Wildly successful within their first week of launch, these UT student entrepreneurs have created a unique approach to nightlife with their new app “Venuu,” designed to help people make informed decisions on where to go for their next night out.

For users, Venuu displays headcounts, cover charges and notifications from bars using constantly updated information provided by the bouncers themselves.

“The most important window in nightlife, the 30-second decision about where the student decides where they’re going to go, is unaddressed by any current existing product — until now,” Noah Cooper, a UT junior and Venuu founder, said.

Venuu’s business model was designed not only to benefit consumers, but also to benefit bars.

“We also are completely free for the bars, we’re completely free for the students. We’re built in Knoxville — we’re never going to charge a single Knoxville bar a cent,” Cooper said.

Through Venuu, bars will have access to their customers in multiple new ways.

With a feature called “The Drop,” Venuu allows bars to send out notifications to all local users with information like current specials and events. “This is a tool for them to help reach their audience in, you know, in a more efficient way than they ever have,” Cooper said.

In addition, Venuu is set to start a new loyalty program for app users.

Using Near Field Communication technology, Venuu plans to install tags within the bars for consumers to tap their phone against. This will log that the customer visited the bar and allow them to earn rewards based on each bar’s unique loyalty program, which they are able to set through the app.

“The bar can set what they want the reward to be — a free beer, a free shot — and then students can get rewarded for going to their favorite places with this,” Cooper said.

The app intends to have a working relationship with the bars without a contract.

“It’s an agreement,” Cooper said. “And we’re about elevating their bar and their culture. That’s why they get to set their reward, they get to control what people see on the map, they get to provide the consumer with all the information they need to make a decision.”

While the app’s creation began as a passion project, Cooper said that he and his partner, UT senior Michael Faragalli, saw Venuu’s potential to “elevate nightlife across Knoxville and the entire SEC.”

Faragalli and Cooper’s design process began when they were both working on separate projects through UT’s Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and were put in contact by a fellow student who thought they would work well together.

Faragalli has been vital to the app’s existence and success, having helped ideate, brainstorm and market Venuu.

“I like to think outside the box, (Cooper)’s the same way, and I feel like all these people could use the product because no one’s had the guts to actually go outside the box and deliver something like this,” Faragalli said.

By utilizing the Anderson Center’s business startup coaches, Cooper was able to build Venuu as the app’s sole technical founder in five weeks.

“I’ve always been passionate about building things. I have a philosophy major, but I love software engineering and being able to create apps now is so cool, because people like me who aren’t super technical are now able to create everything,” Cooper said. “Nothing’s off the table.”

The function of Venuu and the specific information it provides consumers is presently uncontested by any other nightlife app.

“There have been a lot of apps that have come and gone in the bar scene, and, you know, a lot of them have failed for one reason — that’s because they’ve crowdsourced information. That’s why we’re working with the bars,” Cooper said.

LineLeap, a mobile nightlife ticketing corporation, has made for a potential Venuu “rivalry,” according to Cooper.

While LineLeap also sells tickets and charges bar covers through their platform, they operate and monetize differently than Venuu.

Prices listed on LineLeap are set to remain static throughout the night, contrasting Venuu’s dynamic cover charge plan, where charges may start off at a certain price but change as night progresses. Additionally, LineLeap takes 14% of transaction charges on their sales, while Venuu currently takes 8%.

Venuu was released for download in Knoxville on Wednesday, April 8. After two days of launch, the app had over 2,500 downloads with a 71% conversion rate, meaning 71% of users who opened the app store and viewed Venuu then proceeded to download.

“We threw an event at Sunspot last week, and we had 2,000 downloads in a day with a 73% conversion rate. So every 100 people that check the app store, 73 downloaded it. The average app store conversion rate is 3% to 5%,” Cooper said.

After seeing the success of the app in Knoxville within a week of its release, the Venuu team has plans of expanding nationwide.

“We are going to package this information right now, this data that we’re getting from Knoxville, and prove that the model works here in this SEC town, and then we’re going to bring this to every single college town in the country because we think every college student should be using a tool like this to help them navigate throughout their nightlife experience,” Cooper said. “The value that we’ve created here can be replicated all over, and we’re going to prove that through the SEC.”

Venuu will be available for download in Oxford, Mississippi, in less than two weeks, primarily targeted toward Ole Miss students.

“This isn’t a simple product,” Cooper said. “This is a 10-feature interface that is active now in a city with thousands of users. And I was able to do that. And that has never been able to be done before in history. And I think that is a sign that the world is changing.”