Joe has a background in both technology and events. He originally trained in computing, and led a team of web hosting engineers supporting numerous corporate and government clients.
He quit the 9-to-5 to work as a freelance environmental educator, and as the learning coordinator for an environmental charity.
This role involved planning and delivering events, where he experienced a significant pain point around speaker management.
"I was wasting hours emailing people, capturing their session proposals, bio details, practical requirements, availability constraints etc."
"Then copying data between emails, spreadsheets, our CMS and website. It took forever and added no value."
"The worst job was timetabling 100+ sessions onto the agenda, manually checking that there were no clashes, that every session took place in a space with enough capacity, had the right resources etc."
"Because I had a background in tech, I knew that software could do the job much better than I could, so I looked for something to help. I found a lot of great products, but nothing that was quite what I was looking for."
"But my tech skills were pretty rusty, so I asked an old friend and colleague - Gordon - to see if he'd be up for 'a little side project'. And the rest, as they say, is history..."
Gordon has worked in technology for 20 years in several roles across a range of industries. He has a wealth of experience of designing platforms and delivering service to various blue-chip clients.
"I'd been working in a senior technical architect role and was taking a career break while looking for something less stressful and more fulfilling. I'd set up my own company and developed a couple of apps and games for the iPhone when Joe approached me with this idea for some software to help event planners."
"At first I thought it might be an interesting little app that we could develop and sell to someone else. But as we did some market research and confirmed that there was a gap in the market, I realised that there was an opportunity to develop a full-blown SaaS product."
"This represented a significant challenge that I could really get my teeth into. So we formed the company, identified some early clients to help shape the product and the rest is history."
Phoenix is a software developer apprentice who attained a solid understanding of programming through recently studying A-Level Computer Science.
"I love learning how to code practical solutions to difficult problems, leading me to build a booking system for my A-Level coursework. This was my first independent project where I had to self learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This experience confirmed my inclination to progress into software development."
"After Sixth Form, I sought a more hands-on route and thus jumped straight into software development through an apprenticeship with The Coders Guild. That’s when I discovered Lineup Ninja, whose speaker management software matched closely with my previous A-Level project."
"It felt like the best opportunity to contribute to significant work, gain real-world experience, and develop my programming skills in a professional setting. So far, I’ve gained experience working with TypeScript, Ember.js, and Git."
"As I progress through the apprenticeship, I hope to learn from others and strive to become a well-rounded developer who builds software that makes a positive impact."
Our mission is simple: to make event organizers' lives less stressful.
Both co-founders at Lineup Ninja have direct experience of workplace stress. We see a lot of it in the events industry. We believe we can help by giving organizers tools to tame the data chaos.
We're a small, independent business. Unlike many software companies, we made a conscious decision to bootstrap our business and grow it slowly from profits, rather than seeking investment and explosive growth. We believe this brings some important benefits...
Because we don't have investors expecting returns, we can prioritise long-term relationships over short-term profits. We try to do this by delivering a great product and service at a fair price, so you'll want to come back year after year: not by locking you into multi-year contracts.
Because we aren't under pressure to maximise the value of each and every sale, we don't need to find out your budget and then quote for as much as we think you can afford. Our prices are standard and public, so you can quicky see the budget implications of using us, without getting dragged into a high-pressure sales conversation
Without investment to fund advertising, we largely rely on word-of-mouth to grow our business. This means we're highly motivated to keep our clients happy, so you recommend us to your peers. And anyway, helping people makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside
Many larger companies have specialist sales executives, and pay them on a salary + commission basis. This gives them an incentive to do as many deals for as much money as possible, regardless of whether the product is right for the client or not.
In contrast, our 'sales team' are the business owners, and we also provide customer support. We don't want you to buy Lineup Ninja if it isn't right for you, because if you're unhappy we'll feel the pain directly. Also, unhappy clients threaten our reputation, undermining No 3. above.
Our clients work directly with the people who designed and built the platform. So if you have a problem, we can help you fix it quickly. You won't waste hours talking to help-desk agents who don't know the product.
And because we love designing and building software, if Lineup Ninja doesn't do something you need, we'll explore it with you and come up with a creative solution together.
We all know that providing services to the events industry can be stressful. We don't need investors putting pressure on us to hit financial targets as well. And a healthy team can do a much better job of supporting you!
