Startup #7: Find zero-alcohol events and venues
There's no shortage of ways to find alcoholic social spaces, but where are the sober-friendly spaces? 🤷♂️
Non-alcoholic drinks are the fastest growing segment in the beverage industry... but where to find them? 🔍
There's an ever growing number of zero-alcohol bars, spaces and events appearing in major cities, part of the bigger trend of people going sober for wellness or alcohol-free socialising... BUT there's still no single place to find these. Instead, information is buried inside blogs and on specific event websites (e.g. Daybreaker – a morning rave without alcohol). This means that the user needs to know where to look for the information, and requires a lot of work on their part.
Vegetarians have options like Abillionveg, nomads can find the best city to live in with NomadList and there's no shortage of ways to find traditional alcoholic bars (e.g. TimeOut, Google Maps). But what's the equivalent tool for non-drinkers looking for an equivalent social vibe/context to a normal bar?
Even though it's slowly improving, many bars don't serve compelling alternatives to alcohol, with only generic soft drinks available. There's a need for a tool that allows non-drinkers to know what places do have a good offering, or are even dedicated zero-alcohol spots.
Potential Solution
A crowdsourced map of the best places and events for non-drinkers in your city.
Building on a previous launch (Zero Percent Club), which started forming a community of non-drinkers, this will aim to show where the best non-drinking venues and events are near you.
Mutually beneficial – makes sense to create a single hub for the no/low alcohol community to fulfil all their needs. With this startup experiment, I continue the journey by creating a toolbox for the community to populate with sober-friendly places.
Why crowdsourced?
Well, it's probably unrealistic for me to maintain a global list of places – the coverage will always be limited.
Hypothesis
If I build a map where users can add their favourite non-alcoholic locations and events, and kickstart it by populating a chunk of it... then some level of utility and momentum may mean that future users will keep contributing, enabling it to become an app with lasting utility.
Build
I attempted to build it in 24 hours (but also had to travel home for Christmas) – so got to a rough and ready MVP in 48 hours!
What’s more... I’ll attempt to build this one in 24 hours
— johnny makes ⚡️ (@johnny_makes) December 22, 2019
Let’s see how far we get 🏃♂️ pic.twitter.com/HTW5w4z5ea
With the minor downside/upside of it looking like Windows XP... 🤷♂️
When you inadvertently steal Windows XP's aesthetic...
— johnny makes ⚡️ (@johnny_makes) December 23, 2019
BUT results now showing correctly on the map 💪
Users can *almost* submit places, I just need to figure out forward geocoding now 🤯 pic.twitter.com/PCqDdXWoro
Soft launch
It's now publicly available! Will be very interested to see how people interact with the map, if it's even useful, and if they're willing to add new places.
I've seeded it with 16 or so places, but will add more in the near future and aim to stimulate the community to submit and share their own recommendations. One of the easiest and most logical first steps will be letting users leave reviews on places.
Will update here as I make learn and make tweaks... watch this space ✌️
Try it and let me know what you think: