How did a transfer student from community college with no prior programming experience build and launch, by the time he graduated 2 years later, a viral app currently spreading like wildfire across US campuses?
Joshua Anton
This is the story of Drunk Mode, the brainchild of graduating UVA student Joshua Anton (Commerce Marketing/IT ’14). Drunk Mode (iOS / Android) helps you to not drunk dial your friends, and helps you locate your friends who use Drunk Mode via GPS (here’s a video of the app in action). Since its official launch on April 25, 2014 to universities across the east coast and the Midwest, it has now amassed a total of 32,500 downloads, with 40% of users from outside the United States (largest representations being 21% Russia, 6.8% UK, and 3.3% France).
It is interesting to note that Drunk Mode has not sought nor received any external funding thus far; instead, it was bootstrapped together and has been self-sustaining, despite paying its team members for work done. There are many student entrepreneurs who want to build an app and launch successfully but they don’t know how to code. Many in this position see only two paths to success: either the route of finding an expert coder co-founder or paying a development group a hefty sum of money or equity. Anton credits the success of Drunk Mode to the amazing team of nine people he was able to bring on board, and the fact that he and his team learned the skills they needed on the fly.
This article offers the first in-depth look at the story behind Drunk Mode, and interprets what this means for the overall student entrepreneurial culture of the University of Virginia from Anton’s unique perspective (skip to latter part here).
The Drunk Mode Story
Humble Beginnings
Justin Washington.
Anton had been thinking about the idea for the Drunk Mode app to prevent drunk dialing before he transferred to UVA from the Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) at the beginning of his third-year, but was struggling with his inexperience in computer science. For the first two to three months, he talked to about twenty different people looking for someone who could code apps and who was willing to help found Drunk Mode. Through what he calls a “happy accident,” he found his to-be technical co-founder, Justin Washington (CS ’14), “randomly” on a University bus coming from Runk dining hall in October 2012. This was the first of many “happy accidents” that Anton cites as key milestones in the venture’s development. They reconvened at the Starbucks on University Avenue, and realized that both of them were interested in building apps. However, neither of them had any experience in it; Washington had not programmed applications before (though he had experience programming robots), and Anton had no experience in marketing or scaling an application. They both saw that Drunk Mode could be their conduit to “learn to build an app off of a pretty good idea” and decided push it as far as they could.
In December 2012, through the McIntire School of Commerce’s Integrated Core Curriculum (ICE) trip for Block 1 & 2 lead by Marketing Professor Natasha Foutz, Anton visited the Charlottesville-based WillowTree Apps. There, he inquired after all things app-related in order to learn as much as he could about approaching application building. In January of 2013, the two co-founders discovered the Stanford University Entrepreneurship Corner online, which helped give structure to Washington for how to go about developing an app. While Washington was learning to code it, Anton continued to learn the conceptual parts of what could and could not be done with Android and iOS in terms of features and functions. He essentially became skilled at communicating with developers about technical aspects in a non-technical way. In March 2013, they had finished their rough prototype. There was one problem that they soon discovered after testing it: instead of hiding your phone’s contacts, it would delete them forever! It took them another month to debug the app.
Popularity Hits
Up to this point, the team of two had not thought about any sort of launch strategy; they were just looking to develop a working app. A string of “happy accidents” occurred.
Anton was featured in a Cavalier Daily “Love Connection” article, where two students are matched up on a blind date and asked to review the other person afterwards. During this post-date interview, Anton seized the opportunity for publicity of Drunk Mode’s upcoming release, scheduled for April 15, 2013, was referred to Annie Cohen, who wrote the first piece of publicity on Drunk Mode. Cohen’s piece appeared in the evening of April 16, a day after the app released. By 2pm the next day, Anton had received an email from NBC29 news saying, “We saw the Cavalier Daily article. What is the fastest you can get in touch with us for an interview?” They filmed in the back of the Trinity Irish Pub, and the video segment was released that evening. The article can still be found here. Beyond Charlottesville, the Examiner picked up the story as well and released it to a national audience.
Later that day, Anton returned from a haircut and his roommates immediately alerted him to the massive amount of tweets and Facebook posts commenting about Drunk Mode. Up to this point, they team had spent $560 on the project; in the first 24 hours after the article was released, there were over 700 downloads of their $0.99 app, meaning that they immediately broke even. They had jumped to a rank of #226 paid app in the App store by the close of April 17, 2013 (top 5 in the Health/Fitness section).
While this seems like a good thing, they had not anticipated it. Anton remarks, “It was weird. There were still bugs in the app, but people still used it and loved it.” From this, he gathered two lessons for preparing for the release of any app: 1) expect your app to go viral, because if you are not ready for it you will lose momentum fast, 2) plan on little sleep in the following weeks because, “if anything can go wrong, it will.”
Experimentation
From April to November 2013, they went through a large experimentation period. Because they had not planned a launch strategy in advance, they had no concrete ideas for what to do next. Despite this, their users increased heavily. By November, 8,000 users had paid for this app.
Over that summer, Anton focused on marketing and scaling the app, while Washington kept learning to build and maintain it. On the social media side, Anton learned more very important lessons. First, Facebook Groups that are catered to your target audience are instrumental for driving downloads. “We were able to get onto every single Facebook group for millennials and university students to let them know Drunk Mode existed with a description and a picture.” From this, Anton cites that they received 3,000 paid downloads.
Second, Twitter also became a much bigger conduit than they had initially realized. Anton says, “On Twitter, it’s not just about selling your product, it’s about engaging with the culture of the users. We looked for people who tweeted about being drunk.” He emphasized the importance of finding out your ideal user and pinpointing them down to ‘This is the person who makes up ___% of our users.’ They had never done this before, so they were learning about this firsthand.
With Twitter, they learned that if they favorited the random tweets of people when they’re drunk, they will eventually favorite the tweets of influential people, such as a foreign news reporter. This exact scenario occurred, when Drunk Mode found out they were featured on Villa Schweppes, a Parisian news site specializing in nightlife activities. This was interesting, because the app was not available in French. Despite this, downloads from France rose sharply. Further, the story got picked up by Yahoo OMG!, and was featured on Canadian CTVnews.ca for being a top app in France. With no PR strategy, they most certainly got great press coverage by just engaging on Twitter.
If international users were downloading Drunk Mode, they needed to seriously consider them or risk missing an opportunity. Back in March of 2013, Anton and a team from UVA were sent to Singapore to represent the United States in the global finals of the Unilever UniGame business competition. While they got sixth place, the practice of looking into marketing on an international level led Anton to begin including international market segments for the Drunk Mode customer base. He learned from the competition that, “While it’s amazing to have a great audience and expand everywhere, it’s better to focus apps on key countries.” What makes a key country? Anton and his team, specifically the summer interns Alfred Escobari (Marketing ‘16 at JMU) & Isaac Chen (Commerce ‘14), were able to figure out which other countries they should be looking at, based on anthropological research. For instance, they decided to focus on other Western countries because drunk dialing is seen as a much bigger problem there than in Eastern countries (in fact, it’s apparently acceptable to drunk dial your co-workers in Asia). By the end of the summer, they decided to focus on the US, Canada, UK, France, Australia, and New Zealand, and had translated the app into 6 more languages (Russian, French, Spanish, and just in case their assumptions were wrong, Korean, Traditional and Simplified Chinese).
Towards the end of the summer, the team began experimenting with features for the app that were beyond just hiding contacts. They experimented with a content aggregator, ThatNite.com, but they could not figure out why there was nobody using it. In November 2013, Anton visited the Uncubed Conference in New York while on a trip through the Entrepreneurship Group at UVA. There, he met Tim Chen of Nomura Securities (twin brother of Thomas Chen from Charlottesville-based WillowTree Apps that Anton had visited before), who gave him the advice, “Do not deviate too far from your base, and make sure you do one thing extremely well. For Drunk Mode, focus on being a fun preventative in the ‘drunk space.’” The reason why ThatNite.com wasn’t being used is that the space for content aggregation is crowded, and that in order to make those types of apps you need a better reason than just good content. They were deviating too far from their base. With Drunk Mode, they were addressing a real issue, not just providing entertainment.
Daquan Page
If they were going to make a second feature, it made more sense to go with an idea that came from Anton’s younger brother, Daquan Page, who is currently a first year at NOVA (Engineering/Music). Page experienced a situation involving finding two of his friends who were drunk at Tysons Corner at 2am on a weekend. Page thought, “I wish they could just send me their location by just pushing a button and then I could pick them up.” This was the seed for what would eventually become the Find My Drunk feature, and Page was brought onto the Drunk Mode team to work on this idea.
The Team Grows
By the end of November, the Drunk Mode team realized that they needed more people if they were to hit their planned launch date of April 2014. They needed developers for both iOS and Android, a social media leader, a data specialist, and a design team.
Philip Liberato
On the same trip to the Uncubed Conference in NYC, Anton met the next member of the Drunk Mode team, Philip Liberato (CS/Government ’15), who was a specialist in Android development. Over four weeks during Winter Break 2013, Liberato developed the core component of the Android Drunk Mode—the ability to block any app on the phone, and he greatly improved the user interface.
After exploring the power of social media over the summer, the team came to appreciate that managing it was a full-time job in itself. They posted a Facebook status soliciting a social media leader for Drunk Mode, and brought on Franco Honores (Aerospace Engineering, ’16 at Virginia Tech). Since then, Honores has been running all of the Drunk Mode social media accounts to engage with users and give the Drunk Mode brand an online personality.
Franco Honores
The last team member they added in November was Arian Rubin (Commerce ‘13), who had a specialty in web crawling and data collection. Though he had already graduated, he was still in Charlottesville because he was working on another startup, Moocho. Arian had just recently left Moocho to look for other opportunities when Anton and the Drunk Mode team were looking for people to add to scaling efforts for their planned April 2014 launch.
During Winter Break 2013, they found the perfect duo for their design team. They found Heather Rody (CS/Theater ’17 at NOVA) thru a Facebook status solicitation and Nikita Iszard (Graphic Design ’17 at JMU) who designed their logos, images, and a whole new app user interface for the April 2014 launch.
Arian Rubin, Heather Rody, and Nikita Iszard
Solidifying the Plan
As the spring semester started, the team was starting to solidify their plans for the launch. Before this, the team was trying to “do a million things at once and it was becoming too complicated.” Anton credits much of the plan’s refinement to two experiences. First, he was approached by three fellow student entrepreneurs in late January to form the Mastermind group known as Ivory Punch. A Mastermind group is a support tool that has been used by many to-be-successful people before, including Ben Franklin’s Junto, JRR Tolkien & C.S. Lewis’s Inklings, and Henry Ford & Edison’s Vagabonds. The second experience was his Entrepreneurship Capstone II course, taught by UVA Commerce School Professor Brendan Richardson (CEO of PsiKick) and Eric Martin, a founder of 80amps. (According to Anton, Frameri, the Favela Experience, and LearnShark all came through this class last year.)
At this time, Anton credits the Entrepreneurship Capstone class with providing him with the structure of making weekly goals and delivering on them in the short time frame of a semester. He praises the Mastermind group for keeping him accountable on this focus, because he “didn’t want to look stupid in front of peers by defaulting on goals.” It also provided him with a group of people who were struggling through a similar path, and who were just as passionate as him about it. Before this time, weekly goals were not something he had ever kept to, though he knew that Stephen Covey emphasizes the importance of weekly goals in the famous book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Alexander Martinez
For the first six weeks of the semester, these weekly goals kept Drunk Mode on the rails to success. For example, one of the week’s goals was to find the answer to: “Who is your ideal audience? What features exactly do you want to add?” This allowed Anton and the team to prioritize tasks for Drunk Mode. Another goal provided a deadline on finding more developers for Android and iOS.
They found Alexander Martinez (Computer Science ’16) through a friend of a friend, when they began asking around for Android developers. Martinez has been working on the “Hangover” feature for Android, which allows you to recover all your lost SnapChats from when you were using Drunk Mode.
Raven Smith
The last team member was their first experienced iOS developer, Raven Smith (CS ’15), a friend of Philip Liberato who expressed interest when Anton was speaking to Liberato about Drunk Mode at Clemons Library. She has been handling the user interface on iOS and the data analytics part, enabling the team to gather useful information about users on how they use the app. Going forward, she will be handling all of the future features like Hangover for iOS.
Finally, the Entrepreneurship Capstone class had provided the team with the insight that they needed to create three features: 1) Hangover, to recover lost SnapChats, 2) Breadcrumbs, to track where you went the night before, and 3) Find My Drunk, the ability to track your friends via GPS.
Preparing for Release
It was March 1. Their deadline for releasing Drunk Mode was April 15, a date that was symbolic because it was the one-year anniversary of the previous release, and because it would be two weeks before classes ended. This timing was crucial, because of the annual drinking event at the Foxfield Races and because of all of the partying during spring Finals (and with a week of buffer room for the unanticipated). They had six weeks to create an entirely new app for iOS and Android without fatal bugs, developed by full-time students in their spare time.
While the lessons they had learned from April to April came into play for this second round, the road was not without bumps. Many “happy accidents” continued to help them along the way. In the first two weeks, Martinez finished Breadcrumbs and Hangover for the Android side. Unfortunately, their iOS developer disappeared for two weeks during Spring Break. What do you do when you lose your only iOS developer? During Spring Break, Rubin’s plane was delayed, during which time he met the app development company, the Jed Mahonis Group in Minnesota. On the 21st of March, with three weeks left, Anton had to make the hard decision to pay the professional company to develop a simpler version of the hype map for iOS, which they called Find My Drunk. Overall, he thinks that this decision was essential. “While it’s good to have an in-house development team, in a time crunch it is necessary to seek professional services. Students are talented and loyal, but their priorities definitely do (and should) lie with school. When you pay a professional, they make you their priority.” The Jed Mahonis Group turned around this usual 2-3 month project in 3 days.
During midterms, Smith came back online to finish half of the iOS Hangover feature. As they neared the release, Anton’s Professor Richardson advised that they needed to prioritize the redesign of their user interface in order to make it easy to use for the average drunk person. “Make it look like Apple, not Microsoft.” Richardson said, “People are using it for the experience.” This came back to the advice they had heard before from Tim Chen to not deviate too far from their base. Richardson said, “Whatever you do for release in two weeks, make sure you do it extremely well and that your users love you for it.” At this point, Anton pulled Smith off of finishing the Hangover feature and had her instead focus on debugging and improving the user experience. At the end of the project, the two differentiating features of Drunk Mode were actually put to the back burner.
Ultimately, they had to delay the release by a week because they wanted to make sure their app was truly valuable to the user experience. During this last week, the design team (Rody and Iszard) pulled two all-nighters to develop the new user interface in a span of 36 hours (which would have probably taken two weeks otherwise). To focus on their users and stay true to their core, they also decided to give the app some “personality” by polling their current users for ideas to add value to the experience. There are now funny sayings that appear when you turn on the app and there is the option to answer math questions to unlock the Drunk Mode feature. They wanted to make this app for the night you’d rather remember. Anton said, “Drunk Mode is like your older brother— he may support you streaking the Lawn, but he won’t stand for you drunk dialing your friends.”
Release and the Launch Strategy
They decided to make it a free app, and sent the app approval request to Apple in the middle of the week, and expected approval within 4 days. On Friday, April 25, at 6pm, the app was officially released to University of Virginia and University of Alabama students. They did it on a small scale at first to make sure that there were no dire functionality bugs. Within the first 24 hours, they received 2,200 downloads, which is the equivalent of 2% from each University.
The team realized early on that all of their marketing should be geared toward users telling their friends, “You should get Drunk Mode.” Anton believes that “Drunk Mode is a recommendation by your social group, because it is a very useful tool.” As such, their launch strategy was to communicate the idea of the app, so that the people who need it will find out about it.
In the next two weeks, they released at thirteen more universities. These included James Madison University, Virginia Commonwealth University, West Virginia University, Penn State, Rutgers, Colorado State, UPenn, IUP, Iowa University, University of Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio State, and UT Austin. They purposely targeted the schools with students from large regions with major cities to control the market against future copycat apps. As this app was released before summer break, all students go home for summer. Anton anticipates that the current users will recruit a different demographic at home. He likened their strategy to what had made Facebook successful. “What separated Facebook from Friendster and the others? They were able to scale faster to Universities. They were both good products (actually, Facebook was relatively crappy). But Facebook was able to understand their community better and faster than the others, which enabled them to build it faster. They were able to become the social network.”
Screenshots of students who thought it was created by their school.
One of the funny things about the advertisement for it towards each school is that since it was sent to school e-mails, the students at many schools thought that their University was “awesome” because they were telling them to download an app called “Drunk Mode” (see Twitter screenshots above this paragraph). Anton was able to monitor these thoughts by the conversations on Twitter. Students were literally screenshotting the e-mail about the app and posting it to Twitter to interact with Honores on the Twitter account. These users were doing exactly what Anton had anticipated for a marketing strategy: they were providing Drunk Mode with lots of curated content, which significantly increased their brand awareness.
Users remark positively about Drunk Mode and provide brand awareness.
Users track their friends to make sure they get to class (you’re supposed to disable the feature the next morning!)
From this campaign, they received 13,500 more downloads, bringing the current total to 32,500 downloads at the time this article is published. Anton considers the launch a success, because of many factors. They were able to:
get people to talk about app naturally. The new users found the app so remarkable that they freely post about it on social media, where other people that they didn’t target would hear about it. When a user downloads this, “it’s an impulse download based on a friend’s recommendation.”
get users to follow on Twitter and ‘Like’ on Facebook by gamifying how they do it
create general awareness of the app. They had more users than expected.
get user data to debug the app. Smith was able to put in a Dashboard with Google Analytics and Parse to compile crash reports for addressing bugs rapidly.
build a network effect into the app (Find my Drunk). A user needs to have friends on there to use it effectively. People started referring to friends, adding their friends, and even broadcasting their Find My Drunk username on twitter. One Twitter user even used the app to track their roommate to make sure they went to class (they had not disabled the feature the morning after!)
achieve top 1000 apps on App Store iOS Sunday, May 4, 2014.
Drunk Mode reaches top 1000 apps on App Store on May 4, 2014.
Next Steps
So far, they have demonstrated that Drunk Mode is a success with their users. As they continue to generate buzz and publicity (May 15, 2014 article on WUVA Online), they are planning a new release in September 2014, with a completely redesigned user interface and a more improved Find My Drunk feature. There will be a larger launch to Florida and California schools.
Right now, they are beginning to look for campus reps to spread awareness. On this, Anton says, “We don’t need everyone on the app, just some key demographics. Our ideal users fall in three categories: the millennial socialite, the Greek user, and the classy pre-millennial (ages 22-40).” With the launch aimed at the universities, they have gotten a good start in covering the first category, and are looking for ways to branch out to the other two.
Perspectives on UVA Student Entrepreneurship
What were your most valuable resources at the University of Virginia?
In terms of personal growth, it was largely the likeminded people here in the thriving entrepreneurial culture. “In typical entrepreneurship, 90% of them are unemployed, and it’s a lonely world. UVA has provided me with an entrepreneurship community. There may not be many founders, but there are likeminded people. I especially value my Mastermind group: four people sitting at a table, covering four different verticals in startups, all founders themselves, and all are my age.”
Besides the student culture, his professors within the entrepreneurship track of the Commerce school “were crucial.” He greatly appreciates the time they took to talk with him and give him important advice on the path for Drunk Mode. Those who stood out the most were his Entrepreneurship Capstone professors: in the Fall 2013 semester, Professor David Touve, and in the Spring 2014 semester, Professors Brendan Richardson and Eric Martin.
In terms of Drunk Mode’s success, Anton credits the Entrepreneurship Group for providing invaluable networking meets, and Entrepreneurship Capstone class that allowed him to have a more structured environment to grow my company and get class credit. The UVA Commerce Career Services provided him the opportunity to visit Silicon Valley to see where more advanced startups like Google and Facebook are now, and to hear stories about what they did successfully and not so successfully.
In your opinion, how could UVA’s entrepreneurial scene be improved?
Anton believes that there are not a lot of founders here yet, “We don’t have a founder’s culture yet. There are lots of students who are excited and involved in the startup culture, and who want to work for startups, but there are not as many founders as there could be.” When he first came to UVA in August of 2012, he visited the nascent HackCville, but there was not much there at that time compared to what exists now. Over the course of the last two years, Anton has seen and appreciated the people and the infrastructure that has grown to help the founders come out, especially HackCville. He says that this has helped provide knowledge, networking ability, and the necessary cultural movement for the University. Now, the final puzzle piece is the founder’s movement.
Anton believes there are two ways to be a founder.
First, you knew you were a founder to begin with. You say, “I’m in entrepreneurship to build something. I’m willing to fail and learn a lot even though I don’t have the skill.
Second, you could be a closet founder, which is the current majority of the student startup culture around UVA. These types of founders have more to lose by founding their idea, and these types go to work in consulting or at an existing startup first, after which they plan to head to San Francisco once they have the money.
To be a successful student entrepreneur, you need to be the first type. As Anton is graduating from UVA this spring, he is planning to continue with Drunk Mode full-time afterwards. He will not be seeking a traditional job, despite the urging from many of his friends and family. It has been scary and difficult for him to stay this path, because it is so unique. His uncle told him, “You know, people don’t go hungry when they work for JP Morgan.”
To really initiate a founder’s movement, UVA basically needs more founders. Anton believes that the first stage of the movement would just generate more successful founders who started their project as a UVA student and took it from there after graduation. The next stage would be people who founded their project at UVA, and found success during their time at UVA. That’s when these role models are relatable to student entrepreneurs.
Anton hopes that his success with Drunk Mode will serve to break down the first of those barriers for the founder’s movement, “I transferred to UVA for the entrepreneurial track at McIntire, and I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started this app the week I transferred, and I’m leaving UVA with a launched app. This is my company after college. I didn’t have consulting experience; my summer internship was at a startup called Wealthminder, purely for mentorship. It wasn’t a Google, or a Spotify.” When Drunk Mode is truly successful, he hopes it will send a message to all students, especially those at UVA, that, “If I work on my project for the next two years, I can be just like that guy who took the time to just do it even though he didn’t get funding or have any amazing things happen.” Anton believes that many students have great ideas but they just aren’t executing on them. “They aren’t willing to fail hard. I was willing to fail. I put in my whole heart and my two years at UVA to prove that I can build a mobile app and be successful, even though I may not have the skills yet.”
What makes a successful founder of the first type? “It’s not how smart you are, how hard you work, what your idea is, or how much funding you get; it’s talking to many, many people, finding great mentors, and having the perseverance to continue, even if it seems hopeless or you may not be successful. Continue and push it as far as possible.”
Anton believes that the University is heading in the right direction. He’s excited for it, and hopes that “when I come back in the next few years, I will see the UVA student startup community full of founders and not just those who want to be within the startup community. I hope the student entrepreneurs who come after me do it ten times better than I did.”
Why did you choose to bootstrap and not seek funding from the outset?
“I didn’t see a need for why we needed money. Seeking funding is difficult and time-consuming and by accepting it, you have to answer to other people. I was able to get the idea where I needed to be without being restricted by making profit right away. I wanted to fail on my own dime rather than others.” Anton followed the advice of Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, “Your startup needs to be Ramen Profitable.”
They did not submit to the Galant Challenge in 2013 or 2014 for this reason. Although Anton admits that the Galant Challenge would have been useful for getting awareness up for Drunk Mode, giving up equity for cash was not what they needed. “Instead of making vast assumptions in exchange for money, we wanted to make an argument that nobody could refute: that we have a quality product and that people are actively using it.”
“The projects I did before, I bootstrapped. There was no need to get funding before we had traction. In the beginning, Justin and I didn’t yet have the credibility to go up to someone to ask for funding. At first glance, we were not the right people to build this—but we became the right people.” Anton emphasizes, “It’s my team that made this successful. They all share into the vision. In these early stages, money doesn’t keep people there or make them work hard.”
If anyone reading this is interested in learning more about Drunk Mode or what they need going forward, (they could always use more smart, talented, and hungry people), contact Josh at josh [at] drunkmodeapp.com.
Finally, I leave you all with this interesting fact: Co-Founders Anton and Washington don’t actually drink.