
Show HN: VA kids love drinking, hate paying. Step 1. Thoughts? - tomasien
http://thecityswig.com
======
henryboston
"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.

~~~
tomasien
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!

~~~
abduhl
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.

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
alxv
> 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>

~~~
rudiger
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._

------
tylermenezes
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.

~~~
mateosu05
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).

------
DanielN
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...](http://www.wtop.com/41/2821800/Vas-happy-hour-law-makes-some-unhappy)
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)?

~~~
nikphilipsen
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.

~~~
adrianpike
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.

------
nickburlett
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!

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

------
fsckin
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".

~~~
ksol
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?

~~~
fsckin
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.

~~~
nikphilipsen
"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.

~~~
nickburlett
Maybe call it "best discount" ?

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

------
goldins
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!

------
jordo37
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.

~~~
mateosu05
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.

------
porterhaney
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.

~~~
alttab
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.

~~~
tomasien
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.

~~~
alttab
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.

------
Dove
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.

~~~
nikphilipsen
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.

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

------
tomasien
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!

------
nabraham
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...](http://viniciusvacanti.com/2012/03/26/how-getting-rejected-by-
founder-collective-helped-save-our-startup/)

------
skian
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.

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

------
forrestthewoods
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. :)

~~~
nikphilipsen
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.

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

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

------
mparlane
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.

------
misiti3780
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.

~~~
tomasien
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.

------
groovy2shoes
This is a really awesome idea. I'd love to see this spread out of Virginia,
too.

~~~
eupharis
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.

~~~
ksol
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?!?!)

~~~
mateosu05
I for one, am all for expanding to the West Coast. I'm sick of these humid
Virginia summers anyway

~~~
character
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.

~~~
eupharis
Very cool! Can't wait.

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

------
trg2
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.

------
mwexler
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.

~~~
tomasien
Thanks! Go Hoos Go!

------
mercuryrising
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.

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

------
obituary_latte
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...

~~~
ksol
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!

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

------
steveplace
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 :)

~~~
mateosu05
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.

------
flatline3
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. :)

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

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

------
dweis
This already existed for NYC: <http://moredrunk.com>

~~~
misiti3780
wow - that design needs some work

~~~
goldins
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.

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

Is there a public data source?

~~~
character
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.

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

~~~
ksol
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!

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

~~~
character
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.

------
SeanLuke
Apparently Virginia's single largest school has no drinkers.

------
bdunn
Hampton Roads, please!

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

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

------
rumdz
Richmond VA guy here, thanks for the site!

~~~
ksol
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"

------
drivebyacct2
'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!

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

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

