Frankly after 6 months we began to realize that it would be nearly impossible to earn any meaningful revenue from users or from the bars themselves.

Only two of our bars in Denver actually paid for the product ($1,500 for license + hardware upfront, plus $99/month), which wasn't enough to justify the $3.5 million valuation we raised on. What got our investors excited is tapping into the $3 billion of advertising dollars spent by the liquor companies every year. In 2012 less than 3% of this was actually dedicated to mobile, these were the deals we wanted to go after. So it became more about user growth and number of orders than revenue.

I still think there is an opportunity there -- giving liquor companies a better way of marketing their products on-premise through mobile. But I doubt it will be a mobile ordering app that cracks the nut.

Kyle H.