The Banter and BanterTV apps are owned by Around Labs, Inc., a Delaware C-Corp.
Banter is a new platform that shows you real-time information on your local nightlife scene. What happy hours are going on right now? Which bars have live music tonight? What are the current hotspots?
How do we do this?
Through the BanterTV app, available now for AppleTV and soon for Chromecast, bars, restaurants and clubs can connect their existing televisions to our platform and turn them into interactive displays, showing photos that people are taking and uploading in real-time, and displaying promotions, specials and other announcements.
In turn, all of this information, from the photos of people that are there to the specials currently active at the venue, is visible on the Banter! mobile app, available now for iOS and Android.
Banter is already available in every major US city: San Francisco, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, Austin, Chicago, Philadelphia, 40+ more US cities, even international locations like Monterrey, MX, Panama City, and Mumbai. We already have over 40,000 users and our numbers are growing every month. Soon, we’ll be a community of millions, Bantering to make our lives more interesting.
Real time information. Interactive Displays. Unlimited connections. One mighty global platform.
Ever get to a bar with friends only to leave moments later because it wasn’t what you were looking for?
Ever have to walk from bar to bar looking for one that will have enough space for your friends but isn’t totally dead?
Ever feel like you know what bars are nearby, but you don’t know what’s going on at any of them on any given night?
If we’re able to use our phones to know which streets have traffic, how come we can’t use them to do something much more fun: know the real-time busyness and vibe of different places in your city?
Yelp and Google Maps can tell us past experiences, but no one is telling is current experiences — until now.
Forget wasting time and money in search of the perfect bar, and choose Banter: an online community focused on nightlife so you can easily share real-time information on what’s going on in your city.
Banter shows you real-time info about the local bar scene, including photos and other updates being shared by people that are there right now, right on your mobile phone. Think of us like the popular traffic app Waze, but for nightlife.
There are three main components to the Banter mobile app:
Advanced web scrapers, crawlers, & API integrations: We work harder than anyone to compile every single show, event, party, bar trivia, or happy hour going on in your city up to a week in advance. In fact, Banter’s technology generates 10x more events than our competitors.
Party chats: When you RSVP to a party or show, we add you to a temporary group chat with the other attendees, as well as the organizer and performer, so you can easily communicate with them in the days leading up the event as well as in real-time on event day — “Is it as good as promised?” “What music is the band playing?”
Real time social network sharing: You can see and share photos from bars, indicating the busyness, vibe, music and gender ratio, all in real-time.
With Banter, you’re always in the know about how busy a place is, it’s vibe, even the gender ratio (because let’s face it, a big reason people go out is to meet people).
If you’re at a bar that also uses the BanterTV app, your photos will also be shown on the venue’s televisions and screens.
Businesses really love Banter because we help them understand, engage, and market to their customers better than ever before. Bar owners and event organizers can gain valuable data from customers who RSVP, what type of events they are RSVPing to, and how those events are attracting customers — all while having their place known as a local hot spot.
Banter also provides a great way to offer incentives or rewards to your customers. Post to Banter about how much fun you’re having at Northstar Café? Next drink’s on Northstar.
And now, with the new BanterTV app, available now for AppleTV and coming soon to Chromecast devices, businesses can turn their existing TV’s and screens and turn them into dynamic, interactive, money-making machines. After the game’s over, instead of leaving Sportscenter on mute, the business can get much more out of their televisions.
The BanterTV app does three things:
1) Shows photos that the staff and customers are uploading, displaying them in a real-time photo feed
2) Show promotions and other announcements that they want their current patrons to know about, from current specials to upcoming events and parties
3) Show targeted advertisements that are relevant to their patrons, so they can make some extra bucks.
Most importantly – the photos and announcements that are being shown on the venue’s televisions are also being shown on the Banter mobile app, so that all other Banter users in the city can know what’s going on at the venue – in real-time.
Simply put – Banter helps nightlife venues, from bars to restaurants to nightclubs, old and new alike, promote their business to people looking to go out, let others know what’s going on in real-time, and make some extra bucks in various ways.
Good news — you can! Banter is live on both iOS and Android app stores, with over 40,000 registered users.
Most of our users so far are in San Francisco, New York, and Boston, but we’re quickly expanding in Los Angeles, Miami, Austin, Chicago, Philadelphia, and over 40 other US cities as well. We even have international locations like New Delhi, and Mumbai.
We’re doing a lot to get our name out there:
Three key trends contribute to this being the perfect time for an app like Banter to succeed:
These factors combine to create a low overhead business with extremely high revenue and growth potential.
We’re targeting millennials that like to go out – needless to say, this market is huge!
We’re also targeting event organizers, performers, promoters, and bar/club managers who will use Banter to better engage with their guests.
The Banter platform has the ability to generate revenue in multiple ways.
1. Advertising on Banter Jumbotron via Apple TV and Chromecast apps where revenue is shared with the venue. Ads from nightlife brands mixed in between photos.
2. Premium features designed exclusively for high-spending nightclub goers that want access to VIP experiences like early access, private performances, VIP-only chats, and other special offers. We expect to convert 1% of new users to premium version.
3. Promotions of events that local club owners, promoters, and artists want featured to our users.
4. Commissions from purchases like ticket sales and bottle service reservations made by our users.
Unlike apps like Yelp and Groupon, we’re not creating paid subscriptions for businesses, but monetizing our users. This model allows us to grow our revenue as we grow our user base, without requiring a huge sales team
Projections
Throughout 2016, the large majority of our revenue will come from advertising on the BanterTV. We project we can generate close to $50,000 of revenue in Q4 2016, and grow that to $500,000 in Q1 2017.
The main drivers of revenue growth for advertising are:
a) Increase venue registration on BanterTV adoption by sport bar chains and nightclub holding companies that own and manage multiple venues
b) Increase charge per ad impression by developing unique and effective targeting abilities for advertisers
c) Increase amount of ads shown per venue by targeting venues with multiple TV’s that can have at least 1 TV specifically dedicated to BanterTV
Banter is seeking $100,000 via a convertible security at a 20% discount and $8 million valuation cap.
Given our low burn-rate and our near-term focus on revenue growth, we expect this funding will provide us with enough runway to become profitable.
Born and raised in Mexico, Diego studied engineering at Stanford before moving to San Francisco. Although he had been living in the city for five years and knew all the popular spots very well, he still found that trying to figure which nightlife spots would be good on any given night was a crapshoot. Too often did he show up to bars only to find them empty or too packed.
After graduating from Stanford, Diego spent four years as a marketing consultant for Fortune 500 companies. In 2014, he quit his job to focus on Banter full time and has been able to apply the same marketing / growth strategies he developed for these companies to Banter. He also uses his marketing knowledge to understand the appeal Banter would have to local businesses, performers, and promoters.
As CEO, he handles everything from marketing to operations, fundraising, and business development.
Born and raised in Belarus, Alexey worked as a network engineer before graduating from Mobile Makers Academy.