A practical guide to your first bar, your first price and your first repeat booking. What the kit really costs, how to pitch a venue, and when to bring in a second host.
Running quiz nights for venues is a real small business and a fairly forgiving one to start. The costs are low, the equipment is mostly things you already own, and you can test the whole idea with a single night at a single bar before you commit to anything. What it demands instead is reliability. Venues do not book the best quizmaster in town, they book the one who turns up every week.
The work splits into three jobs. Selling: getting bars to give you a weeknight. Producing: building the questions and rounds. Hosting: standing in a room and running the night. Most people who fail at this are fine at the third and never do the first. Treat finding venues as the main task and the rest gets easier.
This guide is written for someone with no company, no clients and no gear beyond a laptop. It does not promise an income figure, because that depends entirely on your city, your nights and what local venues already pay. It does tell you how to find that number for yourself in an afternoon.
Built for hosts and venues who need to look professional from day one.
A laptop or tablet runs the whole night. Quizado works on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, iPadOS, Android and the web, so the first night costs you nothing in hardware.
Players buzz in from their own phones after scanning a QR code. That removes the single biggest startup cost that used to keep people out of this business.
Free question packs to start and a premium library on paid plans. From Trivia Pro you write your own question sets and get monthly AI credits that turn a topic into a round, so production stops being the bottleneck.
Trivia Pro puts your business logo on the venue screen and the player phones, which matters when you are pitching bar number two. Custom fonts, colours and white-label are on Hospitality Group.
Save games and reuse them across bars in the same week. Your production work scales with the number of games, not the number of nights.
Leagues from Trivia Pro keep a season standings table, which gives the venue evidence that the same teams come back. That is the argument that turns a trial night into a contract.
Because the game is saved in the account and scoring is automatic, a second host can run your format without redoing the preparation.
One or two weeknights fits around a day job, and that is how nearly everyone starts.
Four or five nights a week across different bars is where this becomes a job.
DJs, MCs and musicians already have the venue relationships this business needs.
Corporate parties and fundraisers pay differently and fill the gaps in a weekly route.
Week one, build one complete game and run it for friends in a living room. You are testing your own pacing, not the questions. You will find out that eight questions per round is right, that you talk too long between rounds, and that you need a plan for the team who joins twenty minutes late. Fix all of that before a paying venue sees you.
Week two, walk into five bars at four in the afternoon and ask for the manager. Not the evening, not the weekend, and not by email. Bring one page: what the night is, how long it runs, what you need from them, and what you charge. Offer the first night free or at a reduced rate, and be explicit that it is a trial with a decision point after four weeks.
Weeks three and four, run the trial and count things. How many teams came, how many came back, what the bar took compared with the same weekday a month earlier. Bring those numbers to the renewal conversation. A venue manager who is shown a repeat-attendance figure will keep you far longer than one who is told the night felt good.
There is no honest national rate to quote you, and anyone who publishes one is guessing. Do this instead: ring two local trivia companies pretending to be a venue and ask what they charge per night. That is the number your prospects are comparing you against. Price just under it while you have no track record, and raise it once you have three venues who renew.
Charge a flat fee per night rather than a share of the bar. A percentage sounds fair and is a nightmare in practice, because you cannot audit it and you will spend every renewal arguing about takings. A flat fee is easy to invoice, easy to budget for, and easy for a manager to approve without asking anyone above them.
For your first three bars, target places with a dead weeknight, a screen already on the wall, and no quiz within walking distance. Neighbourhood pubs, taprooms and smaller sports bars are the easiest yes. Chains usually need approval from a regional office and will take months, so leave them until you have proof to show.
You can personally host about four nights a week before the quality drops. Past that you either stop growing or you hire. The good news is that hiring is easier than it used to be, because the software does the scoring and the timing. What you are actually recruiting for is someone who is reliable, audible and comfortable in front of a room. Bar staff, drama students and local musicians are the usual pool.
Keep production centralised. You build the games, they run them. That protects the thing you are selling, which is a consistent night rather than a personality, and it means a host who leaves does not take the format with them. Saved games live in the account, so handing a night over is a scheduling task rather than a rebuild.
The kit list per host is short: a laptop or tablet, a charger, an HDMI cable and an adapter, a printed sheet of join QR codes, and a phone as a backup internet connection. Internet is required for the host device and the player phones, and there is no offline mode, so the backup connection is the one item people forget and regret.
The console you host from, and what a second host has to learn.
The quiz format you will sell to venues, explained end to end.
The buyer view of your service, useful for shaping your own pitch.
The music-led version of the night and how DJs price it.
What each plan costs you once the first venue signs.
Install it and build your living-room practice game this week.
Download Quizado free and host your first trivia night tonight!
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