Flowtab
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Flowtab was a mobile app for ordering and paying for drinks in bars and nightclubs. Customers placed drink orders from their phones; the orders were relayed to a bar-side iPad app synced with the venue's point-of-sale terminal, and payment was processed in-app with funds going to the bar's bank account. It was launched in 2011 in California by Mike Townsend and Kyle Hill.
02 / Flowtab FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Flowtab's business model never aligned with venue and customer incentives: bars saw little reason to change how they served drinks, and users had no strong reason to order through an app. A high-profile promotional bar crawl with Uber and Thrillist ended in disaster when the app buckled and drink orders piled up, and the company could not raise further funding. It shut down in 2013, and the founders published detailed postmortems and open-sourced their pitch materials.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- App launched
Mike Townsend and Kyle Hill launch Flowtab as a mobile drink-ordering and payment app for bars and nightclubs, raising about $50,000 in early funding.
- Second app version and bar-crawl failure
Flowtab ships a rewritten second version of its app, then co-hosts a three-bar crawl with Uber and Thrillist where the app fails under load and orders pile up.
- Shutdown
Flowtab ceases operations in 2013; the founders publish a detailed failure chronicle and open-source company materials.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Flowtab raised about $50,000 in early funding, with its last recorded round structured as debt.
- 02
The company shut down in 2013 after its business model failed to align with customer and venue incentives and it could not raise further funding.
- 03
No reliable loss figure with a clear subject, period and basis exists, so no loss amount is recorded.