Even early alphas can scratch your itch

When we at Weave began thinking about the kind of projects that we should take on, we set ourselves a number of selection criteria. Loosely, sone of these were:

• Make things that we would want to use.
• Make things that could be useful to others.
• Make things that people could use as individuals.
• Make things with increased utility for groups.
• Avoid projects whose costs through popularity could be disproportionate to monetization opportunities.
• …and a few others

We felt the very first on the list was critical. We’d have to be working on things that we ourselves would want and need to use. By understanding the itch that you’re trying to scratch, you can do a much better job of scratching that hard to reach spot. (You know that bit just between your shoulder blades.)

Another one of our principles is to attempt to rapidly reach the point that the products start providing functionality. Even if the feature set is tiny, by reaching a point that some features exist, we can start refining those features and then begin adding carefully selected features through a process of iteration.

As Bartapr inches its way towards a private alpha release (v.0.0.4 coming any day now) we have begun testing out its few features whenever we have been out and about looking for a pint.  At present, we are have the ability to find all of the bars and pubs near your location based on a filtered query to Foursquare, and to present those results to you ordered by proximity.

I was rather happy to get some use from this recently when out on the prowl for some good pub food. I had used the existing pub review sites to find a pub but discovered when I got there that the pub no longer served food.  30 seconds and a couple of taps on my phone later, I had located the nearest alternate pub and we were on our way. This newly found pub was serving food (which I gleefully recorded on Bartapr) and so that itch I had was quickly scratched by means of a steak and ale pie and a pint of London Pride.

Ooh. That’s the spot!

Yet another bar review site

You might think, ‘why would these guys be building a bar review site when there are dozens already available?’.  Well, like many products, we decided to build a bar review site as we were frustrated with what’s already available.  Being a group of Brits in a busy city like London, drinking (for better or worse) is one of our past-times, and when looking for a place to meet there are a couple of pub review sites but many of these promote comments that are years old.  This just isn’t very helpful in choosing where to go.

This got us thinking about comments, and how they are generally written after visiting a bar, when the hangover is kicking in.  This was the seed for us to think about how we might make it easy for someone to give useful and relevant information about a venue without having to put a high amount of thought and effort into constructing and submitting a witty paragraph. We wanted to make it so easy that someone might be able to give something useful while waiting for a friend to get a drink from the bar. 

While we were collecting this information, we wondered how we might make it useful for finding bars to visit and also how to make it personally relevant.  After all a bar with loud music might be one persons cup of tea whilst being another persons worst nightmare.  We thought about how we might be able to make it easy to find the type of bar you were after and how your preferences might reflect that.  Once again, a Friday night after work bar might be very different from a first date type of bar.

Finally with the growing proliferation of location based applications, we wanted to make something that could help our thirsty customers find a bar if they were out and about and needed some inspiration.

There are of course sites which offer more than just pubs and bars, but we wanted to make something that was relevant to this type of social event, not just about where the nearest bicycle repair shop was, but how can we help people find the type of bar they are looking for.

So, we think it’s not just another bar review site, but hopefully something simple, relevant and fun.

Cheers!