When the World Cup kicked off this summer, millions of fans faced the same small but real problem: where do you actually go to watch the match? Not just any bar with a TV, but the right one. The one with the big screen, the game-day deal, and a room full of people cheering for your team.
That question is exactly what Watch Party Radar set out to answer.
Why we built it
Watch Party Radar started as a personal itch. My brother and I had always believed that watching sports in a bar full of fans beats watching at home. The trouble was logistics. We both travel constantly for work, and neither of us ever knew which venues were showing the match, let alone which ones would be packed with supporters of our team.
The World Cup felt like the ideal moment to solve it, because cheering alongside fellow countrymen makes the experience come alive even more. I am Dutch and now live in the US, so I am always hunting for the bar with a bit of orange in it.
There was a second motivation, too. My co-founder Dennis and I are the founders of Dashmote, a B2B AI company that works behind the scenes for large consumer brands such as Coca-Cola, Heineken and Red Bull. It is a good business, but one that rarely touches everyday consumers directly. Building Watch Party Radar was a chance to make something that helps people with a real, everyday problem, with the added freedom that, as a passion project, it does not have to make money.
How it works
The insight behind Watch Party Radar is deceptively simple. Local businesses already advertise their watch parties online, on their own websites and social channels. What has never existed is a single place to find all of them across venues and cities.
That is the gap the product fills. Our technology scans websites, social media posts and articles from venues, and from the fans talking about them, identifies who is hosting a viewing party, verifies it, and pins it on one freely accessible map. Venues do not have to sign up or pay a cent. If they are posting about it online, we can find them.
The footprint is expanding quickly. The map launched covering 100 cities and roughly 5,000 venues. Today it spans 318 cities and more than 23,902 venues across 57 countries, and grows every day as more venues post about their viewing parties.
What the response has revealed
The reception has been amazing. We suspected that finding the perfect spot to watch the World Cup was already on fans' minds. Now that the tournament is underway, that hunch is bearing out: people are rediscovering that the World Cup is most fun watched outside the home, and with so many travelling over the summer, the map is getting heavy use.
Two patterns have stood out so far.
First, fans care deeply about atmosphere and the practical extras. The fan-base of a venue matters, and so do details like whether a place has a big screen or a special game-day promotion.
Second, kickoff times shape behavior. Because some matches air very late in certain regions, around midnight or early morning across Europe and Asia, there is strong demand for venues that stay open past midnight and hold the right license to keep serving. Finding those late-night spots has become one of the map's most-used cases.
For a project that began with two brothers wanting a better place to watch the game, Watch Party Radar has quickly become exactly that for a lot of other fans, too.