The Night Shift Report · July 2026

43% of our venue's leads message when nobody's at the desk.

This isn't a survey or an industry estimate. We pulled every message-channel conversation from our own venue's CRM, 1,853 of them, started between March 2025 and July 2026, and looked at one thing: what time people actually reach out. The same brain that answered them is live on our homepage.

1,853

real inquiries analyzed

43%

arrive outside 9 AM–6 PM

30%

arrive 6 PM–midnight

7%

arrive midnight–6 AM

When inquiries start, hour by hour

12A
3A
6A
9A
12P
3P
6P
9P
Outside 9–6 · nobody's at the desk Business hours

Four things the logs said that surprised us.

01

The rush isn't midnight. It's 5 to 7 PM.

The single biggest inquiry hour is 5 PM, and it stays heavy through 7. That's exactly when a venue team is flipping a room, running a walkthrough, or loading in for tonight's event. The leads aren't arriving when you're closed; they're arriving when you're busiest.

02

Three in ten arrive between 6 PM and midnight.

30% of all inquiries start in the evening, after most venues' reply window has ended. Every one of those is a lead comparing venues with hours of uninterrupted browsing time ahead of them.

03

Thursday is the biggest day of the week.

25% of the week's inquiries land on Thursday — people lock in weekend plans right before the weekend. If your response time slips on Thursday evening, it slips on your highest-volume window.

04

Instagram DMs outnumber texts 2 to 1.

1,272 Instagram conversations versus 570 SMS in the same period, a 2.2-to-1 ratio. The channel most venue software treats as an afterthought is the front door.

Methodology

Source: the live CRM of 1712 Studios, a 50–400 guest event venue in Seattle, which is our venue; KAIBA runs its front desk. All 2,929 conversations on record (March 2025–July 2026) were exported; email conversations were excluded because they include newsletter sends that would inflate the numbers in our favor. The remaining 1,853 are people starting a text, Instagram, or Facebook conversation with the venue. Timestamps were converted to Seattle local time. No names, no numbers, no message content, timestamps only. We'll re-run it as the logs grow.

43% of your leads are in this report.
Someone should answer them.

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