How 2 Guys Built

Craft Beer’s Leading Social Media Platform

In Their Spare Time

Tim Mather & Greg Avola Have Grown Untappd From ‘Foursquare For Beer’

Into The Beer Industry’s Social Standard

When Untappd hit the market in 2010 its founders were okay with being tagged Foursquare for beer drinkers, as everyone from Mashable to Inquisitr labeled it. That’s because back then, Untappd was basically that, a check-in service.

Greg Avola (top) and Tim Mather are Untappd’s co-founders.

“Now, we see our app as a beer discovery app, rather than just a check-in service,” says Greg Avola, Untappd’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “We’re focused on real-time and we focus more on the recommendation side. We want to help users plan their evening, to discover what beers to try.”

Untappd has grown its offerings since its launch five years ago. The recommendation features has helped build a fiercely loyal user base of craft beer enthusiasts that topped 1.6 million by the end of 2014.

Avola is the East Coast half of Untappd and is based in New York. Untappd co-founder Tim Mather — the company’s CEO and lead designer — is in California. Though, it isn’t the fact that Avola and Mather have built a platform that is now home to 2+ million users and has catalogued more than 500,000 beers (commercial and homebrewed from across the globe) while being geographically separated — and without any advertising or venture capital dollars — that’s impressive. Avola and Mather have built Untappd into craft beer’s social media platform of choice in their spare time.

Mather is a senior UX designer at Disney Interactive and he spends his days handing UX, UI and prototyping support for a variety of Disney’s online destinations. Avola is a senior software engineer for ABC News and is responsible for building and supporting various parts of ABCNews’ digital properties.

And after hours the pair manages a cross-country workflow that has allowed them to create the digital platform of choice in what is, according to the Brewers Association, a $19.6 billion craft beer industry.

“I think the key to being able to manage this is to manage your time efficiently and take breaks. Otherwise, you’ll be so wrapped into your full-time job and this and that, it becomes hard to see the line between them,” says Avola, who notes that he and Mather spend about 20–24 hours a week on Untappd.

Avola notes that the lack of outside funding does slow down the design and development process, he notes that he and Mather do have the freedom to “have total control over the end result.”