Call it beerspotting, call it beertastic: the RedPint social beer app has arrived. Whether you are a beer connoisseur, beerthusiast or social drinker, this fun and free Boston-built iPhone app is for you.
Dubbed, “The best way to connect with fans and friends of craft beer,” RedPint allows you to rate, recommend, and share with friends what you’re drinking and where you’re drinking it. Along the way you can earn sponsored medals, discover pubs with eclectic brews, tag the friends you’re with, and even share photos of what you’re drinking.
The iPhone app (with Android in the works) hit the app store last night, and we had the opportunity to speak with co-founders John Vajda and Alicia Benjamin about the app and their future plans:
From Idea to Launch: A Story of Non-Technical Founders & the Power of APIs
Vajda and Benjamin came up with the idea for RedPint after spending time out west a couple years ago. They found themselves constantly seeing and being introduced to new craft breweries, but felt as though they were taking a gamble on whether the beers were any good when making the purchase. What Vajda and Benjamin wanted was a way to know (a) is this beer any good (specifically, “what do my friends think of this”), and (b) where can we purchase it. And so laid the foundation for the two core pillars behind RedPint: social and location.
Vajda and Benjamin are non-technical co-founders (although Vajda has 6-years experience in project management in software development), so they wrote up specifications for the app design and proceeded to hire and manage the Woburn-based dev shop Draconis Software. They also did their research on leveraging third party APIs to help build RedPint. For beer information, RedPint taps into the Open Beer Database, which houses information on over 7,000 beers and breweries. For craft beer pubs and establishment location information, RedPint leverages the Beer Mapping Project. In this sense, RedPint is demonstrative of the potential offered by niche APIs in helping developers bring to market more innovative applications.
Vajda went on to explain, “We utilized the Beer Mapping API and Open Beer Database to get started, and we are currently expanding this data set with user generated information consisting of beers, breweries, and locations.”
RedPint’s Features Point to its Monetization
RedPint’s app is broken down into four main sections.
- With Vajda citing social engagement as the main differentiator between RedPint and other beer apps, your Friends feed is the home screen. It allows you to see what your friends are drinking, where they’re drinking it, any caption they’ve left, and even photos of the beer/festivities around the beer if they’ve snapped one.
- A Beer section allows you to update the status of what you’re drinking and has three components: tag the beer, tag the location, and tag the friends you’re with. This Beer section is also where you can search for and rate beers.
- The Beer Places tab allows you to search by name or location for pubs and other establishments that cater to and sell a wide range of craft brews. Each establishment is then displayed on a map within the RedPint app.
- Finally, a Me profile section displays the beers you’ve rated, medals you’ve earned, a history of beer tag check-ins, and allows you to manage your friend connections.
Many of these features point to Vajda and Benjamin’s plans for monetization. After their user base scales, RedPint plans to build business tools around the aggregate beer data they amass. With brands keen interest in knowing the real conversations its customers are having about them, a brewery would benefit from sourcing all the real-time reviews, language and captions related to their brews. With conversation about a particular beer at the forefront of the RedPint app, breweries could even use RedPint as a conduit for crowdsourcing new brews. A pub, on the other hand, might want to source what hot new beers locals seem to be coming back for so they can have it on hand and entice a new crowd.
More immediate monetization for RedPint is their medal offerings, in which breweries, pubs and event providers pay to create custom, branded medals. Users these medals, for example, for drinking specific beers or rating beers at a tasting event.
Aside from beer evangelists, breweries, and pubs, RedPint also plans to help ignite the 25,000+ who are part of the Home Brewers Assocation. RedPint wants to organize contests and events that provide the best home brewers and brews an opportunity to break into the craft brewing market.
What to Expect in the Future
While currently working on an Android version of RedPint, Vajda and Benajamin already have a gameplan on upcoming features.
- One of the first updates will be social integration expansion. While you can currently post what brews you’re drinking to Facebook and Twitter, the next release will allow you to leverage those services to find other friends to follow (or invite).
- RedPint is also in discussions to leverage Foursquare’s API. This will allow users to check into a location on Foursquare along with a nod to the beer they’re drinking via RedPint.
- Finally, RedPint wants to build a beer recommendation engine that will allow someone to say, for example, “I like lemon zest and wheat” and have the engine go on to say, “in that case try any of these high-rated beers.”
While the competition in Boston for beer apps seems tight, we like the strong foundation we see in RedPint’s v1, and look forward to following their development.
Co-founder Benjamin left us with, “What I hope people will see when they download the app is a really great platform with limitless potential. Sure, we have strides to make — as app users want awesome functionality with a beautiful UI — and we’re up for the challenge.”
Download the free RedPint iPhone application here. And make sure to follow and support these local mobile innovators on Twitter and Facebook.
