By Brandolon Barnett
Founder, Chief Product & Strategy Officer
Meet the Host
The Regular helps our partners like Kingfisher - bars, restaurants, social leagues, lifestyle brands - cultivate and engage Their Regulars through memberships, giving and volunteering as a community, a dedicated social feed, and more.
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Need a full night in your venue? Want to offer a membership or be more engaged with your customers, charity, and community? Contact us today and talk with our team about what we can do for your business
“How does one become The Regular? I spent months asking bartenders, owners, and over time others who owned restaurants, farmers markets, barbershops, and more. Some said come by 3 times a week for a month, others said every day for a couple of weeks. Still others said it was just instinct.” - Brandolon Barnett, Founder of The Regular
In 2018 I was in my favorite bar in Washington, DC. (Kingfisher, one of our launch partners!) It was and remains a place that feels like home to me. That place we all have or long for that’s been the site (the café in Friends) and source (the bar in Cheers) of great storytelling and experiences. As I was cashing out the bartender, by this point a friend who’d seen me multiple times per week over the course of a few months, casually commented that I was going to get the friends and family discount. 10% off my tab.
This moment admittedly seems small and…normal. But, especially being a freshly minted new Product Manager at Salesforce helping to build a giving & volunteering engagement platform known as Philanthropy Cloud but also thinking more deeply than normal about customer relationship management, the interaction spurred lots of thoughts for me.
What was this friends and family discount? At what point had I obtained a right to it? Was it something I got other nights I came in? Or was it only something I got from this one bartender? Was the process of getting this benefit, along with the benefit of this wonderful community I’d become a part of, the same for others? Why did this system even exist? What value was it to the bar?
I believe very strongly that you don’t build anything good – products, policies, companies, relationships, vacation itineraries – without asking questions, listening, and striving for empathy. Those are the tools I employed as what’s now a little company called The Regular began to take shape.
How does one become The Regular? I spent months asking bartenders, owners, and over time others who owned restaurants, farmers markets, barbershops, and more. Some said come by 3 times a week for a month, others said every day for a couple of weeks. Still others said it was just instinct. I asked what the value of a Regular was? All said it helped them to connect with customers more deeply. The Regular brings friends, have birthdays in the spaces they love. They are the ones who make an effort to come and support if times get tough like they did for all of us when COVID-19 hit. The Regular is the bedrock of some of the most vital communities we depend on to feel connected to the world and to each other.
Considering all of this with empathy, yet more questions arose for me. What if a person loved a place and community and wanted to be The Regular but had a disability and couldn’t make lots of repeat trips? What about women, who in the research I began to read, felt more comfortable going out with friends. I don’t think there are many friends I’d go to the same place 3 times a week with…What if The Regular – essential for these brands and local establishments – just disappeared? What if The Regular needed help and no one had their contact info? What if something like COVID happened and Regulars wanted to continue to support their favorite communities and local businesses? And finally, if Regulars had enough value to warrant any investment, wouldn’t consistency and a clear entry point and clear answers to these questions make it easier for brands to be strategic about engaging them?
These are the questions that we want to solve for. We started with a subscription and have evolved into a vision for helping build genuine community, something we think is particularly important after the impacts of COVID. To do that, we make connections.
The Regular connects people to communities they love, and idle times at bars, restaurants, and other venues to events those communities hold.
Particularly after COVID, we began to realize that the questions around what it means to be The Regular were indicative of a larger opportunity. Lots of people felt and still feel alone. They want community. Those communities then need spaces to gather. Then there are venues - bars, restaurants - that have space and empty hours. So we match their space and idle times in which they can host the right community gatherings. In the process we increase revenue on their empty nights, build tech to help them engage and convert more customers into The Regular, and data and tools in one place to more strategically cultivate and manage that important relationship.
Anyone who wants can find, join, and be The Regular in communities they love with a place where they can easily brown and join communities through The Regular app, which is now available in Beta on Android & iOS. As those communities need spaces to gather and find a home we then reach out to local businesses and brands - bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and other venues - to ask them when they’re slow/idle (slow Monday? Empty Tuesday?) and could use more customers. We then connect Communities with them to hold events and bring in a guaranteed stream of customers. This is The Regular for Business, and through it we work with companies to make sure those communities have a positive experience in a place that fits their brand, with a goal that a higher percentage of those customers become The Regular for businesses they fall in love in through the communities they care about. At the center of it all is Impact, because we encourage those companies to build genuine community through choosing a local charity to sponsor.
One Stop Shop for Customer Engagement
We’ve got a big vision to help small businesses have a one stop shop for engaging their customers in ways that big brands now take for granted
We have a big vision in store. As we move forward, The Regular user on our app will find a feed that helps their favorite bars and restaurants bypass social media algorithms, they’ll find donation opportunities connected to the charity their community is sponsoring. Social leagues will find one place to check their standings, see their scores. That’s where we’ve started, but it’s just the beginning of our vision of creating true innovation for community. We’re on a mission to revolutionize how local businesses that bring people together engage them, all centered on cause and impact. And the journey is just beginning.