I DIDN'T BUILD ROARi FROM AN OFFICE.

My name is James Lee. I've spent fifteen years looking at the accounts of independent businesses, and nine years running them.

ROARi came out of both, and it wouldn't exist without either.

First I read the books

At Barclays, then Santander, and later as a commercial finance broker, my job was the numbers behind independent businesses in York. The takings, the margins, the month it nearly went wrong.

You see patterns the public never sees. The best food doesn't win. The smartest fit-out doesn't win. What wins is customers who come back — and almost nobody was spending a penny on the ones they already had.

Then I went and did it

Reading accounts is one thing. Standing in the middle of it is another.

I've spent the last nine years in restaurants, helping grow a York business from one site to three. The rush, the late nights and the graft. The Friday when two staff call in sick. The Saturday when there's a queue to the door and everything decides to go wrong at once.

That's where I learned what a loyalty app actually has to survive.

Signal dies exactly when you're busiest

Here's something you only know if you've stood there. When the room is full, the signal goes. Bodies, walls, a room full of phones fighting over one weak bar. The busiest hour of your week is the hour the internet stops working.

A software company doesn't know that. They test on office wifi at eleven on a Tuesday. So their loyalty app asks the customer to wait, or leaves a stamp sitting there pending until the data comes back, and the customer is already out of the door wondering whether it worked.

ROARi was built assuming the signal will fail. Stamps collect offline, on the phone, in the moment — and sync when the signal returns. The customer sees it work straight away, because in a queue that's the only version that counts.

Nobody stands in a queue waiting for a stamp to load.

And you can finally talk to them

The thing that used to frustrate me most wasn't the paper card. It was that you'd recognise your regulars and have no way at all to reach them.

Quiet Tuesday? Nothing you can do. Too much prep and it needs shifting? Nothing you can do. Forty regulars with your card in their wallet and not a word you can say to any of them.

ROARi gives you that. A flash offer goes to the people who already come to you, on their phone, in the next hour. Not strangers on an ad platform — your own customers.

Why it matters who built it

Some of the other loyalty apps are good software companies. That's not a criticism.

But there's a difference between building a product for an industry and building one from inside it. I've done the cashing up. I've had the card machine hang at seven on a Friday. Every decision in ROARi — the offline mode, the rotating counter code so nobody can screenshot a stamp, the fact that staff get a PIN and never see your figures — comes from something that actually happened.

I built the thing I spent nine years wishing existed.

ROARi is built in York by ROARI APP LTD, and it's launching in York first. If you run an independent business here and want in early, I'd like to hear from you.