We’ve all heard about FOMO (fear of missing out), but what about FOGO? That’s short for “fear of going out,” and it’s the problem that CEO Julian Jung said he’s trying to solve with Tablelist.
Jung compared his startup to Uber — in the same way that getting car service before Uber could be “intimidating,” Jung said people can have similar anxieties about going out to a nightclub.
“It’s the same thing,” he said. “It can be a black box and not transparent, and you wonder, ‘Am I even going to get in?’”
With Tablelist, on the other hand, you can eliminate that uncertainty by using your smartphone to reserve entry or even a table at popular clubs. From the club’s perspective, they get to fill empty tables or bring in more people on a slow night, and they also get data about which users are most valuable.
Jung said that when he started the company two years ago, he was focused on VIP tables, but the service has expanded, with some clubs using Tablelist for their regular ticketing. So there’s a big range in possible pricing. On the entry level, Jung said you might just pay $50, but you could also pay $50,000 to get a VIP table for a live concert from a big-name DJ.
Tablelist is currently available in Boston (where the company started), New York, Connecticut, The Hamptons, Las Vegas, Washington DC and San Francisco — and it recently launched in Miami.
Other recent additions include a new Pulse feature, where users can view a live stream of recent activity, like bookings and reviews. In the future, Jung suggested that Tablelist could become more social, allowing different groups of people to connect.
“I might be looking for additional people for my table, and we could add a way for different users to communicate things like that down the road,” he said.
Jung said Tablelist has raised $4.5 million and is currently raising a Series A.
To be clear, I’m definitely not a nightclub person myself. Jung said Tablelist could eventually work with bars and other types of nightlife, but the in meantime, he invited me out on Halloween, to the PH-D Lounge in midtown Manhattan, where the Tablelist partnership was front-and-center.
Yes, I overcame my FOGO. And yes, I had fun.