Did you ever get a thirst for an adult beverage during a snow storm, only to find your larder bare? Along comes Drizly, an application that can get your alcohol delivered to you, at least if you are in a city, in twenty to forty minutes.
Nick Rellas, CEO and co-founder of four year old Drizly, explained how he applied technology to the historically staid liquor business. Drizly gives you an app for your phone or device. You use this app to order what you need. Drizly takes that order and sends it to a nearby liquor store under contract with Drizly. The liquor store delivers product, receives and keeps the entire payment.
How does Drizly make money? A monthly license fee from the liquor store. Drizly never touches the beverage, and never touches the money within the transaction. Now in fourteen markets including Boston and New York, Drizly is again raising capital and anticipates substantial expansion in the United States and Canada in the next twelve months.
An additional possible future revenue source could also be from manufacturers or importers, where advertisements could have a click-through button so that, if the consumer wants to buy the product, that information comes to Drizly and Drizly passes it to a retailer, thereby giving manufacturers or importers an immediate ability to themselves drive sales to consumers.
Drizly also has a compliance function wherein identification of persons authorized to place orders has been preprocessed, so as to avoid facilitating distribution to, for example, underage consumers.
Rellas provided his remarks to a breakfast meeting of the Association for Corporate Growth, held in Boston on January 15th. His description of his business model and its application to the consumer marketplace is suggestive of the disruptive impact of web-based services that are reshaping business: Uber and Amazon spring to mind immediately. The founder (who is in his 20s) worked in a liquor store, noted the absence of technology, and applied his generation’s technological skills to the normally conservative liquor business.