And so it begins......an intro to Who's Round from Patrick

Thank you for visiting our website, and taking an interest…….. 

I hope by now you know what we do?  If not, check out this link if you’re a  customer looking to get a round, or this one if you’re a venue looking serve a round. This long-awaited debut blog, which may be the last if things don’t go well, is about the beginning, why we created Who’s Round and what we hope we can do for you, your friends and families.  

First up, in the midst of Covid-19, you could be forgiven for believing that we are just another optimistic pop up / start-up looking to cash in on the crises.  That’s not the case, Covid-19 is bad for us.  Those technically astute enough will see this domain (whos-round.com) was registered in 2016 or 2017 and our Facebook page was also created around the same time, so we have been in the making for some time now, albeit at a snails pace. 

Our idea, like all great ideas, came during a drunken night out.  This particular night out was with my partner in a favourite South London Cocktail bar (I won’t name it here, just in case they decide to sue us). I say favourite, I obviously prefer a pub, but as cocktail bars go it’s a reasonable compromise, if done infrequently. The issue is it is a cosy venue and great cocktails take time to make and prepare. Getting my round was therefore complicated. Approaching the bar, which was obviously busy, I could quite easily forget these exotically named drinks by the time I was served or, worse still, somebody around the bar may try to engage in conversation me. The whole process took about 15 minutes, and if I managed to get my partner to the bar, I then had another 15 minutes of trying to defend the table from people who thought a middle aged man would purposely go alone to a cocktail bar on a Friday night with a female handbag and claim two chairs and a table. Surely there is a better way to do this we thought?  

This revelation and experience led to even more deep thinking, how we choose a venue to visit? Do we look at Google reviews, TripAdvisor reviews? I’ve been let down in the past when going to a new bar with friends, only to find there was not a single beer on draught, with bottles breaking £5 barrier. In restaurants, why must we wait to be served and to pay a bill, surely, I should be able to do this all with my mobile phone? So, equipped with probably my only joke, the idea of Who’s Round was born with a few mates, and we quickly committed to learn how to code and create websites. 

And, three years later, here we are. This is the second iteration of Who’s Round, we quickly found that coding is much harder than it seemed in the movies, so started looking for a company that knew what they are doing. Since that idea, much has changed but also not a lot has changed. Along has come the Weatherspoon’s App, yet nobody was offering this service to all the other venues, so we felt we could prod along and start a quiet revolution casually at some point in 2020 but then came Covid-19! Now our idea is fashionable, many are looking to do a table service offering, and have far bigger budgets than us so we will most likely not be sailing of into the sunset anytime soon! 

We still think our service is pretty cool – you don’t need an app for every venue you visit, we don’t pass on your email address to anyone, you don’t expose your card details with every venue and we are not just a table service app! We are also about finding new places to eat and drink, knowing the menus, and seeing what it’s like from images and user reviews that are currently hard to find and spread across various platforms.  

We hope that you enjoy using Who’s Round. We may not have the biggest budgets, but the tech does work and if it helps just a few venues open, or gives a few people more confidence to go back and buy a round, we will be absolutely delighted!