Tech entrepreneur eyes global growth with wifi firm Blackbx

Patrick Clover, founder of Edinburgh-based Blackbx. Picture: Chris Watt

There are some of us who can remember the days before a trip to a cafe, restaurant or hotel involved asking for the wifi password.

But digital native Patrick Clover has grown up with this as the norm, and during an itinerant childhood that often involved spells at sea with his family and a laptop, teaching himself to code, linking up to wifi was a priority when reaching dry land.

“We’d go from harbour to harbour and they’d all have these weird ways of getting online – it would either be that you’d have to go to a boathouse and get a code that someone would print out, or you’d make a payment over a webform that would take your money but not work.”

He has channelled his frustrations into founding Blackbx, which provides cloud-based public wifi software enabling business-owners to set up and maintain their own networks, and allowing them to market their services to customers and boost loyalty, for example, boosting revenue.

It came about after what Clover, who was born in the Peak District, describes as an “unconventional education” on the ocean waves with his nomadic parents, who then sent him to learn in a more conventional environment at school in Edinburgh.

• READ MORE: Edinburgh entrepreneur aims to shake up public wifi

While still in fifth year his aptitude for IT saw him set up a website selling software licences for Apple operating system iOS.

And after failing to secure a university place to study product design, Clover started working for a wifi company in the Scottish capital, which he says was trying to work out what its product and customer base should look like.

He learned that many people in the industry were struggling to demonstrate “the value to the client on an ongoing basis so being able to give analytics, data capture, having a branded log-in experience”.

The only way to do so was by spending tens of thousands of pounds, which was not viable. “I thought, wait a second… I can figure this out,” and from his bedroom he came up with what he thought such an offering should look like, then setting out to sell it. It gave venue-owners data on who was visiting, “how much time they were spending, where they came from and how often they returned”.

His first customer was Mike Christopherson of Edinburgh’s Boda Bars, which installed the technology in its bars.