Case study
Co-founded by GCV Labs and Bryan Hoare, n-gage.io is an attractions management platform with a powerful, highly customisable visitor-facing app. It is now in its growth phase, working with some of the best known attractions in the UK.
Ideate
Evaluate
Create
Incubate
Launch
Accelerate
Visitor attractions run on a patchwork of systems: one for ticketing, another for membership, something else for maps and guest messaging. Very little of it talks to each other, and almost none of it reaches the visitor while they are on site. We saw room for a single platform that handles operations behind the scenes and gives every guest a genuinely useful app in their hand.
We co-founded n-gage.io with Bryan Hoare and took it through our full venture build process. That meant pressure-testing the idea with operators before a line of code was written, shaping the commercial model, then designing and engineering the product with our own team rather than outsourcing it. We stayed involved through launch and into the growth phase.
n-gage.io pairs attractions management tooling with a visitor-facing app that each operator configures to their own brand, site and season. Maps, timings, offers, membership and messaging sit in one place, so guests get the right prompt at the right moment and the operations team gets a single view of what is happening across the site.
A platform business needs more than a product. We helped assemble the team around the founder, bringing in the engineering, commercial and operational capability the venture needed at each stage, and providing the shared functions a young company cannot justify hiring for on its own until volumes support it.
The route to market ran through anchor operators who could stress the platform properly. n-gage.io now works with clients including Longleat Safari Park, Knowsley Safari Park and Jimmy's Farm, each of which shaped the roadmap through real seasonal trading rather than through hypothetical requirements gathered in a workshop.
n-gage.io is in its growth phase, deepening the platform and widening its footprint across the attractions sector. The focus is customer acquisition, expanding the feature set around membership and guest engagement, and scaling the team so the business can support more operators without losing the closeness that won it its first clients.
