Hacker News Reader

Comment by dholowiski | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for being awesome Mike.

You could really help me by having a look at http://localbeer.me and making suggestions on how I can bring targeted (craft beer drinkers) traffic to the site. It's sitting at 4-10 visits per day right now. I'm not sure if I've got the design wrong, or if it's just a boring site in general. Is there a killer feature I could add? (I thought auto-locating breweries near you was a killer feature). There is a chicken and egg issue here as well, because the site will get way better if people review beers, but with such low traffic, nobody is reviewing beer. Maybe some suggestions on how to tackle this chicken and egg issue?

View on HN

As a general beer lover, I can give you some issues. I've visited your site before, but forgotten about it. The main issue is this is solving a problem I don't have: I already know where all my local breweries are (and you're missing some in DFW, most notably Deep Ellum and Peticolas). But that's not the point--you aren't telling me anything particularly of note about these breweries. I've been to them, I know what their tap list looks like, and I follow them to get updates.

What is more important to me is building a system to find where I can find my local beer. Who's got the Rahr seasonal? Who's got Peticolas Velvet Hammer on tap? People (including me) have tried to tackle it. The problem is that distributors control that data, and they're not keen on giving it up.

Anyway, I'm sorry to give harsh feedback, but I don't see me regularly visiting this site. It doesn't make my life better at all--it's just a neat way to look at stuff I already know. I think the site looks great, just solves a problem I don't have.

I couldn't have said it better myself. I'm not interested as where the beer came from (although, that's definitely interesting information i'd want to find when I'm already enjoying it) as I am where I can find good beer to drink! The best kind of app for that might be a mobile app where I can log the beer I had and where I'm drinking it so I can try it again later (or recommend it to someone else through your app).

Once you have people posting what beer they had where, then you don't need the distributor's information anymore. Then you just need to go to bars with great beer selections and get the locals into your app.

Of course, before you go down this route, you might want to pop into a few bars and ask the patrons if they would even use such an app.

This is a pretty cool site. Unfortunately for me the DC/MD/NOVA area has almost no breweries at all. Pennsylvania appears to have a ton though.

Two suggestions: (1) Pictures of the bottles/cans, (2)Information on where a certain beer is available.

Despite the fact of no breweries around me, I would still love to try some of these PA brews. I'm sure many are sold in Maryland. Is it possible to get that info?

To answer the 'no beer near me' question - it's pure manual data entry on my part, and it's about 1/10 done...

Maybe this is just me, but the font is incredibly hard to read (I'm on Chrome).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com