The smart beer fridge and beer velocity

Bud Light Lime-a-ritas had the highest “beer velocity” at my college fraternity.

What does that mean you ask? Let me tell you.

Long before I thought about startups, I was the house improvement chair for my fraternity. Small budget, almost no constraints, and one very clear accountability mechanism: if you worked on things people didn't actually care about, you didn't get re-elected. So you learned fast to pay attention to what mattered.

And in college, people cared about beer 🍻

Each week someone stocked a shared fridge with good beer. Not party beer, just something you could enjoy occasionally. At the end of the semester we would settle up.

On paper it worked. In practice it failed in every predictable way. Tracking was tedious. The fridge was insecure. Guests and underage people could access it. And worst of all, for a group of MIT students, we had no data. No idea what people liked or when we were about to run out.

So one January, my roommate Kendall Helbert and I decided to fix it. No classes. No grand plan. Just a simple question. What if we built a smart beer fridge?

An aggressively over engineered solution to a very college problem.

We bought a glass door fridge and added solenoid locks, a Raspberry Pi, passcodes to unlock it, a scanner to check beers out, a database to track inventory, and an analytics dashboard to see what was popular and when we needed to restock.

We even invented a metric. Beer velocity. The rate at which beers left the fridge. Jordan Lucier wrote the code. That would not be his last time calculating velocity of things 😉

Hence the Bud Light Lime-a-ritas. (Not our proudest moment as a fraternity).

Wouldn't be a LinkedIn post without a few takeaways. Although I hope you found this story entertaining on its own.

What mattered most was that I knew the end user perfectly. I was one. I lived with them. I empathized with their frustrations. I knew the pain of needing a beer to make a thermodynamics problem set more bearable, only to find the fridge empty 😂 You don’t need to be one, but product market fit starts with a deep understanding of the user and the problem. When the fridge arrived and we needed to carry it up three flights of stairs, the entire fraternity showed up without being asked, first time I ever saw that happen. That was PMF in its purest form. 🤣

This never became more than a project, but the fraternity loved it and I learned a ton about building. Just start building, you never know what it will teach you.