OneMoreDrink.app

I faced a canon event in my life during the summer of 2019. I could stay in Shanghai and accept an offer to work as a consultant at one of the top law firms in China, or I could take a leap of faith and move to Taipei to co-found a tourism startup with one of my best friends.

I ended up taking the latter, and I am glad I did because it was where I discovered my love of programming. Our goal was simple. We wanted to create a tourism app and website to help Japanese tourists travel around Taiwan. We had done our market research, and as long as there wasn't a major worldwide pandemic that would decimate global travel, this product would work.

We started out creating our product. We made promotional videos and began to plan out our web and mobile app. As I had just left Shanghai, a large portion of my friends were living there. Near the end of 2019, they had begun sending videos of a major virus event sweeping through a city in China. Then, Taiwan shut its borders abruptly.

My co-founder and I were pretty far along with our tourism company, but tourism ceased to exisit for the next 2 years. As Taiwan was one of the first to close its borders to outside visitors and implemented two week mandatory quarantine, we watched the world fight over masks and toilet paper from the safety of our unaffected city.

As Taipei's restaurants and bars remained untouched, we decided to pivot our company away from tourism and into showcasing local venues, weekly events, and daily specials. It was during this pandemic that OneMoreDrink.app was born.

Our goal was simple. We wanted to become the platform that people would visit to find the best restaurants, daily food deals, happy hours, and live performances, and also who local venues would partner with in order to promote their specials and events. We had done our market research, and as long as a New Zealand pilot that knew he was infected with COVID didn't illegally break out of quarantine to visit one of the busiest markets in the city, this product would work.

I spent the majority of my time building the website on a CMS platform and learned JS, CSS, and HTML for personalization and customization. I also continued to work on promotional videos and written content, teaming up with local bars to showcase their bartenders making a signature drink and with local companies to cross-promote written content. My co-founder was in charge of building out the web app that I helped wireframe, test, and build out the database.

Things were going well, and then a pilot broke out of quarantine and spread the virus around a city that had avoided it for about a year, shutting down restaurants, bars, events, and as a result, us. Although our company was officially finished, it had given me a great skillset, countless stories, and more importantly opened my eyes to the world of programming.