kaleazy

Kleiner Perkins buying .2% of Snapchat at a valuation higher than SpaceX, what's the point?

These guys have a smart team, don't bet against them.

Thank you... I think it's valuable that entrepreneurs learn everything they can from the fallen soldiers before them before dedicating valuable years of their life to a startup. That's why open sourcing this was so important to us.

I like to think of startup guys as scientists... even if we didn't find the cure for cancer, there's still value in discovering the 100 antidotes that DIDN'T work.

FYI the alpha site is the same as our main site, www.flowtab.com.

Kyle H.

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.

I'm also one of the founders of Flowtab. When we started the company we made a lot of assumptions about the demand for our product and the ease in which we were going to change bar culture. The demand for the product was there (people used it, they often had a good experience) but it wasn't memorable or valuable enough to make them use it EVERY TIME. That was the hardest thing to do.

Sure we were saving people time, and making the drink ordering experience more efficient (no cash, cards, open tabs and an easily-accessable drink menu), but what we learned is that people in bars are there primarily so socialize, and they don't always need maximum efficiency like you do when you need a ride home (enter Lyft, Uber) or want lunch delivered (Seamless, GrubHub). People in bars like the social friction, and we were offering them a solution that took the social aspect out of the drink ordering process. Hindsight 20/20.

Hopefully other entrepreneurs read our story before dedicating valuable years of their life to a similar product in the space.

Kyle H.