Fed up with waiting in long lines for drinks at music festivals, Daniel Coen set out to create a tech solution for the problem... and Skippio was born. The entrepreneur tells George Morahan about his early live testing of the app, how he’s raised funding and why he’s convinced it will be a global success
Daniel Coen tactfully explains that he was attending “a music festival in Leinster” when he came up with the idea for a start-up to help venues across Ireland speed up their drinks service.
The Skippio founder and chief executive was stuck queueing for 40 minutes and missed “all the best acts” while other punters gave up and decided to leave the site for a few pints in the local pubs.
Queues at concerts, sports events and festivals are a common problem.
When Coen conducted his initial research, queues were named as the biggest complaint, and missing an event due to queuing was the biggest upset to customer satisfaction.
Sitting in a meeting room at NovaUCD, where Skippio has been based since early summer, the softly spoken Coen states that food and drinks are the most important part of the customer experience globally, ahead of technology and even the event itself.
In its simplest form, Skippio is a drinks ordering app.
Users place their order wherever they are on-site, and are alerted when it’s ready, largely removing the need for queuing.
The company takes a percentage of the sales made through its platform.
The platform is built on a web browser app, so users don’t have to download and log into an app that they would likely delete after the event.
On the supply side, Skippio will typically have a separate collection area and back bar located next to the main bar.
“It’s very, very easy to use. It’s quick, it’s fast. It does exactly what it says on the tin: skipping the queues,” he says.
Coen — a picture of casual professionalism with his neat brown beard and wearing a light green quarter zip and blue slacks — is a former management consultant with KPMG and Grant Thornton who left his role as a global project operations manager for pharma multinational Novartis to pursue Skippio in mid-2022.
He took part in the first phase of Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers programme for start-up founders while working full-time, but the six-month second phase required him to leave his job and take the plunge with Skippio.
The initial minimum viable product (MVP) version of Skippio was “scrapped together” with the assistance of the Trading Online Voucher Scheme grant from his local enterprise office and a willing developer Coen found through his girlfriend.
“We got lucky, I just happened to come across someone who liked the idea and hated queues to build us the MVP, because it was expensive — I think in Ireland we were getting charged a good bit to try an MVP,” Coen says.
“My girlfriend is a nurse, and the guy’s brother was a doctor at the same practice, and he said I should talk to his brother.
“He liked the idea and helped me get a very scrappy version, and that’s all we needed.”
Christmas 2022 proved to be a baptism of fire for Coen when he first trialled Skippio at the Fairyhouse and Leopardstown races.
Fairyhouse went well enough, so much so that when he was asked if he was ready to do Leopardstown as well, he said: “Of course we are.”
He adds: “We absolutely were not.”
Viewers of the acclaimed television dramedy The Bear may remember the first season episode where the kitchen staff are completely overwhelmed after a mishap with a new ordering system.
Coen experienced something similar during Skippio’s trial at Leopardstown on St Stephen’s Day in 2022.
“It was a disaster,” he says. “We had hundreds of orders flying in, and we didn’t know if we could turn off the system and close things or pause or anything like that because it was just an MVP.
“We had never experienced anything like it, but even the trial after that went a lot more smoothly.
“Not smoothly, but we knew we could close the store, so we could stop orders coming in until we backfilled, because the worst thing is when you have people standing there and you don’t know what or where their orders are, who they are, or how long they’ve been waiting there, and people get annoyed.”
Skippio has since been employed at the Galway International Arts Festival, the Curragh, Live at the Marquee and Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork.
Coen claims queueing times with the app are 92% shorter than the global average of 18 minutes.
Orders made with Skippio during Gavin James’s gig at the Galway International Arts Festival in July were ready in an average of 30 seconds, and the platform has a repeat user rate of 51%.
To this day, perhaps scarred by the Leopardstown experience, Coen will be on the ground when Skippio is rolled out to a new venue, pouring pints, asking customers how they found the system and what they would change about it.
“We knew exactly what we needed to change,” he says.
“So since then it’s been a lot of reiterating, changing focus heavily on the operation side.
“A lot of people think you just order and you collect and it’s ready. People don’t consider the operational side of things, [things that] our system now has that it didn’t before.
“Take, for example, if [a staff member] needs to go to the toilet. You don’t really consider that when you’re building a system.
“A lot of systems at the moment are just ‘make the order and pick a time’.
“The operators are really hoping it’s going to be ready, that nothing goes wrong and nothing breaks — a tap or a keg or whatever — and that’s what we didn’t know about then.
“And we’ve done a lot of work [to get where] we are today.”
The company is now seeking to trial food orders and Coen ultimately wants Skippio to cater to “the full fan experience”, even if that means assisting venues with toilet queues.
“We’re just seeing can we do anything to alleviate them,” he says.
The company was one of the first start-ups to secure funding (€100,000) from Enterprise Ireland’s Pre-Seed Start Fund, and recently raised another €540,000 from private investors and Enterprise Ireland’s High Potential Start-Up fund.
With the new funding, Coen is seeking to trial Skippio at UK venues and racecourses by the end of the year.
Down the line, he wants to bring the company to the US, the Middle East and Australia.
“We want to get a proper market fit, and then we’ll be looking to raise a bigger round in the next 18 months,” Coen says.
“The focus this year is just to move faster, focusing on our products, our scalability, then raising big rounds to really dominate in the market.”
Skippio will also hire staff in product development, operations, marketing and sales, bringing its headcount to about five or six full-time staff and eight to 10 staff overall.
Rapid growth is the present aim.
“We won’t be profitable anytime soon, definitely not this year or next, because if we are profitable then we’re not scaling fast, and then we have a different problem,” Coen says.
“But look, our goal is to be the household name for events and venues.”
Photo: Daniel Coen, founder of Skippio. Photograph: ©Fran Veale
