hilton) and learned what they needed. Our software then began taking shape into what it is today and we started developing a vision for the future.

Our colour-coded, multi-location event calendar, perfect for restaurants, hotels and venues.

The Future of Venue Management Software

At Event Temple, we are never content with the status quo and we are constantly dreaming up ways to do things exponentially better than they are being done today. We believe that by looking for every single inefficiency in a process, you can create a product that is not just iteratively better, but 10x better. Our goal is to help enable our customers with superpowers that they wouldn't have anything close to if our company didn't exist and so far that has been our compass. As a result, when we started getting real traction with venues, we began to read between the lines of their daily problems to think of how we could create a solution that wasn't just built for today, but one that was future-proof. From that analysis, we came up with the idea of the world's very first venue management software as a platform. We realized that the existing software on the market failed not because it didn't have the required features. Almost all of the software we looked at did have the features a venue needed to run. The issue was that they built their features into a black box that prevented them from adapting to new technology as it was developed It was like they built their software inside of a safe and then threw away the key. I believe their initial goal was to be an "all-in-one" so that all of the customer's problems could be solved in one software, without any additional software being needed. It's become clear that the world changes over time however and now without any way to speak to the outside world, our competitor's software still does that job but in many ways has become a dinosaur in the midst of the current technological landscape. As a result, we made the decision to never let that happen at Event Temple. We created an open API to integrate with Zapier and thousands of other software programs. We build the software around the idea of customization, integration and automation so that in 5 years, if software comes out that we don't expect right now, or that hasn't even been invented yet, our customers can still benefit from it without changing their entire infrastructure. At Event Temple, that's what we believe the future of venue management will be and we are excited for a more open-source ecosystem within the hospitality space. 

Get The Ebook:
The Future of Banquet Event Orders

Sincerely,

Bob Graham
Event Temple