University of Miami seniors Oliver Krok and Nate Reservitz have had their fair share of club experiences. When they were looking for fun after moving to Miami, the parties were nowhere. Now they have a solution.
With their app-in-development, Scope, Krok and Reservitz have answered a question plaguing much of the nation’s student population on weekends, “Where are people going out?”
Reservitz, originally from Massachusetts, dealt with this predicament while working an internship in Chicago.
“I was trying to figure out where to go out and have fun,” Reservitz said. “But I was going out alone, for starters, and two, I didn’t know anyone in Chicago.”
Logically, Reservitz went to the internet and social media to gauge where a good place to go out would be.
“I looked it up on Google,”Reservitz said, referring to a place known as a local college bar, “and there’s all these Yelp reviews by a 45-year-old mom that’s never come here.”
The woman thought the bar was a nightmare, but it was just what Reservitz was looking for.
“There were so many kids there,” Reservitz said. “That woman is not a part of my demographic, and her review of it was very skewed, it would potentially push me away from finding places that I would enjoy.”
Krok experienced this too in Europe.
“I was away with my friends in Europe, and the language barriers were really bad,” Krok said. “This one person told us about a ‘good spot,’ which was really more of a restaurant than anything else.”
Krok and Reservitz began individually brainstorming solutions for this predicament, ultimately leading them to begin their work together.
Enter Scope, their idea for an innovative app that predicts the unpredictable.
Scope will give users bar wait times, customer demographics and price on any given night.
“The idea is to prevent people from having bad nights that could have been great nights simply because they didn’t have the proper information,” Reservitz said.
The pair’s ideas aligned when Krok approached Reservitz with the basis of an idea for Scope.
Reservitz promoted Scope on TikTok while Krok assembled a team to work on the business side of the app’s development.
“I don’t understand the technical side of developing,” Krok said. “So, when it got to a point where I needed to actually start creating something, I found people that are good at that, and that happens to be some of my friends.”
Working with his closest friends was harder than expected.
“Creating a business with friends can be challenging,” Krok said. “At some point, you need to separate friendship from business.”
“We’ve had to remove people from the team. So that’s definitely been a big challenge.”
Since finding a balance within the team, however, Krok, Reservitz, and the rest of the group are moving forward despite their busy schedules.
As they work toward releasing a beta version of the app to students at UMiami, the team has already developed a Minimum Viable Product (to demo the basic features of their app and set up a waitlist where they will be able to release the beta to interested students.
The app’s potential motivates the group to keep building their app and market it via social media.
“[The hope is that] you can actually plan your night out with the app and know exactly what you want to do and have almost a guarantee that there’s going to be the same caliber people as you,” Reservitz said, “and your night is ultimately going to have less hiccups, and it’s more likely to be a great night. That’s the goal.”
“I want this [Scope] to be a nightlife ecosystem,” Krok echoed, “my eventual goal for Scope is that it’s synonymous with going out.”
Follow Scope on social media at @downloadscope on Instagram or @buildingscope on TikTok for more updates.