Tap the Big Idea: Creating a New Category in the World's (Second) Oldest Industry

By Josh Goodman

Buckle up and get ready for a raw, unfiltered ride as Josh Goodman goes from being a guy who couldn't get a drink in a busy bar to building a multimillion-dollar technology company that lets guests pour their own beer, wine, and cocktails and pay by the ounce. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Houndstooth Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781544536095

Josh Goodman

Josh Goodman is the Founder & CEO of PourMyBeer, the world's leading self-pour technology company. Named among Forbes' Next 1000 CEOs to Watch, he has been profiled on Bloomberg, Cheddar, Thrive Global, Fox News, CNN, and CNBC's On the Money. In 2014, the company was over $100,000 in debt with one employee (him). Six years later, the venture had sold and installed over 8,000 self-pour taps in twenty-three countries and had been listed in Inc's 5000 Fastest Growing Companies. In September of 2020, Goodman sold 25 percent of PourMyBeer to Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. Goodman now lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, where he and his wife are raising their two kids and a golden doodle.

Book preview

JoshGoodman_EbookCover_EPUB_Final.jpg

Advance Praise

Josh’s entrepreneurial journey is an interesting one that I’m sure anyone who reads will enjoy as much as I have enjoyed seeing it happen in real-time. More important than the entertaining stories are the lessons that we all learn on our own journeys and the ones you’ll learn in this book.

—John Ruhlin, founder, advisor, and bestselling author of Gift-ology

When I create content, I do it in the hopes that it’s helpful to the people reading it. One of the other benefits is the people you get to meet through the creation of that content. While I originally met Josh through an entrepreneur conference we were both invited to called Mastermind Talks, we reconnected through the Friday Forward newsletter. It’s been great to see him implement some of the strategies and tools we use at our company and get positive feedback from him on its implementation at his company.

—Robert Glazer, New York Times bestselling author of Friday Forward and CEO of Acceleration Partners

In my line of work, I get to work directly with some of the Worlds most recognized entrepreneurs, entertainers, and creators like Sir Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Sir Elton John, and Jay Abraham. The common thread in all of them is they took risks and sought to create something that didn’t exist before. I worked with Josh as a coach/advisor during the early days as well as some private events for entrepreneurs that I host by invite only. It’s great to see that the risks he’s taken are paying off, and I know he’s just getting started.

—Steve D. Sims, Real Life Wizard of Oz, Sims Media, and author of Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen

It’s hard to believe that Josh and I have been friends for over twenty-five years. We were captains of our high school football team together and have stayed in touch ever since. I’ve been fortunate enough in my career to access some amazing C-suite leaders in the public, private, and non-profit sectors, and Josh’s perspectives on business are as innovative (and entertaining) as I’ve seen.

—Justin Dean, Managing Director, Partner, and Office Leader at Boston Consulting Group and named one of Savoy Magazine’s Most Influential Blacks in Corporate America (2018)

Entrepreneurs make their own luck. Resourcefulness is a key feature of anyone who’s achieved something great, and Josh’s story is full of resourcefulness. If you find life to be an uphill battle at times, this book serves as a fantastic source of inspiration. A beautiful account of how grit, hard work, and creativity could lead you to your next big win.

—Jayson Gaignard, talent scout and curator at Mastermind Talks and host of the Community Made podcast

Josh clearly has the Walk-On mentality and is someone I’ve enjoyed getting to work with and getting to know over the years. We’ve shared some of our war stories in business, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading them in this book as much as I did when we talked about them. I hope you tap into your inner Walk-On. Everyone deserves a little playing time.

—Brandon Landry, Founder, Co-owner, and CEO of Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux

If you’d like to read this book at one of our 400-plus self-pour locations globally, find the closest one to you by using the camera on your phone to redirect to the location’s map.

Copyright © 2022 Josh Goodman

Tap the Big Idea: Creating a New Category in the World’s (Second) Oldest Industry

All rights reserved.

Disclaimer: The names of some people and companies mentioned have been changed to maintain anonymity.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5445-3607-1

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5445-3608-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5445-3609-5

Contents

Advance Praise

Introduction

Chapter 1: Grüß Gott!

Chapter 2: Growing Up

Chapter 3: Finding Out What I’m Good At

Chapter 4: Stacking Wins at Modis

Chapter 5: Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone

Chapter 6: The Emerald Isle Awaits

Chapter 7: Best. First. Hire. Ever!

Chapter 8: Running Out of Runway

Chapter 9: Do You Have the Walk-On Mentality?

Chapter 10: Out On Our Own

Chapter 11: A New Start

Chapter 12: Thirty-Nine Pounds of Marijuana

Chapter 13: Chi town, Here We Come

Chapter 14: Roman Around

Chapter 15: How Not to Raise Capital but Still Raise Capital

Chapter 16: Be Wary of Bad Apples

Chapter 17: Coming to America…from Wagga Wagga, Australia

Chapter 18: Travel Deepens Relationships

Chapter 19: Vegas, Baby + 2020

Chapter 20: Self-Pour University

Chapter 21: Microphone Czech

Chapter 22: Hitting the Accelerator

Chapter 23: Little Tyler’s Tumor

Conclusion

Tips and Tools for Your Journey:

Here Are a Few Books You Should Read or Listen to If You Haven’t Already

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Have you ever been to a busy bar, and it took entirely too much time to get the very drink you went there for?

A few years ago, I was meeting some friends at Mother’s Federal Hill Grille in Baltimore, Maryland. Mother’s is walking distance from where the Orioles and Ravens play, so the gameday vibe in Federal Hill is electric, whether it’s a football or baseball game. It was a weeknight Orioles game in late August, and the sun was setting but still at that point where when you’re driving toward it, the visor doesn’t protect you from temporarily losing your sight. We were getting a preview of the famed mid-Atlantic fall weather that makes you wish fall was four seasons instead of just one. I was meeting up with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while for a few beers. The baseball game was going to start in about an hour, so all the bars were slammed.

As soon as we walked in, we started looking for a group that might be closing out their tab. I spotted a high-top table full of empty drinks with the check being dropped off and asked if they were leaving. They said, Yep. The table’s all yours.

After a few minutes of catching up, we started the process of trying to order a round of drinks. The waitstaff was running around frantically. The busser came and cleared our table within a minute of us grabbing it, so we assumed we’d be placing our drink order shortly. The demand for drinks had exceeded the supply of staff to take orders. We tried to get what we thought was our waitress’s attention as she scurried by, but she was in the weeds (that’s restaurant slang for overwhelmed and behind on taking and delivering orders), A different waitress was nice enough to give us the finger, not the middle one, the one that says, I’ll be there in a minute.

Ten minutes passed after we secured the table—still with no order placed. This is when I went directly to the source, the bartenders who were ten feet away. The twenty-foot L-shaped bar was two rows deep with a twelve-tap draft system mounted right on the bar. This was where the thickest part of the crowd was, so I snuck around the side of the bar where they placed the drinks for the waitstaff to deliver. I was going to get their attention by waving a fifty-dollar bill.

Barbaric, I know.

I heard one of my friends yell, Josh, we got the order in! I tucked the fifty dollars back in my pocket and went back to our table. They’d placed our order with a waitress: three local IPAs and one beer-flavored water for our friend with no taste buds. After she took the order (step one), she opened a check in the point-of-sales system (step two), swiped our credit card (step three), entered our order in the point-of-sales (step four). Our order was then sent to the bartender and printed out so he could make it (step five). He poured the four beers (step six) and placed them on a drink rail with the ticket for the waitress to pick up (step seven). She picked them up at the bar service area (step eight) and delivered them to us (step nine). Those nine steps took a combined eighteen minutes to complete.

This broken process could be dramatically improved, I thought—and that was the moment I decided I was going to be the person who solved this problem. I envisioned a way to cut eight of the nine steps out and make it so you could go from Door to Pour in under sixty seconds. No more waiting for drinks.

I had only been out of college six years, but I was on my third job at a third company—all in a sales or sales management capacity. The third job was coming to an unexpected end, but I wasn’t interested in getting another job; I wanted to go a different route. I was on a mission to find a problem big enough and exciting enough for me to solve, and build a business around solving that problem.

Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.

—John Adams (second US president)

I didn’t want to just solve a small problem and build a small business; I wanted to solve a huge problem and build an empire.

After a few months of looking for a problem, I identified one I was excited to solve. My brain lit up from doing the quick mental math on how much money this one bar lost because of the inefficiency—and, equally important, the guest experience of making people wait twenty minutes when those people could have spent more and had a better time if someone had just cut out all the steps.

Starting a business doing something that’s never been done before is daunting. I’m not discounting the difficulty of starting other businesses doing something that’s been done before, but those businesses typically have a success roadmap. Plenty of entrepreneurs have built successful businesses in landscaping, gym ownership, restaurants, bars, carpet cleaning, accounting, law, retail, packaged goods, and so on. To replicate their success, go work for one of the more successful ones and learn their processes, the tools they use, and the culture they built. Then go out on your own and follow their recipe for success while you add your own spice to make it unique to you.

Success leaves footprints.

—Booker T. Washington

The problem I was attempting to solve had never been solved before. It would involve building a combination of hardware and software that would eliminate the nine steps just to get a drink. Solving this problem would change the way that people have been getting drinks at bars, restaurants, hotels, concerts, and sporting events for the last few thousand years. This wasn’t going to be an easy business to get off the ground. I had no engineering experience prior to taking this challenge on, but I wasn’t going to let that prevent me from taking action on this epiphany. What I did have was energy and excitement to tackle this problem.

Following the eighteen minutes and nine steps waiting for our first round, I obsessed over a solution for this dual-sided problem. I thought, What if we could all pour our own beer? We’re allowed to pump our own gas and pay for what we pump into our cars. This is no different.

I pitched the idea of self-serve drinks to the friends I was with. What if you could just pour your own beer and pay for what you pour, the same as pumping your own gas, like an ATM for beer? If you google ATM for beer today, you’ll see our technology in a video that went viral about one of our locations in Brooklyn, New York.

I wish they had it here, one of my buddies replied. I’d pay double to not have to wait this long for a drink. My idea had passed the first test: the friend test. After thinking about it a bit more, I told them I had to go home to write a business plan for self-pour systems while it was fresh in my brain. I was on a mission to fix this problem, and I wanted to take action. I went home and worked on the initial plans until I crashed at 4:00 a.m. I’d taken action—the most important part of the process.

The journey from pulling that all-nighter to building a product and a company and selling 25 percent of that company to Coca-Cola Europacific Partners in 2020 wasn’t easy, nor was it pretty, but it has been rewarding and entertaining, and it has taught me more about myself, my business, and my life than I’d anticipated when I started this journey.

This book aims to recount the journey and the lessons learned along the way. My hope is to not only entertain you, but for you to walk away with some practical dos and don’ts when it comes to pursuing entrepreneurship—regardless of your field.

We’ll start with a celebratory ski trip in Austria, where I almost died. The trip to Austria in 2015 started the newest chapter of the company and what I view as the birth of our current company, Innovative Tap Solutions, doing business as (DBA) PourMyBeer and PourMyBeverage. The five years before that trip to Austria, I was also all-in on self-pour, but it was complicated. Those years were filled with wins and lessons (notice how I didn’t say losses).

Some of the wins included getting forty-six states’ liquor authorities to approve the self-pour concept and growing the self-pour concept from nonexistent to more than three hundred locations in the US (2022). The lessons included being federally sued by Irish business partners who owed me and my US business partner $100,000 for commissions we’d never taken.

I’ve gotten to meet amazing people in the process, and they’ve all influenced me, so you’ll get to meet them too. I’ve learned to appreciate everyone who’s impacted this journey, regardless of their intentions.

By the end of the book, I promise that at least two of these three things will come true:

You’ll laugh and learn from my mistakes.

You’ll want to visit some of our four hundred-plus self-pour locations to try it for yourself.

You’ll plan a trip to visit Austria—and possibly Ireland, but definitely Austria and maybe even Minneapolis, but only when it’s warm there.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I kept moving forward. My number-one goal was survival. I believed deeply in the problem I was solving, and I let the desire to solve that problem fuel me. Keeping your business alive is the most important ingredient in the process. Similar to poker, as long as you have a chip and a chair, you’re still in the game. Some of the poor decisions caused more pain than others. Pain is a powerful teacher, and I’ve come to view it as a teacher rather than something negative that’s happening to me. I’ve learned and gained more from the pains in my life than I have from the wins.

Let’s dive right in.

Some names of people and companies were altered as I wasn’t sure whether they wanted to be included in the book. The events that took place involving everyone in the book are accurate.

If you’d like to read this book at one of our 400-plus locations globally, find the closest one to you by using the camera on your phone to redirect to the location’s map.

Chapter 1

Grüß Gott!

(German translation: Good Day!)

It was 1:34 a.m. on March 2, 2015, and we were in the remote Austrian ski village of Flachau. It was a Monday night, but days of the week are irrelevant during ski season in western Austria. Similar to college spring break or any day of the week in Las Vegas, every day in this Alpine paradise is a Friday or Saturday.

We were surrounded by what I can only describe as every postcard or Instagram Reel of what you’d expect the Alps to look like—larger-than-life mountains covered in powder that disappear into the clouds, making you believe you’re not just in another country; you’re in another world. I was the only American within a hundred miles, but fitting in has never been a problem for me. I grew up in Petersburg, Virginia, where my sister and I were two of four Caucasian children enrolled at Anderson Elementary in 1985.

What I didn’t know at 1:34 a.m. was that I was an hour from coming as close as I’ve come to dying.

I was invited to join the Austrian company I was partnering with on their annual directors’ ski trip. The two years leading up to this trip had been some of the most challenging and stressful ones of my life. Keeping the business alive from deal to deal and vendor to vendor took its toll on me. This trip was exciting for two reasons: I was going to get to see a working prototype of our new self-pour system, and I’d managed to keep the business alive to get to this point. I’d started PourMyBeer with a friend and former colleague two years prior to this trip. He’d had to leave the business seven months earlier because it couldn’t afford to pay us salaries, and he was offered a director role with a venture-backed beverage company that was too good to pass up.

The company I had partnered with in Austria to bring my idea to life is named Redl Gastrosystems. The company bears the same name as its founder, Hermann Redl Sr. Hermann Redl Jr. has run the company since 2000, and he’s the Hermann I built a relationship with. Hermann Jr. is a slender, six-foot-tall, dark-haired, clever, well-dressed family man approaching his fortieth year of life. His father, Hermann Sr., had started the company forty years earlier. Hermann Jr. went to work for his father after graduating from university.

When Hermann Jr. took the reins of the company, it was not in a financially healthy position (with over a million euro in debt) and the main business was as an electrical repair and installation company. Hermann Jr. learned how to use point-of-sale systems and drink control systems and saw an opportunity to transition the company and focus on that emerging market.

For the first few years, they resold other companies’ hardware and software. Hermann Jr. realized he could build better versions of what he was reselling, which would be more profitable in the long run. He hired the additional staff needed, and that’s exactly what they did. Within a few years of taking over, he’d transformed his father’s electric repair company into a cutting-edge technology company, specializing in dispense for the hospitality industry. He was able to pay off the debt and turn his family business into one that employs eighty-five people locally, including his two sisters, who are part owners.

Their company has earned recognition and respect from major brands in Europe, including IKEA, Bunn, and many other companies, for their custom solutions to solve business issues. For instance, at IKEA, they built a system that allowed shoppers to weigh the fabric, and it would print out what they owed where they got the fabric from.

They’ve also integrated their systems with most major coffee dispensers and espresso machines in Europe. Switzerland’s largest brewer came to them with two problems. One solution was an automated beer line cleaning system and the other was an automated growler filler. That brewer put the cleaning system solution in over 1,000 locations in Europe to ensure that their lines were cleaned properly so the beer tasted the same no matter where it was dispensed from. They were also the go-to company for integrating dispense systems with a variety of point-of-sales systems. I’d liken them to a technical incubator and design shop. There wasn’t a problem they couldn’t solve. By the time I met Hermann Jr., they were regularly turning over ten million euro a year.

Every year, they have their annual directors’ ski trip, and I was their guest for the trip in 2015. Four months prior, I wire transferred them $60,000 as a deposit on future orders so they could build the self-pour hardware and software I would use to construct an empire. This investment needed to pay off because I had customers who had already paid me their deposits for something that didn’t exist. I needed a working product I could install by April of 2015 (one month after this trip to Austria).

Collecting deposits for a product that doesn’t exist requires faith that it will all work out, but you also have to have a dash of crazy sprinkled in because it’s stressful AF.

Do things that are just impossible enough to be possible.

—Ken Kragen, legendary entertainment manager for Lionel Ritchie, Kenny Rogers, the Bee Gees, and Burt Reynolds and organizer of We Are the World and Hands Across America

The technology we were building would allow customers to pour their own drinks using self-serve taps on a wall and only get charged for what they poured. I’d spent the five previous years reselling other companies’ self-pour systems, but they all had major flaws in how they were engineered. The people who had made them had no prior knowledge of dispense technology. In short, they were learning as they went. I wanted to build a system that eliminated all those flaws in the other companies’ designs. I wanted to build a product that could scale.

Allowing customers to pour their own drinks is simple. I was surprised it had taken until almost 2013 for this concept to come to market.

Here’s how the process works for a customer using our self-pour technology:

You walk in, and the staff checks your ID. They connect your credit card to an RFID card, wristband, or key fob, similar to using an RFID card to access a hotel room.

You approach a wall of taps with screens above them. A single screen can give you access to two to four taps at a time. Each screen has an RFID receptor below it. The screens show what drinks are available at each tap, how much each costs per ounce, and how much you can access legally/responsibly before staff has to reauthorize your access to pour. (Standard settings limit each patron to two drinks before a staff member needs to reauthorize their RFID card. This could be sixteen ounces of beer and eight ounces of wine.)

You tap or place the RFID card in the receptor, put your glass under the tap, and pour your own drink.

You pull your card out, and the screen shows how much was dispensed and how much will be applied to your open tab.

When you leave, the amount you pour, by the tenth of an ounce, is charged to the payment form connected to the RFID. You don’t even have to check out. You can drop your card in an express checkout box on the way out the door.

Brilliant, right? It’s basically gas pumps for beverages or a drink ATM.

I landed in Vienna at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, the day before the ski trip. Hermann Jr. met me at the airport and took me to his office in Hollabrunn, forty minutes north of Vienna.

This is a picturesque, small, rural European town of roughly five thousand, where most of its residents live their entire lives. Some go away for a few years to live in Vienna or other cities, but they eventually make their way back to Hollabrunn to settle and build their families. They take pride in where they are from. It’s also the home of one of Austria’s largest technical universities.

When we got to the office, Hermann wasted no time showing me how our prototype would work. It was a small five-inch screen connected to a PCB board. An RFID reader, flowmeter (to measure the liquid), and solenoid valve (to allow liquid to flow through the line or not) were also connected to the PCB board. The screen had a logo of a beer on it. When he placed the RFID card on the reader, the screen came to life. A beer meter on the right side popped up, and the number of ounces being poured was visible on the screen. The valve popped open to allow liquid through it. Then Hermann blew through the flowmeter to simulate a pour—and voila! It worked. It wasn’t a finished product, but it was at a point where I could see it in action. It needed a proper housing and frame as well as some design updates, but they were already working on that. I asked him if I could get a prototype sent to me the following week. This would allow me to close more deals.

Will we hit the delivery date next month for the projects I already have deposits for? I asked.

Yes, I believe we will, Hermann Jr. answered.

The feeling I