Mat Weir and why he put Queenstown first on the list for First Table

There is a story you hear often in Queenstown. Someone comes for a winter, maybe a summer, intending to stay just long enough to enjoy the outdoors. Then the place works its quiet magic and suddenly a year becomes many.

For Mat Weir, that shift happened quickly. He arrived in 2008 for a software development job and the promise of days spent snowboarding and mountain biking.

“I thought I would come down to Queenstown for a year, experience Queenstown life. I loved the appeal of the outdoors and loved snowboarding and mountain biking. So really good fit for me. Came down for a year and did not leave.”

Between coding by day and exploring the region by weekend, he found himself becoming part of the town’s fabric.

A Simple Idea, Made Scalable

The seed for First Table was planted in 2014 by Solera Vino, a small French restaurant that offered half-price meals for the first diners of the evening. Mat recognised the clarity of the idea and knew how technology could give it scale. He built a website to replicate the model, then walked Queenstown’s streets asking restaurants if they would join.

The simplicity remains the platform’s strength. Restaurants offer 50 percent off the food bill for the first table of the night. Diners pay a small booking fee. There are no contracts and venues choose exactly how they participate.

What began as a hyper-local experiment is now a global business with over 3,500 restaurants and over 3 million diners across New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

Why Queenstown Was the Perfect Testbed

Mat is quick to explain that Queenstown was not just home, but the ideal market to prove the model.

“Because Queenstown is so small, it makes it easier to get around all the restaurants. For our model to work well, we need to reach a critical mass where people know about the platform and then they can start referring each other. Reaching that critical mass for a marketplace type product is a lot easier to achieve in a small city than it is in a big city.”

With a population of around 30,000 yet a remarkably high density of restaurants, the town allowed First Table to reach that critical mass quickly. Once the model was validated, Mat expanded the concept across New Zealand. He even took a campervan on a week-long onboarding trip to bring restaurants from other regions onto the platform.

Auckland followed. Eleven months later, Sydney. A couple of years on, the UK.

Today, First Table’s headquarters sit in downtown Queenstown, supported by staff across New Zealand, Australia and the UK.