bngr

BNGR uses live foot traffic data to show you what nightclub or bar is HOT right now, and what's dead. Real-time data - updates every 15 minutes. Skip the lame nightclubs - tonight, go to a Banger!

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Inspiration

We were in a new city during a tech conference. Wanting to blow off steam that evening, we started looking around Google Maps trying to find the busiest nightclub by scanning through the live data listings. We were looking for that elusive "red bar" on the live data graph that Google aps uses to show a place is WAY busier than usual.

How many places are around you, that you WANT to be busy? A child's park, a dog park, bars, clubs, coffee shops, etc. - these are places where you may be hoping to interact with other people and/or pets, and so the busier they are, the better. So, I began to investigate how I could get this data in a raw format so I could identify those "hot spots" in the city you're in - whether your home city, or while you're on the road. Imagine you land in a foreign city, and immediately know what's the top night spot? That's Banger.

What it does

Banger uses live foot-traffic and brings the results to your pocket. Using this data, you can show what nightclubs and bars near you are the busiest, and rank them from busy to empty, so that you can find the most popular places - the "Bangers". The app lists nearby bars and nightclubs in descending order from Banger, to Very Popular, to Popular, to Dead.

Banger is completely FREE to use, to see what's popular tonight. And if you want to see what we PREDICT will be popular tomorrow or the next night, you can pay $1 per month to subscribe to "Forecast" data, which will give you upcoming predicted rankings up to 7 days in the future. Imagine knowing where you're going to go this weekend, before it's even Wednesday!

How we built it

Banger was built using React Native with Expo, and the Backend is AWS Lambda.

Challenges we ran into

There were surprisingly few challenges; the final Apple approval process had 4 kick-backs, but they were easily solved in a few hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our first prototype had 1-2 cities; we're proud that we developed a system to add more cities quickly, and we were able to get to 10 by launch!

What we learned

We learned that creating a subscription RevenueCat was one of the easiest parts of building the app. :)

What's next for bngr

We will first expand immediately to 50 cities. Then, we will begin the process of reaching out to club owners to see if they want to buy a sponsored notification on one of their "dead" nights. This will allow them to send a push notification to all the people in the app who have toggled their city.

There will be one push notification per city, per night, for sale. Any club can buy it for the night - first come, first served. This gives us a B2B platform that will become valuable over time to club owners and club promoters, who will use it to drive traffic to their establishments.

We will also explore letting club owners interact with our paying Banger members, allowing them to pre-buy entry to the club on a Popular night, and skip the line to get in. This will incentivize nightclubs to pre-sell a certain quantity of tickets so they can ensure their club is a "Banger".

Obviously, this all relies on having enough people in the app to make these notifications worthwhile for a promoter. We will begin running Facebook traffic to the landing page to drive free adoption in one major target city, and attempt to build a nightly revenue stream from a single large city first.

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