Dave Cunningham, founder and CEO of Flint Hills Group and Groover Labs early adopter, has spent the past several months with his team building a new mobile app for whiskey lovers. Dave, a whiskey enthusiast himself, drew inspiration for the app while leading Campfire, a 12-week startup course taught at Groover Labs.
Campfire combines seasoned, local technology experts with Stanford University’s and Y Combinator’s Startup class. Each week, Campfire attendees watch coursework videos and then participate in a discussion led by a different local, in-person mentor who has deep experience with that week’s topic.
Flint Hills Group recently collaborated on a blog post that recounts how they decided to build the app, what features to include, and submit it to the Apple and Android store. We’ve reproduced that post here, along with a few shameless questions about what it’s like officing at Groover Labs.
Congrats, Dave and team, on a beautiful, new, and first-of-its-kind app that will connect whiskey lovers all over the world!
What inspired you to create the Whiskey Shelf app? Was there a specific problem you were trying to solve?
Flint Hills Group has been building customer software for over 50 companies and decided to expand our offerings by building our own custom software solution.
The Contest
A contest was held to study different software solutions to build, with 19 different ideas submitted. A rating system based on the Stanford University/YCombinator Startup Class was used to score each idea. The winning idea was the Whiskey Shelf app for whiskey-loving consumers.
Unique
No app exists that tracks a consumer’s whiskey database, how to track down hard-to-find whiskeys, and tracking an infinity bottle all in one app. There are wine collector apps that are close but no whiskey apps that can do all this.
Tell us more about the Stanford University/Y Combinator Startup Class.
Some motivation for the Whiskey Shelf App and how it was built came from the 12-week Campfire tech course taught at Groover Labs. Campfire teaches how to come up with good ideas that scale and build a minimal viable product quickly.
Campfire
The course is entering year three and starts on Thursday, March 2nd at 5pm. The class is built from the Stanford University / YCombinator Startup Course taught every year, which has produced companies like Stripe, Instacart, Reddit and Zapier. A very small number of class openings remain. You can learn more about Campfire and signup at https://www.grooverlabs.org/campfire.
Dave is a Whiskey collector who also leveraged his network of whiskey friends to vet feature ideas for the app. He also studied other alcohol apps, such as Cellar Tracker which is a wine inventory tracking system as inspiration for his whiskey solution.
Can you walk us through the development process of Whiskey Shelf? What were some of the biggest challenges you faced?
Just picking a product name is a challenge. You must find a catchy name that has a website domain available and is not trademarked. Once Whiskey Shelf was selected from 6 different names, a list of features was assembled which would be seen as valuable. Not all the features made the cut for the first release, which is a minimal viable product (MVP) where potential users we spoke with said they would be excited to use an app with those features and pay for some of the features.
Populating the Database
A huge hurdle we had to overcome was a database of whiskeys to standardize user data from. Dozens of websites and apps existed with similar data but none of that data was easily accessible. Flint Hills Group (FHG) believes in US-based teams instead of seeking labor overseas. A team of 4 people worked for months to manually assemble a starting whiskey database of over 1,200 whiskeys.
Crowdsourcing Whiskeys
Since then, a crowd-sourcing feature on the app used by beta testers along with the FHG has added 600 more whiskeys. The database grows by roughly 100 whiskeys each week.
Design
Building the UI/UX mockups, creating the mobile apps, and building a cloud-hosted dashboard and database was a team effort taking between 4 and 5 months. FHG believes in small expert US teams to build an MVP software system quickly.
App Stores
The last hurdle has been getting the apps approved by Google and Apple. We are very close to success on that with Apple being our last challenge.
How did you decide which features to include in the app? Were there any features that you considered adding but ultimately decided against?
We could have built in features for 1-2 years that people would have loved, but this would not have supported our MVP goals for software solutions.
Minimal Viable Product
With an MVP, you build the essential features as fast as possible to release and add on the features your customers demand the most as they use the app. We used a beta user group of 20 whiskey experts to decide on these MVP features and identify what features would be most important to build after we released the MVP.
What kind of research did you do before developing the app? Did you consult with any experts in the field of whiskey tasting or distillation?
I am actually a fairly passionate whiskey enthusiast with close to 100 bottles in my own collection. Over time, I have met dozens of whiskey collectors who have collections far larger than my own. I gathered the opinions of these whiskey collectors with regard to the app idea. I found there was a consistent excitement about the app and a feeling that nothing like it existed. There are also Reddit and Facebook groups that talk about what people would like and what they are using now - mostly spreadsheets.
How do you envision users engaging with the app? Is it primarily for personal use, or do you see it being used by professionals in the industry as well?
We are asked by liquor stores if this could be used to manage their inventory. Whiskey Shelf was built for the consumer market and would not be appropriate for business use.
How do you plan to update and improve the app in the future? Are there any new features or functionality that you're currently working on?
We have a list of five features we plan on implementing next as part of a premium user subscription. These features are:
A valuation of your collection and each bottle.
The ability to communicate with other users who have hard-to-find whiskey you are seeking.
Detailed reporting capabilities.
Having more than one infinity bottle.
The ability to capture a blend recipe that you love from your infinity bottle as a report to recreate in the future.
What feedback have you received from users so far? Have there been any surprises or unexpected reactions to the app?
Users always try unique things you would never anticipate. We have found a number of usability problems and software bugs by our 20+ beta users, which we have addressed in follow-on releases. The broad release of the app will benefit from a smoother user experience. We have at least 10 other features, such as pictures of the whiskey bottles that users would like. Over time, we will continue to improve the app based on user feedback.
What has been the most rewarding part of developing Whiskey Shelf? Is there a particular moment or achievement that stands out?
The speed over which we built this system consisting of an iOS and Android app, a cloud-based dashboard, the 1,800+ whiskey database, and the www.whiskeyshelf.app marketing web page in 4-5 months was astounding. It was a true team effort.
You have an office at Groover Labs. Tell us about your experience working in a collaborative work environment.
I have officed at Groover Labs since it opened before the pandemic. There is no other space like Groover Labs in a multi-state area. The space is not just co-working; it is a tech ecosystem fostering tech companies and growth for the region. People get to know other tech experts at Groover Labs they would never have met anywhere else. Groover Labs is a non-profit with the goal of helping to scale the tech industry in the region. A rising tide lifts all boats, and Groover Labs is that rising tide for tech.