Whether you’re looking for saloons in Nashville, planning your brewery tour in Denver, or want to go all out at the newest swanky nightclub in Miami, Yule has you covered. Founders and lifelong friends Jonathan Richter, Kirk Riley, and Christopher Waterbury considered the abundance of social media posts being tagged at locations and knew there had to be a way to combine all this information together in a way that could be accessible, fun, and useful for someone interested in exploring local nightlife.
That’s where the idea for Yule was born, and for two years these friends have spent countless hours learning to code and cataloguing the social media presence of nightlife venues across the U.S. – and beyond. “We realized early on that location-based data was an up and coming trend, so we decided to make that the foundation of our app” CEO Richter explains. “People thought we were crazy, I mean how could you go through and organize the nightlife scene for every neighborhood of every city in the country? Well, with dedication and perseverance we developed a highly efficient backend system for cataloguing nightlife spots and have manually scraped the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram data for nearly 150,000 venues worldwide.”
But Yule has a lot more to offer than just linkable social data. Users can post photos, videos, or text as themselves or anonymously. This content shows up on the “nightlife feed”, which is basically Yule’s version of a Facebook newsfeed. There is a realtime ‘Yule Score’ based on an algorithm that helps determine how fun a place may be for you at the moment. The app is also introducing a new method for check-ins. Yule checks to see if a user is within a specific range of the venue and if so, a user’s interests will be anonymously added to the Crowd tab of a venue profile. This means that you are able to see general yet reliable stats about patrons, such as the average age, male/female ratio, and even schools people attended or sports teams they root for. Eventually this could lead to Yule being able to recommend bars to you based on people of likeminded interests wherever you are. It’s also a surprisingly efficient platform for keeping up to date with your favorite venues.
While Yule is still in the early stages of production, the app has a lot to offer for people in their twenties interested in exploring nightlife in a new way. So next time you’re in a new place and wonder what’s going on at hot spots around you, check out your surroundings on Yule!
