It started witha spreadsheet.

A spreadsheet and some cursed logic

Tap’d began with an ordinary problem: I wanted to go out without overspending. So I did the only reasonable thing and built a spreadsheet — every happy hour and food special near me, held together by some genuinely cursed logic that tried to work out whether a given deal was live right now.

It worked, more or less. It was also a chore to keep current, and it only knew about the handful of spots I’d wandered into myself.

No app knew my neighborhood

Surely someone had built this already. A few apps came close — but none of them covered my area. The local spots, the neighborhood happy hours, the specials I actually cared about: missing. If you didn’t already know a deal existed, there was no way to find it.

Too local for any one company

Happy hours are stubborn things. They’re intensely local, they change on a whim, and no company is ever going to hand-maintain them block by block, city by city.

But a community can. When everyone adds the deals they find and vouches for the ones they’ve tried, you get something no single company could build alone: a living, local bank of specials that stays accurate because the people using it keep it that way.

A living list, kept honest by the crowd

That’s Tap’d. Spot a special? Add it. Not sure a deal’s still good? Vote on it. Every tap makes the map a little more complete and a little more trustworthy — for everyone. No stale listings, no dead ends, no turning up to a “happy hour” that ended six months ago.