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AppyHour: Find the Best Happy Hours Near You

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After spending a few years teaching English in Germany, I felt it was time for me to return back to the states and start my career. With a dual bachelors in Political Science & Economics, it was only natural that I went to Capitol Hill in Washington DC. I spent a few months at a Congressman's office and the Ways and Means Committee, but I ultimately left as it became apparent it was not the career path I thought it would be. The experience left a profound impact on how I viewed government and politics. I got to see how the sausage was made and left a more informed citizen, but the increasing partisanship at all costs left me disillusioned. One good thing came from my time on the Hill though. I got to interact with a lot of different business groups and the entrepreneurial bug bit me.

Being a young millennial and naive novice entrepreneur, I sought to build a business to solve a critical problem that impacted myself and other young DC millennials. Naturally, that was helping folks find the cheapest happy hours around town since we all had no money.

But while scoping out how to build out an app that would aggregate happy hour info, I came to realize that there was an immense business opportunity here. Massive alcohol distributors like Anheuser-Busch wanted an effective way to influence consumers to purchase their specific brands. They were already spending billions of dollars a year on advertising, but on ineffective avenues like billboards and TV. Google and Facebook banned advertising alcohol outright. There was no path for hyper personalized alcohol advertising.

I realized that by building a platform that attracted an audience that was looking to purchase alcohol immediately, this would be extremely attractive to alcohol distributors. AppyHour was born.

I had never built a software product before, much less started an engineering team from scratch. Joining the various DC startup meetups and conferences, I came across eager engineers who wanted to tackle an interesting and unique challenge. With a small seed round raised, I was able to hire just one team member. But that team member was critical. She taught me how engineers approached technical challenges and their motivations. This perspective gave me a shared language to explain the interesting technical challenges AppyHour had to overcome.

Challenges such as:

Determining what architecture to implement
How to collect restaurant data on different format like PDFs, images, and dynamic web pages
How to aggregate and normalize unstandardized data
How to build and define the correct database structure
How to dynamically display information on a map

I was able to convince a rag-tag group of engineers to join. Not with equity, but because building AppyHour would help them solve interesting challenges and grow their technical skills.

The AppyHour Team

Live testing AppyHour at an event

As the business grew, I found myself with the team in the trenches more and more. My time was being spent more on setting up software development processes and bringing clarity to the team on the needs of the business. I remember sitting with a team member one night talking about what titles we should use when we go to meetup groups. I said "I don't feel comfortable calling myself the CEO of AppyHour. It doesn't feel right. I'm leading the team to make an awesome product, not managing a massive organization". She told me "You sound like a Product Manager", and the title has stuck since.

After months of growing pains, I was able to establish a solid process for managing software development and launches. It was a blast going out to local bars and live testing the app with users to get their thoughts. It also helped that buying drinks counted as a business expense.

A year later, we were able to fully launch AppyHour to much fanfare. We were seeing user numbers grow and we thought about expanding nationwide. But the times were changing. I always kept a pulse on how the team was feeling, and it was clear that building AppyHour was immensely rewarding for the team. My engineers were able to tackle technical challenges they weren't able to at their normal jobs. But after a year of grinding away and constantly thinking about alcohol and happy hours, it felt like it was time to move on. We all got what we wanted out of this experience.

The team has since disbanded and AppyHour now remains in a demo state. Over the years, I have seen team members go on to get a PhD in Computer Science. Others went on to start up their own companies. And others move on to rewarding careers.

As for myself, as I wound down AppyHour, a recruiter at Fannie Mae reached out to see if I was interested in joining their product department to support their affordable housing initiatives. I took the mistakes and lessons I learned from as a Product Manager at AppyHour and went on to Fannie Mae to create MH Advantage. You can read more about my time at Fannie Mae here.

I look back at my time running AppyHour with great fondness. It showed me that I had a passion for Product Management, and leading teams to create awesome products. But the most rewarding aspect was getting to work with some of the smartest people I knew and seeing that the experience they gained at AppyHour push them forward in their careers.

Let's get in touch!

justintsn10@gmail.com

Justin Hinh | Product Manager‍