The problem
The opportunity is stemmed from a problem that a fellow student and colleague was experiencing while operating his taproom. His taproom's goal was to carry independently-owned breweries, but the issue was that there were no channels to place orders outside of email and text. This was overwhelming for him because as you can imagine he was getting emailed and texted constantly from well over a 150 different breweries and counting.
I set out to validate this problem with other taprooms and breweries. The consensus was that the overload of emails and texts caused beer-buyers to ignore them. This makes it very difficult for breweries to build new relationships without having someone out in the field everyday of the week. For most breweries, they do not have the bandwidth to have someone in the field everyday. This lead me to the solution of providing an online ordering system to provide beer-buyers with the ease and accessibility of online shopping.
The pivot
The pandemic put my original business model to a complete halt. The breweries along with restaurants were forced to-go beverages only. Most of the breweries were not canning at the time, and only had crowlers which are 32oz cans filled directly from the tap, which made to-go sales that much more difficult. I pivoted the platform from wholesale to direct to consumer and launched to the public on April 06 2020.
The work
With so much uncertainty in the market, I did not want the added risk of hiring. This meant that I acted as every role for the business. I went out to land new brewery accounts, fostered existing account relationships, merchandised content on site, provided customer support, implemented bug fixes, improved UI/UX flow based on feedback from customers, ran social media campaigns, and I was even the one actually picking up and delivering product.
