On a busy night out on Northgate, crowds of bar-goers pull cash from ATMs with IDs shuffling between their hands, all just to get in line for their favorite spot. But behind the scenes, a new player is working to redefine how businesses and consumers approach nightlife.
Financial management graduate student Dhruv Ruttala is a co-founder of Chaser, a business dedicated to integrated loyalty programming for bars. It takes the form of an app — set to launch in January — that allows users to earn points every time they spend money at a participating venue, then redeem those points for drink deals. In return, the bars get data on consumer trends.
“The main issue we’re trying to solve is that loyalty seems to be disappearing in nightlife,” Ruttala said. “For bigger restaurants and chains, it’s easy for them to create integrated loyalty programs, but there’s not one unified platform for all nightlife venues to hop on. So that’s what we’re trying to create.”
The spark for Chaser didn’t start with bars. Ruttala and a friend from high school always knew that they wanted to go into business together, so when they got together one summer to spitball ideas, inspiration struck in a coffee shop.
“We were wondering why there isn’t more coffee shop rewards programs, and we were thinking about what other contexts that would apply to,” Ruttala said. “We were in the same fraternity, so we hit the bars together a lot. That was something that came to mind, and then we realized it was actually a much bigger hole in the industry than we thought.”
They started talking to bar managers and friends who were regulars at Bryan-College Station spots, and after getting positive feedback, their next step was to bring on developers to build out the app’s features and fine-tune the interface. So far, Chaser has two bars on board and 25 beta testers.
“We’re really in a testing phase,” Ruttala said. “Right now, we’re offering it for free to the bars that are essentially giving us the data that we need to prove that the concept works.”
Chaser’s newest developer, computer science sophomore Cayden Maguire, was recruited by Ruttala through their fraternity, Alpha Tau Omega. In preparation for the launch, Maguire is responsible for improving user experience through small but essential features, like automatically updating rewards or connecting users to campus organizations.
“My main role is improving on the interface that people see,” Maguire said. “That’s the biggest part of what I’m doing, is making the app easier to use or more accessible. Another part is the backends, which is the database.”
The development team continued testing close to home, using their fraternity brothers as initial beta users to identify bugs and collect feedback.
“It’s really helpful to have a bunch of different points of view on our app,” Maguire said. “They have a lot of useful feedback. We just talk about, ‘Why does your app not have this screen?’ or, ‘You should add a flash sale feature,’ and then we go from there.”
Ruttala believes that the data provided by Chaser could play a role in helping bars weather financial challenges, particularly onNorthgate, where a growing number of businesses are struggling to stay open through construction and changing consumer cultures. The most recent victim was VooDoo Brewing Company, which announced its permanent closure on Sept. 29.
“One of the biggest problems in hospitality is that return customers are really hard to generate,” Ruttala said. “You can get someone in through the door the first time, but it’s really hard to get them back the second time. If we can help with the idea of bringing people back to the same bar because they know they have a reward they can redeem, they’re way more likely to go back. It’s creating recurring revenue that they didn’t have before.”
One of the bars contracted with Chaser is The Spot on Northgate. For general manager Afan Abid, the appeal lies more in rewarding his loyal regulars than bringing in new ones.
“It stood out to me because a lot of our customers are regulars, and I want to be able to reward our regulars,” Abid said. “The Chaser app shows me what repeat customers I have, and it allows them to rack up points and then also claim rewards. I think it just helps both ways. On my business standpoint running The Spot, I get to reward my regulars, and then for them, [Ruttala] gets to start a business where a concept that hasn’t been introduced in the bar scene yet will get introduced.”
For the Chaser team, the brand as a whole is about more than just business. Helping local bars is a way for Ruttala to recapture nightlife culture. The app is intentionally designed to run in the background, so users can rack up points without ever pulling out their phone.
“Ten years ago, nightlife was way different,” Ruttala said. “It wasn’t going out just to take pictures. It wasn’t to go blackout either. It was to have fun, to hang out with friends. Even over the past five years, is what I’ve noticed. Freshman year, we would go out to make memories. Now it’s just to take pictures. I think bigger than just the app, we’re testing out something broader through the brand itself. I think the idea far down the line is going back to the era of putting our phones away when we’re out.”
