This week I spoke to Lin Dai, CEO of NY-based Hooch, about an interesting approach to PR. Since its inception in 2015, Hooch has been steadily growing audience to 100K subscribers, many of whom are paying $9.99 per month. The mobile app gives visitors to more than 500 venues the privilege of “first drink free” as they expand their roster of bar stops and social experiences.
Hooch was founded by Ukrainian-born Aleksey Kernes, Lin Dai (of Shanghai) and Jared Christopherson, cofounder of Yellowhammer Media Group providing high growth strategies for comScore top 100 companies including Living Social (now Groupon).
Kernes dreamed up the idea for Hooch during his tenure as a doorman for Hotel Chantelle of New York. He watched the response of clients being rewarded with a gift they universally welcomed—free drinks. At the hotel, he met Lin Dai, then the CMO of Keek, a social-networking service he’d just taken public in Toronto.
The two joined Jared Christopherson, an expert in high-scale marketing, and bootstrapped the app from Dai’s apartment and building lounge at Caledonia, in New York. (As a side note, Lin got married at about the same time he started working for Hooch, making his wife a mega-hero). The three built a culture that attracted four additional members–a head of operations, head of events and point people in LA and Hong Kong. The company is currently seeking additional funding, after launching itself on the steam of a $1M seed round from friends and family and angels in the hospitality space. More recently, the company is gaining celebrity fans (DefJam’s Russell Simmons is an angel investor) who validate the company and the experience through social media and Tweets.
Dai is quick to admit his audacious goals for the company, which he characterizes as “far beyond a free drink club.” He intends to raise the membership to 500K paying customers for the lifestyle product that at $9.99 monthly is affordable to fairly well anyone as a kind of a “Class Pass for drinks.” Beyond the obvious reasons for growth the company is building a data business by gathering information on who buys what, by gender, demographic and even time of day.
“Everybody wants a free drink,” Dai says. “It’s not perceived as a discount, but an aspirational experience. You’re always happy somebody took care of you. It’s not like getting…