2024 marks the 10-year anniversary of a few things: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie getting married, U2’s album being downloaded to every single Apple device and the birth of NZ hospitality platform First Table.

Founder Mat Weir takes a look back at the First Table journey.

How does it feel reaching 10 years of First Table?

I started very organically with 10 restaurants in Queenstown, so I had an idea that I wanted to get 10 restaurants in 10 cities.

The goal was a hundred restaurants on the platform, and I thought that was probably going to be it. But the more I got into it, the more opportunity that I saw, particularly around how fragmented the restaurant booking spaces the more that I got into it, the more opportunity that I saw.

We’ve come a long way since then. We’ve got 2,100 restaurants on the platform now, and did you know we operate in 50 cities across New Zealand, Australia and the UK?

What’s it like taking your platform to new cities and new customers?

It’s exciting being able to take what we’ve innovatively developed here and to give it overseas. I mean, there’s no guarantee that it was going to work, but it does in the UK and Australia.

They do have a lot of similarities in the hospitality space, so it was a good opportunity for us to help restaurants get their nights off to the best start possible and for diners to help them explore new places.

Over the 10 years, what has changed within the industry since First Table first started and now?

The best thing to talk about is the impact that our model has had.

When we started, the incumbent model back then was the Groupon model, which was a really terrible model. It was explosive and unsustainable. That was something I had identified and thought there’s got to be a better way of doing this.

Read more: Hospitality is more than just food, it’s also design

The model that we’ve introduced gives restaurants control. It also serves a purpose, which is to fill off-peak tables. It’s sustainable and it’s a win-win.

The idea for First Table came from a little French restaurant in Queenstown that would offer the exact thing that we do, and it was a bit of a local secret. This was a restaurant that knew the value of having people in the restaurant in the window view at the beginning of the night and I thought that was a great idea, why aren’t restaurants doing this?

Another thing to mention in the past 10 years is COVID-19 and how that impacted the hospitality area. How did that impact First Table and how did you overcome that?

Hospitality was the hardest hit out of anyone during Covid. So during that period, we knew that when everything opened up, that we would’ve a really important role to play in helping rebuild the hospitality industry by reconnecting diners with restaurants.

Knowing that we kind of just nobbled down during that period, we built our app and released that, also built out the functionality for regular bookings as well. That put us in a really good position post-Covid when everything opened up.

Because we have a database of over a million diners on our platform, then we kind of took a leadership and authority positioning on communicating and getting them comfortable dining out again.

We had some new products, new way of doing things and that made us play a key role in helping reconnect.

Is there a moment where during your time with First Table that clicked in your head that’s like this business is going to last a while?

When I designed everything in the beginning it was about ensuring that the model that we built was long-term and sustainable.

It needs to work really well for restaurants and diners, and that’s kind of where our model is unique in that it does work for everyone and that’s why it’s been able to, that’s why it’s sustainable in its lasted 10 years.

What is one piece of advice you would give to one-year-old First Table?

The big thing that we’ve learned is our first table app that we launched at the end of Covid, it’s been really transformative.

My piece of advice to one-year-old first table would be to build that app straight away and get it out there.