Entrepreneur launches ‘Airbnb’ of private events
Aims to simplify booking space
PROVIDENCE — A serial entrepreneur, Nick Cianfaglione was helping his family plan for a funeral reception when he realized the effort it took to book a restaurant for any kind of event.
The entire event booking space was fragmented, he said, where it was up to consumers to call a list of restaurants and hope that the right person would be available to speak to go over pricing and other details. But most of the time, the person working inside these restaurants, breweries, and other venues, was not available when he was calling.
Previously the founder of VC Social and Artist Republik, Cianfaglione has now founded Restaurent, a new tech startup that eases the event planning process, he said.
What is Restaurent, and how does it work?
Cianfaglione: I like to describe Restaurent as the Airbnb or Open Table for private events. Someone is able to easily go to our platform and say how many people they are hosting, a specific date, their budget and then show which venues are available for rent.
What markets is Restaurent available in currently?
We are primarily based in New England. On our platform, consumers can currently choose between Providence, Newport, Boston, as well as Connecticut, and also Austin, Texas. We plan to further expand across New England over the next 18 months. Our key focuses are on Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Austin.
Why the outlier of Austin, Texas?
I personally split my time between Rhode Island and Austin. Plus, Texas has about 56,000 restaurants compared to all of New England’s only about 35,000. Austin is a city driven by food, and it’s a huge market opportunity for us. But the company is based in Providence and always will be.
In your market research, where did you find that people were typically booking their events?
We live in a world right now where 80 percent of events are still booked over the phone. In a post-COVID world, you have staffing shortages at these businesses. They don’t always have someone to answer the phone, and they’re missing out on potential leads. Consumers get frustrated because they can’t reach someone.
Can’t someone find all the amenities they want in an event space online — whether it be on the restaurant’s website or on Google?
There are venues that are missing out on these events because search engines like Google are not designed to find these venues based on amenities, pricing, and all these other elements that go into picking a venue. That doesn’t exist nowadays. Even if they do find some elements on the restaurant’s branded pages, they likely won’t be able to find out if a restaurant is even available for the day they are looking to book.
There are restaurants, breweries, wineries, or other venues on Restaurent currently. How much does it cost?
We usually give the first three months free for a trial. After that, it usually costs a venue about $50 per month to be on our platform.
Do you have any investors?
We raised about $1.5 million in January to kick-start the program. About 90 percent of the funding came from Rhode Island-only investors, which I specifically did on purpose. I wanted to show that you can raise capital in Rhode Island — it’s not that obscene of an idea.