You do not need to be on every platform to open a venue. You need four things, and all four can be done in a week.
A Google Business Profile. Your social handles claimed, even the ones you will not use. A website that covers the basics. An online booking system.
That is the entire minimum. Everything else is a later problem, and one of the classes I used to teach at my local college was digital presence for new businesses, so I have watched a lot of people talk themselves out of opening over items five through forty.
Google Business Profile is the one people skip and it is the most important
You are a location-based business. The location is the product. If somebody cannot find where you are, nothing else you do matters.
Setting one up is free and takes an afternoon. Google's own walkthrough covers it. Put in your address, your hours, your phone number, a link to your website, and real photographs of the actual place.
Think about what you look for when you are checking out a business you have never been to. Put all of that in.
Claim every handle at launch, even the platforms you will not use
When you settle on a brand name, register that name on every major platform immediately and make them all identical. Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok at minimum, plus anything else you care about.
The reason is boring and the regret is real: in four years you will want a platform that did not matter at launch, and somebody else will have your name on it.
Here is the part most businesses miss. Even on the platforms you have no intention of posting to, spend three minutes filling in the profile. Upload the logo, write one line about what the business is, link the website, and put in your location.
That does two things at once. It gives you a set of established sites pointing at your website, which helps you get found. And it means somebody who stumbles onto the empty profile can still work out what you are and where. Around 40% of younger users search on TikTok or Instagram before they search on Google (source), so those blank profiles are not dead weight, they are a search result.
Your launch website should be a minimum viable product, not a project
I have talked a lot of people out of the website they were imagining before opening. It is usually big, complex, expensive, and eight weeks from done.
Work out the minimum instead. For an entertainment venue that is: what you are, photos that show people having a good time, where you are, when you are open, and a link to book. Five things.
Build it on a platform and you can do that yourself quickly, or pay somebody a modest amount to do it properly. Your venue does not need a custom website is the longer argument, including why I stopped hand-coding my own.
You can add the rest after you open, when you know what customers are actually asking for. You will guess wrong about that before you open. Everyone does.
Online booking is not optional, and picking one is easier than it looks
If you take reservations of any kind you need an online booking system on day one. It saves you the phone time, and more importantly a large share of your customers simply will not book by phone or email.
There is a straightforward way to choose. Go and look at ten other venues doing what you do. One platform will keep appearing. That is the one built for your activity, and the fact that everyone landed on it is better information than any review site.
Escape rooms cluster on a handful of platforms. So do golf simulators, and almost every golf sim business within 150 kilometres of me runs the same software. Do not try to be clever about this.
Five reasons your venue needs an automated booking system covers what it costs you to skip.
That is the whole list
Four things, and none of them take more than a few days.
There is plenty you will want to add later: paid advertising, an email list, real content, all of it. But without these four nobody can find you, and everything you add on top of nothing is still nothing.