Party on: The site for a great night
Self-described “avid nightlife seekers” Keir McHarg and Ryan Chartres were left wondering the same thing after a particularly fruitless night out left them standing in the cold without a warm bar in sight.
“We went to five or six venues and nothing was happened,” McHarg said. “We were wondering why there was no one who had put something together to help people go out on specific nights.”
Frustrated that finding a decent drink had become such a challenge, they decided to simplify the process for themselves and their fellow Australians.
The Where To Tonight team (l-r) Camila Gonzalez, Keir McHarg, Ryan Chartres and Juan Mantilla.
Three years on and they’ve combined McHarg’s background in website design and development and Chartres’ marketing experienced to create Where To Tonight, a website already being hailed as “the Urbanspoon of nightlife.”
The site aims to collate and rate Melbourne’s venues to help take the stress out of a night on the town.
With a team of four based in St Kilda, Victoria, McHarg and Chartres have created a site allowing users to search for their ideal hotspot using over 70 different variables.
According to McHarg, getting the venues to come aboard was simply a matter of “just rocking up and meeting the venue manager.”
Now, over 200 venues have joined the site and that number increases by 10 weekly. McHarg and his team are already creating a mobile app and have a view to expanding nationally and, eventually, globally.
“What excited us was evolving this idea into something that could help you jump off a plane in New York and feel instantly comfortable about discovering the nightlife there,” he said.
Probably the most ingenious element of the sight is the Mood Watch function. Much like Facebook, users can check into venues and rate them according to their atmosphere. This will be particularly helpful if you are one of the many who find it hard to leave the house on cold, gloomy nights.
“Especially in the winter people are sitting home and wondering if they can be bothered going out,” McHarg explained. “If they knew what a venue was like it could motivate them…they can see which venues are pumping.”