Ollie Fegan, founder, Temptster
Dublin tech entrepreneur Ollie Fegan secured a €100,000 investment on the TV series Dragons’ Den last night after he pitched his new app Temptster that allows restaurants and bars to promote same-day offers to customers.
Following his pitching session and a round of questioning by the judges on Dragons’ Den, Fegan managed to secure a €100,000 investment for his busines from investor Sean O’Sullivan, who heads up SOSventures. In return O’Sullivan will take a 20pc stake in Temptster.
Launched in February of this year, the Temptster iPhone app deploys GPS technology to identify a user’s location. It then displays same-day offers in nearby bars and restaurants in Dublin City. More than 100 Dublin restaurants have signed up to use the app and results can be filtered in order of proximity to the consumer.
The app’s merchant interface and database were developed using MySQL, PHP and HTML5.
According to Fegan, the instant nature of the Temptster app means that if restaurants are quiet, they can bring in customers who are nearby within 15 minutes. The table booking is guaranteed via Temptster for both the restaurant and the customer.
“Empty tables and last-minute cancellations cost Dublin restaurants, clubs, and bars millions of euro every year, and cause havoc to profit margins. Temptster is a real-time solution to reaching customers as well as a fantastic resource for people socialising or living in town,” said Fegan, who was formerly sales and marketing director for Fegan’s Foodservice in Dublin.
He is planning to use the investment to develop the app across other platforms such as Android and Windows and to launch the app in the UK.
Temptster is currently based in the Guinness Enterprise Centre in Dublin. The start-up has also secured an investment from Enterprise Ireland.
Disclosure: SOSventures is an investor in Silicon Republic
