The Day We Gave Away Our Company: A Product To Help People Drink a Little Less

This idea went from a text message “We should build this platform” to a full featured product in less than 4 months. It all started when Justin Kan, founder of Twitch & Investor, decided to quit drinking and start a community on Telegram. I called the best engineer and designer I knew and said “we need to build this product for Justin’s community. He has the community, we should build the perfect product.

We built it. And now we want to give it to you. The app (iOS & Android), the brand, the URL, everything.

On April 21st, 2019, Justin Kan wrote this Tweet thread about quitting drinking:

In his last Tweet, he linked to a Telegram group for anyone who was interested in a daily group to support and keep people accountable.

I had been trying to drink a lot less and decided to join the group. So did thousands of other people. It became a great place for all types of people to help each other. People who had been sober for years were helping people on their 3rd day of being sober.

What I found most interesting was the core behavior and metric that everyone shared: The streak of # of days not drinking.

On top of that, it was really interesting to watch people restart their streak. The problem with all alcohol related tracking apps is that you feel bad whenever you break the streak.

It felt like a great opportunity to build a new type of app for everyone in the world to drink a little less, that would make the world better.

On May 15th, 2019, I pinged my favorite developer and friend, Ian Hunter. I said “we should spend our weekends building a new type of application to help everyone drink less that doesn’t make everyone feel bad if they decide to have a drink. It can work for people who are totally sober but also work for people who are just looking to drink less.

There were 2 big differentiators that we went after with the product:

1. Make it work for everyone so the community can support people at all stages. From a brand perspective, make everyone feel great about using the product. Mostly, don’t make me feel bad if I break a streak and have a drink. This is why we have “Best streaks” as a core functionality in the product. We also made the drinking action not say things like “Oh no, broken streak” or any negative behavior. We just restart the streak and don’t make the number animate.
2. Multi-player vs single-player. Every other app in the space is an app that only works for you. We wanted to build a full group chat functionality that showed the core metric (Streak #) as part of your profile. The community is the moat and we wanted that to live inside of our platform.

Insert: Sodawater. Let’s drink a little less, together.

We spent 4 months building out an entire product. Brand, iOS & Android app, website, everything. We’ve been using the product and there’s really something special about it. We want the Telegram community to have a new place to communicate, track, and support each other.

We don’t have the time to make this something big. But this is something that should be big.

So, we want to find someone to take this over. Here’s what you will get:

• Full featured iOS & Android app built in React
• Group chat functionality. We build our own chat infrastructure so it is social at its core, not just a streak tracking app
• Full brand and design assets
• Full website design and content
• The URL sodawater.app

This is the perfect opportunity for any founder, business person, or investor who wants to skip the 6–12 month process of kick starting a new idea. We also discussed this idea with Justin Kan himself and he really liked the concept.

There are a few things that still need to be polished up before a full launch but this should be minimal work for the right team. Mostly login auth type iterations.

Please DM me @shanemac on Twitter if you are interested in taking over this product. We are interested in both cash and equity offers.

Here’s product images and the website design: (we are also happy to add you to the Testflight to use the product)

Homepage & Brand:

Product Screens: