UsherU founder Oliver Fegan has been lucky to get a second bite of the cherry. He launched Temptster in 2013, which attracted investors and clients before fizzling out. “It failed because we didn’t have the team or tech in place to capitalise on early traction,” says the 35-year-old Dubliner.

The Temptster app alerted users to special offers in restaurants in their locality, and signed up 300 eateries in Dublin for the service. With UsherU, the app focuses on cinemas, allowing owners to notify app users about ticket discounts.

Fegan launched a beta version of UsherU in London in April 2015. The British Film Institute had run a competition for solutions to improve cinema attendances, Fegan explains, and UsherU emerged as the winning entry. “We make it possible to book tickets across all cinemas in three clicks.”

Fegan says that his company now has 50 cinemas on board using the app, including large chains like Cineworld’s Picturehouse and Curzon. Dublin is in the pipeline for 2016, but at the moment the app is London-centric for offers, although cinema listings in Ireland are available on the app.

A BFI grant of £25,000 helped Fegan and his team develop a skeleton product, while a more substantial investment of €220,000 from Telefonica and European Pioneers helped build the team of 11 people.

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Business Model

UsherU works from a base in the LINC centre in Blanchardstown IT and also maintains a London office. The business model is that UsherU takes a small percentage of every ticket sold through the app. “Since September we have been growing ticket sales 70% month on month,” he says.

“We also work with film distributors who want to market films to our users based on their film preferences. We are the first company to use machine learning to make it possible to reach audiences based on their tastes and not their age.”

The UsherU founder says that being a middleman is an ongoing challenge for the company. “You have to worry about both supply (cinemas) and demand (consumers). The biggest challenge is to fix one side so your sole focus is on delivering the other.”

Pictured are UsherU principals Oliver Fegan (left), Catherine Downes and Andres Macias