Australia's best happy hour platform

How I designed, built and manage the biggest and best list of pub specials and happy hours on the continent.

Quick disclaimer

This isn't your usual folio piece as I'm the founder, designer, developer and sole operator of the entire platform. I've been working on it in my spare time since 2012, launching in 2013. But I wanted to share the principles behind it, the problems I sought to solve, how I applied design thinking and built something focused entirely on users and not typical metrics around walled-gardens and hyper-monetization.

A little background on Eat Drink Cheap

Started as a bit of fun in 2013 and is now maybe the largest source of happy hours and pub specials in Australia with 4,200 weekly offers all updated and verified every 3 months. Venues can list for free provided it is advertised as a special and users (punters) can browse our mobile and desktop website along with our iOS app all for free.

Problem and opportunity

Pubs and hospitality of Australian life. They represent billions of dollars to local economies, employ enormous numbers of people and are happy to provide enjoyment for the majority of adults in the land. Venues put considerable effort into crafting weekly "specials"; offerings at reduced prices including happy hour and or classic food dishes like steak, parma (chicken parmigiana), burgers, lunches and more.

Most venues struggle to attract attention behind their core locals. Those with low traffic locations need to get people in their doors and even in 2024 with pervasive social media still need a way to reach people in the moment, where they are.

Market analysis

In 2012 there were the usual mediums (Timeout, Urban List, Concrete Playground) publishing regular articles about the scene, new venues, trends and yes specials. The Happiest Hour was the main provider of happy hours, having operated since 2004 (and should add we have nothing but love for THH, they were an inspiration and deserve their flowers for being pioneers).

However, like a lot of the internet information becomes stale. It was difficult to stay up to date. Venues come and go while marketing efforts and consumer tastes evolve. The internet had also taken hold with the rise of social media as Instagram turned one (in 2013 - yes - one) and the iPhone was barely six.

There was also the rise of pay to play operations which meant the destination would never have every single special because venues would naturally refuse to pay. My other key principle echoed early Google who famously aspired to "organise the world's information in one place". I too sought to collate every special possible, present the facts as accurately as possible, free of bias. My goal is not to evaluate your special, it's to get you to go and try it for yourself. Thus our mission was born:

More specials, most accurate, free to list forever

Now how are we going to do this?

Solving for the venues

Immediate need was to source specials. Outreach was slow going initially so I sourced them myself. Can say hand on heart I don't scrape, don't copy other websites and don't steal material except (like Google) from the venue websites themselves. Working in the city would walk past venues, capture photos and ask friends to send me pictures of neighbourhood specials boards. In a single day I could walk the length of Chapel Street and capture 50 venues worth of content, hand out business cards and talk to venue owners. This became challenging once I moved overseas.

Switching to a digital solution I collected emails and social handles for venues, sending out requests for specials and also DMs on socials which slowly built a rapport over time. To reduce friction would ask venues to send me their specials and I would add them to the platform on their behalf which also meant I could editorialise the content. Everything on the platform is presented from my perspective, my view of the industry.

The best thing about this industry is there are unlimited customers with an open door, and endless consumers you either know or can readily find. We started with qualitative research ;) Talking with venues it was clear the special was an inducement to get people in the door, then come back and spend more later. Awareness was everything but often their marketing is in-house, especially in 2012. They simply wanted broadest possible reach with locals to get them to come in once.

Solving for the punters

For our consumers (we termed 'punters') it was a matter of accuracy, reliability and being able to find a discount when they wanted it. With the rise of the smartphone, knowing where you are and what time and day it is would quickly evolve in to our core premise; they want something now, today, close to this location.

Punters wanted results nearby right now

Worth noting here that over time this would evolve into two distinct groups: the majority of users who would search for specials between 4pm and 8pm - indicating they wanted it now - versus the users who researched and planned ahead.

The solution needed to afford what is available now where I am, but also be organised so I can find exactly what I want.

Early solutions

From the start we were only serving Melbourne. Everything was hard-coded to Melbourne. We focused on the inner city suburbs and laid the foundation for SEO. Key solutions were around location and search. Finding specials where you are and being able to search or filter.

Early feedback about accuracy was earth-shattering. Turns out venues cared about accuracy too which we never discovered talking to them. Once punters started turning up expecting steak night when it no longer existed or cost more, it was apparent that everyone wanted accuracy.

We added datestamps the next day and forced venues to verify the specials every 3 months else we took them down. To encourage venues to keep us updated we made our default feeds chronological. Whereas many platforms use the "feed" to monetize by ranking based on an arbitrary algorithm they can game, ours is simply that the freshest specials appear first.

I don't want you to stay on my platform

To help punters easily verify specials, made an early call to avoid the walled-garden effect and encourage users to leave the platform. We link directly to the whats-on page on each venues' website, to their soecial media channels and if the special has a webpage link directly to that too. The sooner you shift to their platform, verify a special and hit their booking page, our work is done.

For 4 years I manually added specials when visiting them via my inner city job and added minimal features. I couldn't get traction without venues, and couldn't get users without more specials. Naturally one becomes despondent. I didn't even have an Instagram account 7 years after launching.

Sharing all this to remind you to keep going and that nothing happens overnight.

2020 2.0

By early 2020 I had been living California for 3 years and wasn't maintaining the site. Some specials were 9 months old and almost no new features. I was intending to shut the site down.

Then the pandemic arrived and shut down Melbourne and we started removing listings from the site as the hospitality scene completely shut down. Started reaching out to venues directly to see how we could help and quickly pivoted to promoting takeout, who was still serving grab and go food and helping to broadcast their message to our dwindling audience.

In May 2020 I was laid off from my job and had a little spare time to spend building new features. Added nearby now geo search, rebuilt the site search completely and added an all new map. Online bookings were taking off and we added special events like Christmas, New Year and the Super Bowl.

We need to drive bookings

Key feedback early post-pandemic was the fervent shift towards online bookings so venues could manage check-ins and capacity. Within weeks we had added booking links and captured more than 500 links to venues. Today we have more than 1,300 booking links (60% of our active venues) and drive approximately 30,000 outbound clicks every month to website and booking forms.

Towards the end of the year it became apparent restrictions would lift and given I wasn't in Melbourne, I wasn't in Sydney or Perth or Brisbane. It was time to expand nationwide which required a complete rebuild of the logic behind the app.

In early 2021 we went live nationally with an all new url structure, search, listing details page. Also added nearby and geo-based results relative to suburb pages and venues.

2023 to today

Returning to Australia early 2023 allowed us to connect personally with venues and build a following on social media with actual content. In 18 months grew our Instagram audience from 1,000 to more than 14,000 by posting regular content with a simple premise; we don't review our experience, we pay our own way and we try to showcase as many different suburbs and special types which stays true to our values of showcasing specials equally and giving you the facts.

It was also time to add some key UX features that people kept asking me for:

Interactive map with labels

The map was proving super popular as browsing by location was easier than sifting through a list of arbitrary suburbs. Only catch was you had to sift through all the pins. In my first foray in to some tricky javascript, made all the pins display their special type and allow filtering by food or drinks. Next iteration was to add coloured pins to indicate if a special was live now, was sometime today or had passed to help punters evaluate options close to a specific location.

Launched a simple iOS app

Strongly believe that mobile web and native apps serve different purposes and shouldn't necessarily have feature parity. Put this to the test with v1 of our iOS app which focused on really simple features:

• A list of specials closest to you based on geo-location (want nearby now)
• A map of all specials for a given day indicating if they are active now (want to research)
• Filtering for day, type and to display only what's live now (both now and researching)

And one I definitely didn't get asked for: personal parm preferences

One of the oldest debates across Australia - no not our flag or head of state - parma vs parmi vs parmy has raged for decades. Having built the platform Melbourne-centric, parma was hardcoded in to the tagging and urls which likely irked my new users in every other state (and Geelong). Something had to change.

Introducing Parmz: ability to customise the label depending on your personal parm preference by choosing from parma, parmi or of course parmdiddlyumptious which would update the term across the platform. Also made some safe assumptions by defaulting to parmi in most other states leaving my home-town as the parma outlier.

In a classic example of a CEO feature no one asked for and no-one cares about, this feature has been literally used by nobody and nobody cares that it exists but I love it. It's ok to push back on stupid ideas from higher-ups but in this case I'm judge jury and executioner and there's nobody to protect me from myself ;)