The idea came from me wanting a curated up to date list for myself. I thought the alternatives are/were outdated, poorly maintained and/or pay-to-rank. When ratebeer shut down earlier this year I thought I might as well offer this as a potential replacement for the venue listings.

The data is initially crowd sourced, or researched by me when I'm bored. Keeping things updated is done with various automated (and some manual) alive checks for each venue.

I know you're right about the landing page. Would be nice to show the closest venues or locations there immediately, but I absolutely loathe pages that ask for positional data right off the bat (could do some geoip stuff maybe).