The tracking platform behind a keg rental start-up
Renting kegs to craft brewers only works if you know where every keg is, who has it and who to bill, from the brewery to the pub and back.
The problem
Kegs are expensive and slow to buy, which makes them a stumbling block for small craft brewers. Kegstar's answer was to own the kegs and rent them out: "We own the kegs so you don't have to."
That model lives or dies on knowing where the kegs are. Each one moves from the brewery to a warehouse, a distributor and a venue, then back again, and the business has to know who has it, how long they've had it and what to charge.
Constraints
- Small team, fast growth. A well-funded start-up growing quickly, with a small team running the business and me as the only developer.
- Many hands. Kegs pass through brewers, distributors, warehouses and venues, none of whom work for Kegstar.
- Tracking is the product. Every keg was barcoded and tagged, and brewers needed to see where their beer was, on their phones.
- Built to go global. The platform had to work beyond Australia from the start.
What I did
It was a team effort, and my part was the technology. As the solo developer, I architected and built the platform the business ran on: asset tracking for every keg, customer management for brewers and venues, and billing on top. It exposed a REST API with an Angular front end, and was rolled out globally.
Customers needed native apps, so I managed an external agency to build them for iOS and Android against the platform's API, setting the direction and keeping the apps and the platform in step.
How it fits together
Outcome
- Kegstar's valuation grew from $20m to $50m while I was there.
- Brambles, the global supply-chain company, took a 30% stake in Kegstar in 2014 and bought the rest of the business in December 2015.
- A tracking, customer and billing platform, built as the solo developer within a small team.