Inc. Magazine – September 2019

PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHAN PERKEL ● ● ● SEPTEMBER 2019 ● INC. ● 63

It’s funny. I wasn’t really that

into beer.

Tim and I met over Twitter in

2007. I lived in Massachusetts

and he was in California.

We worked on a few freelance

jobs together—me as a software

engineer, and Tim as a web

designer. I’d never heard of

what he was drinking out

West, and sometimes I’d think,

“I wish I could get that beer.”

In the summer of 2010, I was

traveling a lot as a consultant for

KPMG. I remember sitting in

my hotel room in Springfield,

Massachusetts, and telling

Tim, “Hey, we always check in

on Foursquare—what if we

did something related to beer

and location?” Beer is inherently

very social, and there wasn’t

an online version of that

inter action.

I went home that weekend

to work on a prototype, and had

a dirty version of it within 48

hours. We launched Untappd

that October 22. Fourteen days

later, Mashable wrote an article

about it.

Over time, we became two guys

doing what we could to support

millions of people on this app—

on the side. Our two main advis-

ers, who’d sold beer startups,

started telling us we weren’t

dedicated because we hadn’t quit

our day jobs. Neither said it out

loud, but they heavily implied:

“Hey, you have this successful

thing. Why haven’t you gone

ahead and tried to do this full

time?” Then one of them sat me

down over coffee in San Fran-

cisco to talk about Techstars.

The allure was very big. The

greatest things come out of those

incubators, with plenty of fund-

ing. But I was so used to corpo-

rate life: You went to work, you

went home, you got a paycheck.

This would have meant not

knowing if there would even be

a paycheck. Not knowing if this

is going to last three months—or

how your relationships are going

to hold up.

If we were single and in our

20s, we could’ve made it work.

But we weren’t in college. We

couldn’t eat ramen noodles for

the rest of our lives, or pick up

and move somewhere else. We

had families. We couldn’t just

drop everything and go for it.

We knew we needed to get

bigger, but an investor would

have felt like a boss. We needed

a partner we could trust. The

idea of a merger started to make

sense.

In 2015, we were approached

by Next Glass. It had structure,

but not scale. We had millions of

users. Next Glass acquired

Untappd that December. The

combined company took our

name—and we quit our day jobs.

And we’ve finally become big

beer fans. The Greg from eight

or nine years ago would be

perplexed by how I now like

all these hazy IPAs. He’d say,

“Wow. That’s disgusting.”

My favorite beer now is

Pliny the Elder, a double IPA

from Russian River Brewing. It

was one of the first beers I

learned about from the Untappd

community.

It’s never let me down.

Nine years ago, Greg Avola and Tim Mather created Untappd, a

Foursquare-style check-in app for beer, thanks to an idea and $1,000

from Avola. Even as Untappd took off, the two kept their day jobs—

until they found an unconventional way to devote themselves to their

company. —AS TOLD TO CAMERON ALBERT-DEITCH