High-tech beer-drinking
Des Moines entrepreneurs develop smart flights
PERRY BEEMAN Oct 21, 2016 | 11:00 am
3 min read time
812 wordsBusiness Record Insider, Innovation and EntrepreneurshipBen McDougal is brewing plans for a big rollout for FliteBrite’s first product — a smart beer flight paddle designed to make it easy to both enjoy a bunch of beers and tell the world about them immediately.
The 34-year-old graduate of Ankeny High School and Loras College (computer science) is part of a team that created FliteBrite, a business that combines McDougal’s love of beer with his dream that we could all use digital technology to track our beer flights, and share information about them with others.
He and his wife, Davis Brown attorney and shareholder Jodie McDougal, have settled into a busy life with a 1-month-old daughter. Ben works on the computer guru side of homebuilder Drake Homes, and indulges his entrepreneurial startup drive on the side. He has more or less given up soccer for the less bruising yet somewhat more time-consuming sport of golf.
You might think walking into a bar and drinking a flight of beer is a pretty simple task, and you might share your thoughts about the latest microbrews with a friend. But McDougal started to think about how technology could make the experience better, and quickly allow you to give the whole world your opinion on that new Hippo Hoppy Turbo Supersonic beer you just tried.
“We were enjoying flights, but I would get so annoyed at not knowing which one I liked best,” McDougal said. “The idea was to blend a little technology into the tradition.”
“We’ve created the world’s first electronic flight paddle,” McDougal declares with a pride just short of the enthusiasm he has for being a new dad. The plastic paddle, manufactured in Cedar Rapids, has four slots for beers you can use the Wi-Fi-enabled connection to track, read about and comment on.
The gizmo lets you keep the beers in order much more easily than if you just had a piece of paper marking the various brews. And it has a connection to Untappd, the online social network that lets you track what you’ve been drinking and where, and share what you thought of the suds. The website offers about anything you’d want to know about a certain beer, and then some. It makes it easy for bars to show their goods digitally, and for beer-drinkers to build their favorite flight menus.
“It’s almost a beer-drinking journal, connected to friends,” McDougal said.
For the purveyors, it helps manage inventory, getting valuable feedback on what people are drinking, and new beers on the market. For beer-drinkers, it’s a way to see all the beers available, and with a quick click, a whole lot more.
“From an app perspective, you are able to manipulate your menu with a single click,” McDougal said. “You get the label and the code numbers. There really is no typing if you don’t want to.”
“It’s like fueling the virality of something that is already viral,” he added.
You can set up the flight however you want, clicking through the beers on Untappd.
“We have been building prototypes and going through customer discovery and building the business,” McDougal said. He adds with a laugh, thinking of all the beer-drinking he’s done: “The customer discovery phase has been really great.”
The company did a soft launch at a Philadelphia conference in May. Shipments will begin in earnest this month.
The paddles are designed to stand up to beer spills and everyday use in bars and restaurants.
“This is machined,” McDougal said “This is solid. We’ve invested into tooling, which has an upfront cost but allows us to just spit these things out.”
“We have taken a handful of pre-orders. Our first one was from Hawaii, our second one was in Ohio, and our third one was a chain with 36 locations. I have heard a lot of people say, ‘Let us know when you are ready.’ ”
The paddles will be leased, so a bar could have 10 to 30 paddles on hand to try them out before deciding whether to make a bigger play, McDougal said. “This way, we have recurring revenue and also we can service the paddles when they are out in the wild,” McDougal said.
“It’s been hard to determine what the market will bear, because there is nothing like this out there. But I’m conscious that you can never really increase your price.”
The company is studying a lot of charges, ranging from about $10 to $30 a month per paddle.
McDougal is part of a three-man development team that also includes manufacturing guru Ethan Davidson, who met McDougal at One Million Cups, the free weekly confab for startup entrepreneurs. Ben Sinclair, chief tech officer, comes from a long career in software and is, in McDougal’s view, a “magician.”
FliteBrite points out that the paddle would be just as effective sorting wines or cheeses, and those are potential growth markets.