Before BoozeHound.

The year 2016 was rather fruitful. I was working at a big telco (not the green one), as a Sports Editor, doing something totally unrelated to Tech and startups. Every day after my shift ends, or some times, even during shifts where I was waiting for certain tasks to finish, or whilst having my meal, I turn on the Macbook Pro and keep practicing my UI/UX skills.

Working at a big corp opens your eyes to how fast and nimble startups can be.

Corporations have deep pockets which might make you think they can build anything and everything they want in an instant. But, the need to be cautious and already having lived in a highly structured work environment, you cannot just green light every good initiative that comes your way.

During this period, every big corporation was holding a startup competition with cash prizes only to acqui-hire or talent-spot and offer them high-paying jobs. This also brought with it a group of talented tech chaps, who gamed the system. They basically always partnered together and took part to only win the cash prizes without any intent to make a viable business out of it.

This obviously left a sour taste in someone like myself. It always baffled me when startup founders were only throwing out ideas to a bunch of people, use all the right buzz words of that time and put together a half decent demo with a overly exaggerated deck, and poof! money appeared almost out of thin air.

With these corporations all trying their hand at developing a startup environment by hiring during pitch competitions, there was no real need to materialise the ideas you presented. That did not stop me from taking this idea to win a 2nd place, only behind a group that ‘demoed’ a prototype which failed in dramatic fashion but still won because most were Engineers by trade.

The Aha! moment.

If I am being 100% honest, BoozeHound, might have been the only project which I thought of, solely for the competition. Budweisser was the main sponsor, and it had to be alcohol-related in some shape or form.

In most of my ideation stage, the few points I really aim to nail are, is there a decently sized group of people that can use this. What value it brings to them? Is there a fair trade of value for their time on the app, and the amount they pay us for some benefit to them.

I roped in my younger brother and a childhood friend, mostly for moral support and some tweaks along the way. Neither of them were into tech like I was. But nonetheless, their inputs did help get that 2nd place. The logo for example, my brother had worked that, even though it is not necessarily a typical app logo style.

Good tech ideas are not just ones that you have stitched together through your past experience of seeing and using good apps alone.

Think about it, whenever someone says, ‘man! I have this great app idea’, it usually is a combination of some other apps they have used and stitching together different features from different apps.

Taking part in a beer/startup pitch competition was a no-brainer for me. We were avid drinkers, and some of our friends were also running craft breweries around this time.

Catching up with friends always involved us going to bars and knocking back a couple of pints. My observance during all this time, allowed me this insight. Each time we met in the day time, we always caught ourselves buying whatever was on the Happy Hour menu. Whenever it was evening, I also noticed that the first few things was to ask ‘What time does your Happy Hour end?’.

The answer to the last question usually came back with a ‘we’re sorry.. it just ended 5 mins ago’. It then hit me, what did Happy Hour actually mean? Am I the customer who is happy and thus the pricing? Or is the outlet feeling happy, so they priced it lower?

If Happy Hours were literal, would that not mean a customer should decide when that time is for him/her?

Flipping Happy Hour on its tail, to allow a customer to decide when he wants to exercise his/her happy hour. That was the premise.

We understood that Happy Hours were a way to attract the crowds in for off-peak hours. But who is in the know when a particular outlet’s down time is? What if it was crowded in some places, but not others? What do these small bars/pubs/clubs do? How can they announce instantly, ‘hey, we are having happy hour for the next 2 hours’?

From a customer stand point, what if I catch up for drinks every day, but I can never reach in time for Happy Hour? What if I as a paying customer of a subscription app, am able to activate a 1hr Happy Hour, on-demand?

It was shaping up slowly. The idea started to seem like it had legs. A sound revenue model, decent enough target segment and good value exchange.

How I started work on it.

Still without any social standing in the startup scene, let alone tech, I just applied whatever I could, mostly through Youtube videos. The deck was also the first few professionally put deck I have designed. It was short, concise, and hit all the industry best-practices.

Logo works was shipped to my brother to put together. I had just scoured the net for some reference images, and he went to town with it. Building the entire mockups and demonstrating the UI/UX was something I was growing comfortable with.

Tools like InVision, Sketch, Flinto, were the main ones I had used. There were not as many iterations for each screen, as we were on a race against time. I believe it was 2 weeks of ~12 hours per day that got us over the line.

If the whole mountain of tasks look daunting, just look at the step ahead of you and tackle it well.

Building momentum, or cadence is important even to the physical act of climbing a mountain. Have the end in mind, but only the steps ahead in sight.

Coming home after a 12hr shift, I will get to work almost immediately, and usually only managed surviving on 3-4hr sleep. On weekends, and much of the last week before the pitch, I utilised much of my offs-in-lieu.

At this point, my managers and higher ups had caught wind of what makes me tick. They did showcase my skills but to much dismay of the others, wondering why I was being ‘extra’. As much as the highest ranking officer took a liking towards my extra curricular activities, most others down the line, almost felt like they were busy figuring out how come I have so much ‘free’ time for such activities.

How I built it.

At this point in my life, I had no intention to pick up coding again. I had done decently well in my Diploma, but those things were redundant by the time I had gotten out of University.

Design skills were picked up by replicating popular sites, studying why things were done the way they were. What made users carry out specific actions. What makes them stay, etc. I was doing a ton of reading, and soaking up as much from whatever I could find from the Internet communities.

A hi-fidelity mockup does not actually mean a demo, but it might be good enough for an elevator pitch.

Being a non-technical founder, I knew the odds were stacked against me. Let alone the marketing guys and people with PR chops. The mockups had to be so realistic, I needed the judges to question whether it was a working demo or not.

The hard work paid off. Demo day was fast approaching. I had also reached out to my mentors within The Hub Singapore, who had guided me along the way. Building the entire flow with all the exact interactions in play, we hit a home run with the pitch.

Our deck, the logo, the idea, the hi-fi mockup presentation, everything clicked. Until the dreaded question from one of the judges came, ‘So which of you guys are the technical chaps?’.

Where I am with this project now?

Much like the others, I did love BoozeHound for what it was aiming to do. In a world where the only alcohol-related apps were mostly digital menus and ordering systems, there was little to no real innovation in that market. Of course every now and then, you had some that come and go, that dared to put a playful edge to businesses.

Personally, I think much of the demise comes from poor execution and usually lacking a technical co-founder. These days, the same skills I put into building mockups are the same ones that would enable me to build real-world apps on no-code platforms.

Fun and a little cheeky could go a long way, but the more tried and tested solutions e.g. POS, will allow generation of immediate revenues

Do original ideas work all the time? Not really. But, when done right, they are the most spoken about. Makes you go, ‘how did i not think of that?’

Starting a startup is hard. But doing it solo and throw in a mix of being non-technical, you have to choose bite-sized businesses to focus on a niche and serve them well. Doing a 2-way marketplace sort of business, is also 2x more difficult in terms of execution, unless you already have a community of either side already within reach.

The amount of work that would have gone into getting bars to bite on this idea, and to convince customers to pay for a subscription to basically facilitate their appetite for a habit such as alcohol consumption, just did not sound right for me.

Even though I enjoyed the occasional drink or two, I also have seen plenty of friends and families that have fallen to the grasps of alcoholism. When my principals came into question, I decided as fun as such an app would have been, I could not live knowing I am enabling a behaviour which I myself would not be proud of using.

This project will be missed. But it did teach me how to ‘hack’ the pitch competitions when you are a non-techie.

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