Bar Roulette

17 August 2015

Well, we are all for trying out new ideas, but this one seems a little…..leftfield. This isn’t your standard roulette promotion like this Lucky 247 Roulette Offer.

It´s the Bar Roulette App, and it´s a web app (you just have to head there in a browser, there are no apps in the Play store or the App Store yet, so I guess they are just testing out the demand before spending any money on it). It’s not as techy as Lightning Speed Blockchain Roulette (now that is Geeky), but it does have an app!

Here´s how it works:

The aim of the service is to get you out of your old bar routine. if you feel stuck in a (bar) rut, this could be for you.

Sometimes it´s good to try out something new. This Web App reckons it´s the perfect way of you discovering new drinking establishments.

The app is linked to local directory service Yelp and anti-taxi firm Uber. You register (you´ll need an Uber account) and flag down a ride. Uber then transports you to a random bar on Yelp picked within a certain distance and that have a decent rating on Yelp. The man behind Bar Roulette is Tyler Swarts.

The next step could be to add in restaurants (for eats) and even AirBnB (for a place to stay.

So is this a crazy idea, or an inspired one?

Well, the cynic in me laughs this idea off. I mean, there´s so many thing you can pick on. You have to have an Uber account (that´s going to cut your market down). You may end up in a terrible bar, or even your local. Why wouldn´t you just do the research online yourself and then throw a dart at a map, and get the Tube? They are going to need a lot of marketing spend to get this off the ground, blah, blah, blah.

The main problem we have with the app is that the people who are most likely to use it, may not want to ride to a randomly chosen watering hole in Uber and have to pay for the privilege.

But you know what? I think Tyler Swarts is on to something here. People just don´t have time to organise this kind of stuff as much these days. And the kind of people who use Uber are kind of more adventurous than the average, we´d think. And if anything is going to go viral, this kind of app is. So there´s your marketing.

The beauty of these kinds of ideas is that they can evolve cheaply. If the random bar idea doesn´t cut the mustard, maybe the random restaurant will. Or maybe if the app allowed you to narrow down the randomness, so you could request a random Vietnamese Restaurant, for example. If the app could build up a profile of your perfect night out (bars, restaurants, clubs, views of the city) and then package it all together into one amazing random night out in any city in the world. Now that would be cool. I can see this evolving if he can get some momentum behind it.