The beauty of blogging is that you get to blog about whatever you want. Despite that my posts tend towards the dry, so let’s change that up and try a wet one: a post about beer. There are few things in life I love more, so it’s a bit surprising that it has taken me this long to get around to it as a topic.

A woman is like beer. They look good, they smell good, and you’d step over your own mother just to get one! — Homer Simpson

Local Beer

If you love beer, you probably love craft beer. I think its interesting that our generally accepted term for “good beer” is “craft beer.” It’s an usually clear definition of what makes a good product:

1. Trying to make a good product.
2. Keeping the scale small enough to keep the product good.

Kansas City, my hometown, is home to one of the best examples of great craft beer around, Boulevard Brewing. If you’ve never had their stuff, run, don’t walk, to your nearest liquor store or bar and get your hands on a pint of some of the best stuff coming out of the American beer industry.

I think that one of the most important lessons that startups can learn from older models of businesses is the importance of place and community: being some place, not every place. Boulevard is a great example of a company that’s always had a very local to regional focus. They’re modeled after the pre-Prohibition era local breweries, that served their local communities because they had no other choice. Beer before refrigeration was a tough business to do any other way.

The great thing about being focused on the people right next door is that you can get to know them well and maybe solve their actual problems, instead of ones that you’ve made up in your head. When it came time to launch Boulevard beer, they tapped the first keg at Ponak’s, their next door neighbor, then and now. Being able to walk past every day and see what people thought of the beer must have given the brewers a pretty good picture into just how people felt about it.

Of course, if you know anything about the alcohol business in the US, you know that all alcohol businesses have to start out with a very regional focus. The movement of alcohol across state line is very highly regulated, and you can’t just tweet a link to your site and sell to whoever logs on. It’s a much, much more complicated process than commerce in other goods and commodities, let alone the rarefied world of software.

So, with Boulevard, this obviously meant that they would start their business in Missouri only, and expand slowly and deliberately from there. Somewhat by necessity, the business was following exactly Jason Fried’s advice to grow slow, discussed in more detail in his and DHH’s essential business book REWORK. It’s antithetical to Paul Graham’s definition of Startup = Growth, and maybe that’s a good thing. This brings up another great aphorism from Fried (and his partner in crime, DHH):

Start a business, not a startup.

I think it’s really interesting and exciting to see the startup world really focus on things that are obviously businesses from the beginning. Whether it’s shaving, eye glasses, or debt, there are lots of exciting things going on with companies that are focused on businesses, not just things that get a lot of page views. Obviously, most of these startups are working from the startup = growth model, but I think that their is a chance for a more lasting impact in companies that focus on building real businesses instead of just selling to Google.

Boulevard, with its very traditional business model and more normal growth, was absolutely a business from a beginning. Moreover, the enforced focus on their local and regional communities played a big role in the next chapter of the Boulevard story.

Local Bottles

Boulevard does a substantial portion of its overall business in kegs. You can find them on tap all over the KC region and beyond.

But people love beer in bottles too, and that’s where the problem comes in. Despite the midwest being home to plenty of industry and beer drinkers, there was no solution for glass recycling in the region. This is a real problem, because due to the economics of transporting glass, recycling must happen reasonably close to both supply and demand.

The folks at Boulevard saw this as a true chicken and egg problem. There was not much glass recycling going on, so there was no local glass recycling option. There was no local glass recycling option, so there was not much glass recycling going on. So they stepped in and organized a solution: Ripple Glass.

In short, Ripple Glass is the solution to the glass recycling problem in the KC area, organized by people and companies from the area. It consists of a processing plant and a network of collection containers throughout the region.

Some of the collected and recycled glass goes to regional fiberglass insulation plants, while the brown portion goes to be made back into Boulevard beer bottles and begin the cycle all over again.

Local Problems

I think the most logical question to ask when hearing the story of Ripple Glass is, “Why Boulevard?” There were lots of people producing glass waste as a byproduct of their business, many of them a lot older than Boulevard. In my opinion, a lot of credit has to be given to their understanding of their role in their community. Beer has a complicated relationship with society, being both something that brings people together but can also create a lot of trouble.

Much of how Boulevard maintains that relationship comes down to conversations. People are welcomed into their brewery, and if you’re lucky enough to go, you can try some incredible brews that are found nowhere else. One of my favorite brews of theirs is the Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale.

It’s a very strong beer, bottled in a wine bottle. That’s not accidental. The brewers at Boulevard both understood that there is a real demand for strong beers, but also that a really fine beer should be served like wine, as a drink for sharing and pairing with food. This clear recognition that they’re making a relatively expensive beer, best suited for enjoying as part of a social experience is astute.

A unique product like Tank 7 comes from the same place that Ripple Glass comes from, a deep understanding of the lives of their customers and their businesses role in it. I’m a big believer that startups should be highly engaged with the specific communities that they find themselves in and play off of their unique strengths. This is something that is discussed a fair bit in Paul Orlando’s writings on startups and accelerators, that I’ve deconstructed a bit before.

Once a company is that engaged with its community, it is only logical that they’ll start to be concerned about more than just their next product launch. They’ll notice things like used bottles going to landfills instead of to recycling plants. At Intent Media, one of the several ways that we’ve found to engage with our community has been for several people to teach computer science at a local high school. Given the technical knowledge in your average tech startup, such an activity seems like an obvious choice.

Here on Medium, a story of just one programmer reaching out to the needy in his community has recently caught fire. The post and the associated Kickstarter campaign are compelling narratives about how much power each and every one of us has to have whatever impact we choose. I find this example a compelling answer to some of the questions I raised earlier about what should the role of software developers within 21st century society be. I only wish there were more clear instances of using technological knowledge for the good of society, although I’m optimistic that there will be more in the future.