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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, it was time for me to return 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 interacted with many business groups, and the entrepreneurial bug bit me.

As a young millennial and naive entrepreneur, I sought to build a business to solve a critical problem impacting 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 an app that would aggregate happy hour info, I realized 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, so there was no path for hyper-personalized alcohol advertising.

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

This was the first time I had built a software product, much less started an engineering team from scratch. Attending various DC startup meetups and conferences, I encountered 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 in different formats 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 convinced a rag-tag group of engineers to join, not with equity but because building AppyHour would help them solve exciting 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 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, discussing what titles we should use when going 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 said, "You sound like a Product Manager," the title has stuck since.

After months of growing pains, I established a solid process for managing software development and launches. It was a blast going 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 launch AppyHour to much fanfare fully. We were seeing user numbers grow, so 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 could tackle technical challenges they couldn't at their regular 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, start up their own companies, and 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 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 on my time running AppyHour with great fondness. It showed me that I was passionate about Product Management and leading teams to create incredible products. But the most rewarding aspect was working with some of the most brilliant people I knew and seeing how the experience they gained at AppyHour pushed them forward in their careers.

Let's get in touch!

justinphinh@gmail.com