If you’re a frequent drinker, you’ve probably searched the app store for a special drinks app, something that will tell you which drinks are on sale at which bars/restaurants in your immediate vicinity. Depending on where you are, you may be able to find something that works halfway, but the quality of these apps is surprisingly low. They are often outdated, have poor coverage or local outlets, or just don’t work as advertised.

Why not?

I would go so far as to say that these types of apps don’t work and here’s why. Pretty much all of the ones out there right now rely on individual people going to bars, writing up the specials, entering them into the app, and then posting them. Do you see the problem here? No one person or group of people can be tasked with constantly going to every place in a given area that sells alcohol every day and doing this. It is impossible. This is why the current stable of drink specials/happy hour apps is broken.

A new model?

I want to propose a new method or model to do this, one that does not depend on individuals but on companies themselves. If there were some sort of central database where each restaurant/bar could enter their specials, you wouldn’t suffer from the problems mentioned above. If the company manages its own specials in this “central database”, it will always be up-to-date and “official”. That central database must be accessible to anyone through a website or native application interface. Such a model would be highly beneficial to anyone looking for drink specials in a given city.

The adoption problem

With any such idea that requires widespread use to “work” or be useful, you have the initial problem of getting people on board. In this case, companies would have to think that such a database is a good idea and start entering their special offers before their customers use the application; that is the problem of the egg before the chicken.

It is extremely difficult to convince business owners to adopt any kind of new process or software, which goes back to human nature. People resist change, and that makes it difficult for innovators to succeed in promoting new technologies.

The only way to solve the adoption problem is advertising: by getting some companies to join something, others are likely to follow.