A new venture for Wichita software developer Dave Cunningham combines a love for two passions — data and whiskey.
The founder and CEO of local custom software company Flint Hills Group has launched Whiskey Shelf, which is a mobile application that tracks a user's whiskey inventory and delivers data in almost painstaking detail for the die-hard whiskey drinker.
"Whiskey has exploded the last couple years, and users are, like, almost a little insane," Cunningham said, laughing, "they want to share with everyone."
Whiskey Shelf went live on the Apple and Google app stores in late February, and Cunningham says it's now approaching 3,000 users across the globe.
Users can select a bottle from the existing database, or scan a new one and give it rating and price. So far, users have scanned more than 57,000 different whiskey bottles to track their collections.
In that way, Whiskey Shelf shares crowdsource whiskey data — a function that Cunningham says doesn't exist on similar apps.
"We now know for this bottle, across thousands of users, what they rated and what they paid for it," he said. "So then when you go to a liquor store and you scan that bottle, we can tell you the average rating and we can tell you the average price people are paying for it."
The concept for Whiskey Shelf was sparked out of an 12-week tech startup course in Wichita called Campfire.
Explore the WBJ's Business Startup Guide: Find the Wichita organizations, people and resources you should know if you're considering taking the leap into entrepreneurship
Based on the Y Combinator Startup Course at Stanford University, Campfire is designed to help grow new tech ideas and tech companies that takes place each year at Groover Labs. Part of the team that initially brought Campfire to Wichita three years ago, Cunningham helps build the curriculum and serves as a mentor for the program participants.
So far, 65 people have completed the program, with spring classes starting back up in March 2024.
And for the first time this spring, Cunningham was a participant.
"I actually applied things I was teaching in this class for three years to build this software," he said.
In addition to tracking a collection, Whiskey Shelf also allows users to create what's called an infinity bottle.
"It's really a blend of your best stuff, and then you measure what goes into it and you're creating something that doesn't physically exist because you blended other bourbons or ryes together," Cunningham said. "It fills the bottle up as you add in or pour out, it calculates what the proof of the bottle is.
"At some point we're also going to allow this to generate kind of an electronic recipe card. Like, this tastes amazing, I want to share this mixture with everyone so they can read it."
There's also a premium subscription of the app that's priced based on how many open or new bottles that are in a user's inventory, starting at $40 per year for less than 100 bottles, all the way up to $500 per year for someone with 2,500 bottles or more.
The premium version of Whiskey Shelf has several advanced features, including a random bottle selector, which will pick a bottle at random based on certain criteria.
Only want to drink from bottles that are already opened?
From bottles that haven't been opened?
Or something for special occasions?
With the premium version, users can also email themselves detailed reports analyzing their whiskey collection. For example, in Cunningham's personal collection there are 128 bottles, including 96 bourbons, 13 ryes, three Irish whiskeys, and so on. Sixty-nine bottles haven't been opened yet, 59 are opened or nearly empty.
"Who the heck would know the percentage of what stage of open your bottle is and what's the average cost and the average proof of your entire collection — but when we have all the data, we can calculate crazy stuff, including like a diversity score," Cunningham said, which is "exactly what type of whiskey you have from what countries, so we provide these really interesting things."
Cunningham said he also realized that whiskey drinkers are social in nature — they all want to share what they have with other Whiskey Shelf users — so he said there are plans to expand the app with a social media-type component
Cunningham said his goal is to continue to grow the brand and reach more audiences, and ultimately, if anyone offered the right price, he'd also sell the business.
"I don't know what this is going to turn into," he said. "It could be pretty big."
