Meet Fevue - Manchester's Festival App Startup

Say hi to Salem, founder of Fevue, a social media app that helps people connect with the festivals they want to attend. But, how did Salem's journey start?

So, what is Fevue?

Fevue is a socially powered mobile platform for music festivals that enables users to browse through all the major festivals around the world, whilst sharing their adventure.

What makes Fevue different?

I really thought about the way festival tickets are currently sold, and realised that there needed to be something innovative out there for ticketing technology and event marketing. The technology is built on an aggregator platform that collects and organises data from multiple online ticketing vendors extracting the best ticket prices for upcoming festivals. Everybody is a winner.

Salem’s Story

Before winning a spot on Facebook’s accelerator program and jetting off to Silicon Valley, I lived in the inner-streets of Manchester, where gangs and drugs dominated life within the neighbourhood. In fact, it was the norm for someone of my age and ethnicity to be swept up in gang culture. However for me, sport was the only escape from gang violence, so I decided to take up basketball; playing for Manchester Magic representing the city in a national league and international tournaments.

Sports wasn’t quite enough and I left high school with no GSCE’s.

Life wasn’t looking great and there weren’t many opportunities to jump on. I knew I needed to do something about it and I found a way to attend Loreto college in Manchester, to pursue my education. I consequently became the first person in my family to graduate from university and do an MA in Financial Services and Banking. So, I really have no tech or digital background at all, and despite going down an educational route, the entrepreneur in me still had a lot to prove.

I started my first business when I was at university, selling fashion accessories i.e. belts, watches and scarves from my backpack to my classmates. It felt like my path was finally set and after graduating from university I started a business with a school friend, importing men’s clothing from china. Like many startups, what seemed like a great idea at the time , turned out to be a complete fail. We literally lost everything and ended up with huge amount of debt. And that was my first startup failure, but it wasn’t enough to put me off an entrepreneur’s lifestyle.

Giving up certainly wasn’t an option.

I thought I needed to expand my horizons so I began to learning how to code mobile software. This sparked my idea for Fevue. I had done some work at the Warehouse Project and Parklife, but I wanted to help my friends attend these festivals, and have the same amazing experiences that I did.

Finding the best ticket prices at affordable rates is really difficult, particularly for larger festivals that sell out within few hours of release. Fevue sets out to solve this problem - bringing festivals to the attendee, not the other way around.

I ended up spending 16 hours a days, for nearly 5 months (without pay) building and testing the Fevue platform. I thought that there were limited resources in Manchester and my path to having a tech startup was bumpy to say the least. It wasn't until I came across SpacePortX that I was able to see Manchester’s growing tech community and luckily, the SpacePortX team offered support and advice to my new start-up company.

Facebook and beyond

We’ve finally arrived to the present day. In late Dec of last year, I applied to be a part of the FbStart, which provides start-ups with an exclusive community, worldwide events, mentorship from Facebook, and up to £45,00 funding. As a result, Fevue is was chosen to represent Manchester on a global stage, to be inducted as a part of the FbStart.

So, I was flown to attend the annual Facebook F8 Conference to showcase the final version of my mobile app and also released the app to the general public to download from the heart of the Silicon Valley with the backing of Facebook.

If you would have told 15 year old me that I would have a tech-company, and also partnered with Facebook, I would have laughed at you. However, this is now my reality.