Airship

Airship is the UK’s leading hospitality CRM. It was founded as PowerText in 2001.

We started the business while I was operating the Deep End, the original idea came from Rob Marcer who was working clubs in Newcastle as a techie. Rob chatted to me about using SMS for Marketing and PowerText was born.

In the old water tank room on the second floor of the Deep End we set up shop. We recruited a talented coder (Mark Little) and set about the build.

The early years were encouraging and we gained a lot of customers, we were early SaaS before the acronym was a thing. We had a lot of different customers but were making no money, we were over servicing our users, and charging too little. We were also arguing (a lot) between ourselves and that was getting us nowhere so we hired a GM to concentrate us and take the lead. A small investment of £50k followed from HSBC and we applied the 80/20 rule to our customers and focussed down on building tech for the hospitality sector.

We built a really strong portfolio of clients including Revolution Bars and Barracuda Group and worked closely with Nexum Leisure, the owner of Zanzibar and Escapade Clubs (amongst others). A lot of the revenue came through SMS and then Premium Rate SMS for Text to Screen and Queue Jump shortcodes.

The recession hit us hard, Barracuda went under and we lost 50% of our income, the outcome was that we parted ways with our GM and Mark, and pivoted again to become more of an agency.

Through 2010 to 2018 we wrapped buildings, built websites, ran social media campaigns and launched loyalty programmes for some of the leading operators including Novus Leisure, Living Ventures, Côte, Revolution and JW Lees. All alongside developing Airship.

We also met first Oskar Smith and then Andrew Whiteley, we built a series of companies under the Airship umbrella for Content, Social, Creative and Web Services. I thought it was a strong model, but we became rudderless and the final straw was our largest customer, again, Bargain Booze, unravelling spectacularly as part of the Conviviality PLC crash.

Rob stepped down as MD to CTO and took a year out, and I stepped in as CEO with Oskar and Andrew to attempt to save the business.

The 18 months before the PE round was honestly the hardest time of my life (and I’d had a few). I remember being absolutely broke, with not a penny available personally or in the business, being stuck in London without the means to travel. My credit controller at the time pulled in some money so I could make my next meeting.

We raised from Mercia in 2019 and sprinted through the pandemic, then exited to Zonal in 2022, and on to Volaris in 2026.

A lot of the thinking behind Airship, on data, loyalty and the value exchange, runs through the writing archive.