Show HN: VA kids love drinking, hate paying. Step 1. Thoughts? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: VA kids love drinking, hate paying. Step 1. Thoughts?

thecityswig.com

60 pointstomasien99 comments

"The first girl hired by the founders, she's responsible for renaming the vision once known as "cheapdrinks.com" to the much swankier The City Swig."

I'm going to have to say that I think "cheapdrinks.com" is a better name for this service.

but have you seen the current landing page of http://cheapdrinks.com? we can't compete!

This may be a case where paying a buttload of money for a domain name will get you a buttload of velocity. Who needs an easy to remember domain name more than drunk people?

I've always like the name of this Australian service: http://www.thehappiesthour.com/

That was my reasoning when I purchased http://www.moredrunk.com - that and it was ridiculously cheap.

We're not about cheap drinks, that's just step one. We're going to be about recommendations for drinks, social night planning, and flash deals for bars. The change from "cheapdrinks" to "The City Swig" reflects the change in vision from a cheap drinks site to this broader experience we're trying to bring to our users.

I can totally see your point though!

I see the city's wig when I read this. Swig, while being a great word, is not something I think of immediately. Kind of like Pen Island.

I like it! Somebody said once the ultimate app would help people get laid. I'd imagine helping college kids find beer would be a close second. If you could only combine the two.....

My only question is this: how are you going to get traction? So I use this to plan a pub crawl with my friends. Why would I tell anyone else about it? Why would I ever come back?

Cute ideas are easy. Traction not so much.

I live between UVA and VPI. Great to see some local startup ideas appearing on HN.

ADD: Sort of a random idea, but I wonder if you couldn't do a reverse auction for drinks. Kind of like groupon for drinkers. Something like "If 50 people promise to show up and each order $20 worth of beer, what price would you sell it for?" Not only would this mean more beer cheaper for the kids, it would also mean that wherever they went would be a pretty rocking place with a good number of people there.

Daniel,

You are actually spot on with a lot of problems we are encountering (and solving!) right now. we hope apps & push notifications will help spread the idea.

the auction deal is interesting too... but we hate the Groupon model. maybe giving the local businesses more control is a step in the right direction?

Perhaps so. The point here is that there is a tie-in between wanting cheap drinks and being part of a crowd. The bigger the crowd, the more bargaining power you have. Also it helps folks get out and meet each other. So instead of just beer, they're guaranteed to go to a place that has a lot of activity.

Lots of ways to do this, I think.

Thinking some more about traction, I would try playing the social angle if at all possible. And I don't mean Facebook, I mean the idea that college kids want to be part of a group full of other college kids. They're very social. If you had some way of telling who was going where (or who was already drinking where) you could ping people who've used the system in the past with current opportunities. Stuff like "Hey, it's $2 beer night at Joe's and 42 people are there right now. Interested?"

Like everything else in the startup universe, this is going to be a process of hypothesis and experimentation. I've personally found that getting people to toss out ideas that sound cool is very easy -- and useless. It's really a matter of having the market validate ideas, not HNers. Here's hoping you don't have to iterate a large number of times.

For your use case, people use Facebook and word of mouth. College towns are social enough and close in proximity enough they don't need these sorts of apps. VT is my alma mater and I guarantee you I would have not used an app to tell me where to drink.

Once you have enough friends Thursday through Sunday morning just tend to happen. Social apps is definitely the wrong way to think about it.

We're not about trying to replace the experience of word-of-mouth drink specials. We just want to make that happen even easier. In larger cities it is difficult to keep track of drink specials for all of the bars (especially when they change so often), and many times I find specials on the site that I didn't know existed or have changed from what I thought they were. When you go out with friends, you usually go with a small group because it is hard to plan otherwise, why not make it easier? Also, your use case doesn't apply to grocery store or liquor specials...that I know of.

Maybe so. I guess I don't drink enough to adopt software that saves me a couple bucks on a drink. When I buy alcohol in a store I go for convenience unless I'm buying single malt scotch. And if I'm going out with friends I choose atmosphere and selection over price. Just my input. Good luck.

Exactly. These college towns are often so small that a whole app for people to save a few bucks would most likely not be incredibly popular. Then again, I'm not much of a drinker so my point of view might be a little bit skewed on this one and the target audience might provide a genius business model. I guess we'll see.

+1 for same alma matter :)

We 100% agree, we're going to make this about the crowd, that's Step 2!

> Somebody said once the ultimate app would help people get laid.

I've first heard that from an old jwz rant.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Relevant passage:

But with a groupware product, nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it's just fundamentally not interesting to individuals.

So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

"Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

The great thing about drinking is that it's an inherently social experience. Where are my friends going? What great deals or events can I find -- and show off to everyone I know?

Then there's the power of the crowd. One extra customer is great for a bar, sure. But 20 people coming in as a group? That's worth offering a steep discount to. Social deals meet the super variable, high-margin world of nightlife.

Two things (I'm using the mobile version): I wasn't actually sure what the site did until I finally got through all the pages. I understood that it was supposed to help find cheap beer, but nothing about how. I initially thought it was some sort of loyalty program. Two, it took way too long to get to the end with each question being a full (slow) page load, plus there was no indication of how many steps there still were.

The mobile version of the site is pretty tough to use. It's only temporary while Apps are in development(Hopefully ready by the end of summer).

So I had a similar idea about six months ago. Briefly start working on the app when I was informed by a lawyer friend of mine that most states had laws against advertising drink specials.

Interested if you have looked in to this at all, especially because googling "laws against advertising drink specials" brings up this http://www.wtop.com/41/2821800/Vas-happy-hour-law-makes-some... as the first result.

On a broader scale I guess this brings up two points: 1) have the owners of this site considered this issue yet? 2) Is it sometimes better to just build it and worry about the legal ramifications later (to a point)?

I'm a just a dev on the site, but here's my point of view. The news has overblown the actual laws concerning the marketing of drink specials. We have actually been in touch with the Virginia ABC since the start to make sure nobody gets in trouble as a result of this site. The laws are in place because Virginia is afraid of underage drinking, and they believe that drink specials encourage underage kids to drink (of course, they wouldn't be able to get into the bars, but that doesn't seem to concern the legislature). As long as the drink specials are advertised in a responsible manner, the state doesn't seem to have a problem with it. Luckily, being developed in VA means that if it works with the laws here, it will likely work with the laws pretty much everywhere else.

Maybe this is hopelessly naïve, but I almost feel like having to navigate through sticky legal restrictions offers some advantages to a startup. For one, it's a barrier to entry for competitors. But even more, it forces you to be creative with monetization, and lets you tackle some interesting problems others may have decided to skip.

That's one way to look at it - like many of the risk factors we struggle against (market, product, incumbent), if it can be overcome it can be a definite barrier to competition.

On the flip side, it's still a risk.

We've considered this issue and done a lot of research on it, there's really only 12 states to worry about, and even those the problems can be overcome. It's never a good idea to see barriers and say "nope, too hard". Figure out a solution, there is one, it's the Hacker Way.

Two suggestions:

1) use geo location services to automatically pick which location to show (thus eliminating a click in the beginning)

2) put a big "call a cab" button up. You suggest people "swig responsibly"... help them do so!

You, sir, are clearly clairvoyant. Both in the works!

The tabbed interface feels like tabs for the sake of tabs.

I want the cheapest way to get a bunch of folks drunk, with a couple of options.

"Cheap" liquor sorting doesn't seem great... I get 50ml vials at the top because they're cheap. Sure, I could filter by size, but what if I'm stocking up?

If you sorted by ABV / dollars, with an option to filter by Liquor, Beer, Wine Cooler, and Wine, you would not need any separate tabs and can add an additional two categories.

If you're married to the tabs, just put all the extra crufty UI on a separate tab labeled "hipsters".

god, we already know enough about hipsters living in Richmond.

in all seriousness, thanks for the input! we will be the first to admit that what you see now is not what we want the final product to be.

alcohol/$ is generally what we sort by. not sure how you are seeing the 50 mL airplane bottles, I'm not getting any when I play with the sort options. what were you looking at specifically?

I see now. Sorting by "Cheap" gives me airplane bottles.

Additionally, the subtle difference between "Cheap" and "Best Value" doesn't quite justify making a new sort option -- to me, they're essentially the same, since whoever can afford a $1 shot can also probably afford a $2 fatty mug.

"Cheap" and "best value" is a subtle difference right now. But we're moving toward keeping track of the average market prices of items... and then "best value" becomes those offerings that are most reduced from the average.

Maybe call it "best discount" ?

Good suggestion - we'll A/B test that shit. Thanks!

As dweis mentioned here, I am working on something like this for the NYC area: http://www.moredrunk.com - it is still in early development but I will definitely post an update to HN when it's more stable and polished.

Edit: However, I am not keeping track of happy hour deals since that requires a new data source that I haven't figured out yet. Ideally, I'd have establishments give me the data but the site doesn't have the ability or userbase for yet.

I like the implementation of The City Swig, and I'll be sure to keep it in mind when working on my own, (NYC-based) project. Keep up the good work!

Are you asking for feedback?

Right away my big question is: What am I doing here? What is my question/problem and what is your answer? I understand neither from the questions leading into the page with information. I understand the information, but not the specific problem you are answering for me.

If this is the why (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/116422/Screenshots/25.png) it needs to be MUCH larger and explained. Don't make me think, especially if I am looking for booze.

It seems like you guys have great info though, interested to see where this goes.

Thanks for the feedback! This is the essentially our first draft of the site which has been out since last September. Working on rolling out new stuff(including an app) by the fall! The more feedback the better.

I was one of the first college kids outside harvard to get my eyes on facebook almost 8 years ago. This reminds me a lot of that.

When FB first came about everyone was chasing girls using AIM. People started posting links to their FB page on their AIM profile and all of the sudden we had a new way to chase girls.

The other college ingredient besides chasing girls, is going to drink.

A tool to sort by price/specials, plus the college level distribution of it, is spot on. I'd keep going with this idea.

At Virginia tech there are only a handful of bars, and generally by the second semester of your senior year you know where you are going on which days. Getting people back to this is,vouch less to the site to begin with, is going to be hard.

Most students don't go to a bar for cheap drinks. They go there because their friend or the cute girl they like asked them to go or will be there. For that, only one person makes the decision where to go and when it comes to web volume that does not play out very well.

People love us at VT, we've seen lots of growth there. Turns out usually 1 person knows all the specials, and everyone has to look to that person. No longer.

You say that like having a friend who knows what's up is a bad thing. Tose guys are usually pretty fun to be around so it's not like it's a chore. I'm usually one to hit up my friends instead of replacing them with software.

Maybe I'm not the target market, or I have a full paycheck now and understand if I'm going out to drink I'm gunna get screwed either way.

With my time at VT, the only thing I ever needed to know was the $4 pitchers of yueingling at sharkeys. Done and done.

Whoa thanks man! It's def going to have to be a social app going forward, we 100% agree. Cheap drinks is just a starting point.

It's pretty strange to have your base liquors mixed in with mixers. If I'm looking for a good cheap gin, it's not really relevant to know that I can get a REALLY BIG bottle of triple sec for REALLY CHEAP. I already knew that.

I usually use http://gin.findthebest.com/ to figure out what good options are. If there was local store data in one of their charts, I'd use it all the time.

Hmm, did you try selecting "gin" from the drop down menu at the top of the Stocking Up box? We default to showing everything liquor stores offer, but you should be able to narrow down to just the base liquor you want.

Ah! So you do. I feel silly now; I didn't see that.

I just posted this and went to play basketball, andddd look what happened. This is neat!

Thanks for all the comments HN, our CTO has been on the case, but I'll get to some now. I've been waiting to post this here until our UI underwent some huge improvements, but I decided we could no longer wait, had to see what HN had to say!

I think this how Yipit started. They initially were looking to do bar deals in nyc. http://viniciusvacanti.com/2012/03/26/how-getting-rejected-b...

I love the idea. The idea that college kids don't follow price as a drinking pattern is way off -- notice that bars coordinate happy hours as to note compete with each other.

As long as City Swig doesn't limit themselves to just alcohol and price, their business has endless potential. Good luck.

thanks man! We need some investors to agree, but we'll work and do our best!

I like it a lot. I'd love to see an option to filter out cheap stuff for going out. The site is currently aimed at college kids so it's fine, but if you ever expand to hit the mid 20s with a job crowd you'll need that filter. You couldn't pay me to drink Natty ever again. :)

We're working toward defaulting to a "recommended" view, where we use info on what you've liked before to make recommendations. Chances are, if you're mostly interested in craft beers and red wine, we won't be stressing Natty prices for you.

Er... so you can select "I am under [the legal drinking age]", and then you show me places to drink?

Doesn't for me. It also doesn't prevent you from ahem changing your mind if you say no, though...

You could always get in to bed with pubs and bars and offer a "order a tab" form on your site. Or hell, make the tab city wide. User puts a 50$ tab on, your system integrates with the pubs/clubs who buy drinks against the tab and you take a small percent.

i think it is a cool idea. i had a similar idea a few years ago, where you could take bar data like beer and food prices, and make an app collect a bunch of data, and then make a recommendation engine using the data. I started to build it and found out quickly that getting that data was a lot harder than i thought (most of the bar menus were pdfs of images, and could not be mined of text). Since then, foursquare has come out with the explore feature, which is very similar, but as far as i can tell, they are no using bar items (food,beer,price) as features for their recommendation engine. Your idea is cool, but I bet it will be a pain in the ass to scale.

Getting the info is incredibly easy if you're on the ground, and we plan to use people on the ground as sales people as well as information aggregators. It's not as hard as it seems, maybe 10 hrs a week of work for someone who can be there, and the bar specials can be crowd sourced. We haven't even done a good job letting our users talk to us, and when specials are wrong someone almost always lets us know.

This is a really awesome idea. I'd love to see this spread out of Virginia, too.

Me too! Can I make a request for Portland next? :)

It seems like the easiest way to keep prices updated would be to have an iPhone and Android app (or maybe just a good mobile site) where users or store owners looking to drum up business could add prices for new specials, flag expired specials, etc. Similar to the way Google Maps stays up to date.

Also, does anyone have any insight into just why beer prices are so incredibly variable? It's not uncommon for prices to vary by 50% between nearby stores or even at the same store, depending on the day.

send us an email at hello@thecityswig.com! we always love to hear from yall.

the problem with virginia is the ABC regulations. we are looking to expand outside of the state soon - maybe DC, charleston SC?

Native apps with location-aware deals are on the way (we hope to even collect data on what you like to drink via webcams mounted directly in your fridge or facial recognition at bars themselves. are we kidding?!?!)

I for one, am all for expanding to the West Coast. I'm sick of these humid Virginia summers anyway

I agree. Sitting in a 90-degree apartment without power while working on our mobile platform is not the most code-friendly environment. On a different note, establishments will soon (possibly this week) be able to edit their establishment listing from mobile. We're also trying to get user feedback on specials so we'll know which prices are out of date in case the bars forget to update them.

Very cool! Can't wait.

And it's 60 degrees, blue skies, and sunny in Portland at the moment. Just saying ;)

This reminds me of a vertical-focused Yelp, with good semantic markup for prices of individual items. Super cool, nice work guys. Will definitely keep an eye on you going forward.

Having seen the sturm und drang over the president and the board recently, it's nice to see a site focused on the less important but far more fun parts of being a Wahoo.

Thanks! Go Hoos Go!

The right arrow on the 'going out' or 'stocking up' page first adds more rows, then if you press it again it shows all new rows. Consistency would make it better.

Might as well have a box with all the local AA meetings.

Coming from mobile (iOS) my first impression is:

????

6+ taps and I still had no idea what I was supposed to be doing nor what I was trying to get. Maybe I'm just gettin old...

we're right there with you. the browser "optimized" site we have right now is 180 degrees from what we want to be.

look for native apps w/ actual functionality soon!

Made this for Gainesville, FL back in 2008 http://www.nightgator.com/

Problem here is I have to go to the site every time I want to check for drink specials.

Why not some sort of push interface?

I've had this idea in the past, where people sign up to your SMS "newsletter" that lets them know about the best drink specials that night. Sort of a text-based Groupon for fratboys.

Bars and promoters could then pay you for access to your list, provided they had a good deal at the time.

I'm sure SendHub would love to help... in fact, I think I've told Ash about this idea a few years back :)

We're working on building an app that will be able to send push notifications with personalized suggestions based on how you've used the app before. As in, if you typically look for draft beer it will send you the best draft beer special on that night.

Steve you jus NAILED it. Nailed it. Please, tell SendHub, we need connections and help, we need them badly and SendHub is dope as all get out!

As an NYC resident: great idea! Now, please don't list anything in my neighborhood!

We have enough 'woo'ing college kids as it is. :)

We're never coming to NYC, don't worry! We're college towns and mid-sized cities all day.

Does Baltimore count? C'monnnnn.

Berkeley would like to have a word with you... come here!

This already existed for NYC: http://moredrunk.com

wow - that design needs some work

Hey, thanks for the feedback. I run that website. It's still in early development and there are still some technical challenges. I will definitely post to HN when it's more production ready.

Would you mind saying how you get the price lists for your stocking up section?

Is there a public data source?

From the dev team here: all the establishments have a back-end editing page that they can access after we verify that they are the owners of that establishment. They can then update their establishment's specials. Some bars have jumped on this opportunity for free promotion, but we would love to see wider adoption! Until then, many of our grocery prices and unclaimed bars must be updated manually. Luckily, prices are usually changed on a regular schedule. Liquor prices in VA are publicly available, so that is easy.

How are you guys obtaining the data for the specials and alcohol costs?

We have a back-end where bars are able to claim (and verify) that they own/manage/work at the establishment. then they can update their own prices. we are working with grocery and convenience stores to get a spreadsheet of prices that we can parse.

frankly, I never thought bars would keep their third-party profile pages updated, but we've been pleasantly shocked that they do!

How are you selling/convincing them on updating their prices?

free advertising! We have a lot of people who look at the site, and it is incredibly difficult to find drink deals online in one place (at least in Virginia), so people go to the places that are listed on our website that have the best deals. If you're not on the website, our users might overlook your bar. Seems like a good enough incentive to me. We will also market the ability to directly contact the bar's core crowd via push notifications and SMS when that is ready by the end of the summer.

Apparently Virginia's single largest school has no drinkers.

Hampton Roads, please!

Kind of like Gas Buddy for beer? Not a bad idea...

Kind of yeah! We get that a lot, I like it.

Richmond VA guy here, thanks for the site!

cheers! drop us a line at hello@thecityswig.com if you've got any suggestions for us and maybe we'll run in to you in the fan doing some... "market research"

'Error: You need to have cookies enabled. Learn more.'

I have cookies enabled. Pretty much out-of-the-box Chrome here. Even in incognito (which still allows session cookies, yes). Works fine in Firefox.

Very nice once I get in though!

It's logical, if you're looking for drinks you'll probably want to have cookies.

I think what the OP was saying was they DO have cookies enabled, and still saw an error.

not sure about the cookie issue. we'll look in to it. if you figure anything out feel free to drop us a line at hello@thecityswig.com

thanks for the feedback, much appreciated!

And the help/"Learn More" link is broken.

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