10
Every Untappd anniversary, I try look back on our past year (see prior years: 9, 8). This year marks our tenth anniversary, and to be honest, I never thought we’d get here, but here we are and this year has been very different than the past years, for many reasons.
At the inception of Untappd, we were just a two man team, who had met over Twitter, who lived on opposite sides of the country and had full time jobs unrelated to the beer world. We had this idea for an app with our goal being to disrupt the beer world and make that world more inclusive and open the beer community to the discovery of beers, bars, breweries and friends. It was a lofty goal, a passion project, and never did I imagine that we’d still be achieving and reaching for this goal ten years later with a team of over 90+ employees, in three countries across the globe.
2020 has been a very impactful year for Untappd. In February, we acquired the assets for Beer Advocate, a popular rating website that rivaled Untappd back in the early 2010s. Consolidating two major players in the beer world together under one roof was a major move for us. Shortly after that, we announced that Untappd had received a major investment by Providence Strategic Growth.
With the investment, came some changes for me within Untappd. I was asked to move from Chief Technology Officer to Chief Creative Officer. This meant being removed from the Product & Engineering team to focus on our new media initiatives with respect to community growth. It was very hard for me to no longer be close to a product that I had developed and engineered for the past nine years. I’m always so enthralled by the product, that to have to step back from it’s development was a hard transition for me, but changes like this happen as a company becomes bigger and acquisitions, investments, etc. are made.
It's been eight months since my role change and I have spent my time engaging with the community and scaling Untappd TV, a media-arm of Untappd that aims to connect beer fans with Untappd in a variety of different ways. Our first product of Untappd TV was our Virtual Happy Hours. They aimed to connect people during COVID-19 with live streaming with interviews with industry professionals. It was a very successful endeavor and we have recorded over 60+ episodes. It’s been a pleasure interviewing and discussing beer with so many people within the beer community.
We also can’t talk about this year without talking about COVID-19 and the impact it has had on our usage and core business, Untappd for Business. Once lock-down occurred, all across the globe, we saw a massive decrease in check-ins to public venues with the closing of bars and restaurants. It was a scary time. We had to change our strategy on events and social media to help drive the conversation toward Untappd is this new world. We introduced Untappd At Home, a new venue for people to check in to at home. With the creation of this venue, we were mind-blown by the support from our users drinking safely with over 30m+ check-ins happening at the venue since late March.
We created and launched within 48 hours, a project called "gregslist", which aimed at connecting people with information regarding curbside and delivery when it came to bars and breweries in their local area, as well as other COVID-19 information.
This year we also had to postpone our yearly in-person festival and therefore host our first ever Untappd Virtual Festival this past July. It was great sitting down over a two day period with all our Untappd users and beer enthusiasts and enjoying good beer and good conversations. Something we all needed during that heightened time during the pandemic. The success of that virtual festival has led to a European version that will take place next month.
This global pandemic is something we never could have imagined last year on our anniversary. Last year, we were celebrating with hundreds of people in person and everyone I spoke to would say "You have to do something HUGE for 10!". These conversations sparked many ideas, but of course none could come to fruition.
Since our celebratory plans have had to change, we have put together a Virtual Party, taking place on October 24th, 2020 from 3pm - 6pm. In addition, we have filmed an Untappd Documentary that will air right after the party showing what it has been like behind the scenes for the past 10 years at Untappd. You can watch the trailer below.
When we hold events to celebrate our anniversary, a lot of the time, it's couched as "Untappd's Anniversary Party", but in reality, it's a party celebrating YOU, the community. I've stressed this a thousand times in prior years, but it still remains true, it's the community that has helped us in terms of growth, support and praise.
Untappd has changed my life, I've met some amazing people in the last 10 years, and it's crazy to hear stories about Untappd with other people in their daily lives. Whatever the future holds, I'm super proud to be part of this amazing community of creators, users, brewers, and bar owners, to push beer in the right direction. Sure - we made mistakes - but we corrected with feedback from the community. We've listened to your improvements, and we pushed the app forward in a positive way, to help connect the community, locate, share and discover beer all over the world. To me, this is how you build an app and cultivate a community, by putting them first.
If it wasn't for the global pandemic, we would most likely be hitting about 1 billion check-ins right around this time (based on our early metric in January). While that didn't happen, we did reach more people with our new Untappd at Home venue, our Untappd Virtual Happy Hour, and our revamp on our blog by doing more data dives into the wealth of information that we can derive from the Untappd platform. Whenever there are chaotic events, we always ask the question - "What can we do for our community" and adapt our methodology.
It's been an amazing, unbelievable 10 years of Untappd and everyday I am still in awe of how much passion, care and interest the community has on the platform. It brings me so much joy to see Untappd used by many, and keeps me going to be the voice of the community and the app. In this new role, I still aim to bring your concerns, feature to our product and engineering team to make sure we are continuing to focus on you, the community, so we can continue to move forward in mission to "surprise and delight" you everyday.
Cheers,
Greg
