Love the nightlife? ANU students have an app for that

Like many of us, Dexter Todd and Oliver Bagin know the feeling of getting pumped up to go out with friends, only to endure an underwhelming night.   

The tech trailblazers have launched Bardar, an app that provides real time data on clubs and surrounding nightlife, ensuring we no longer have to cough up an entry fee or wait in lengthy lines for a DJ playing tragic hits from the 80s to an empty club.   

Todd, a Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics student at The Australian National University (ANU), developed the idea for the app after a mediocre experience at a Sydney nightclub.  

“My main gripe was that it’s really easy to go online and see how busy a restaurant is or how full a movie theatre will be, but I can’t check how busy a bar or club will be, what kind of music they will be playing or if there were any cool events on,” Todd says.  

Todd recalls reluctantly attending an event with a school friend, and listening to a speaker encouraging the audience to found start-ups. 

“I couldn’t really argue with that, so I decided to start working on Bardar,” Todd said.   

His co-founder, Oliver Bagin, an ANU Advanced Computing student, had recently developed an app for a Canberra bar and was interested in building an app in the nightlife space.  

He met Todd through a mutual friend at ANU, and after hitting it off they began working on the project that would become Bardar – a radar for bars.   

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Currently, the app provides users with live data from 400 Sydney venues and from more than 750 events each month.   

The duo recently attended the South by Southwest Sydney conference (SXSW) and competed in the Pitch contest in the entertainment, games and media category.  

The preparation for the competition was intense, as Todd and Oliver were also major technology partners and had built an in-app venue guide for the music festival component of the event.   

“Both the integration and the pitch were such unbelievable opportunities,” Todd says.  

“We’ve just been pinching ourselves repeatedly going ‘wait, is this real?’”  

Prior to the competition, SXSW provided them with tailored coaching sessions.  

“To be honest, when I’ve entered pitching competitions before, there’s always been some level of support. But the insight from the experts that SXSW paired us with has been next level,” Todd says. 

“In my experience, building a deck is something that you can’t really do on your own – you’re constantly going to others to get advice, feedback and test the narrative flow.  

So, to have expert support in the lead up to the pitch was really invaluable.”  

While the Bardar team were unsuccessful in their pitch, the competition revealed new opportunities to work on future festivals, including a potential collaboration with SXSW Austin.  

“At the festival we realised there’s a huge market for delivering app integrations for in-city music/arts/culture festivals that are currently remaining underserviced,” said Todd.  

“We are investigating these integrations for the app whilst preparing for the Always Live music festival in Victoria later this year, at which we are the sole app partner.”  

As for the future of Bardar, Todd and Bagin are looking at expanding to Melbourne, with the eventual goal being to enter the international market in 2025.   

“Whilst it’s a fairly expansive vision right now, and right now we are really focused on improving the company one day at a time, it’s important to have some really massive end goal to work towards when founding a tech company,” Todd says.   

“On a very mechanical level, you’ll have a hard time getting funding if your company doesn’t have the potential to become a massive enterprise that could one day be acquired for tens if not hundreds of millions.   

“The promise of massive reward is the only way to balance out the high-risk investment in an early-stage startup.”  

Todd has a few words of advice for budding digital entrepreneurs.   

“I can only repeat the argument that motivated me to found Bardar in the first place – if you have an idea, give it a go,” he says.   

“On top of learning an absurd amount, there are limited entry barriers for founding a software company, and the cost of failure when you’re young is minimal.  

“Oh, and if you found a startup, you will never be bored. Stressed plenty, but never bored.”