Beer discovery, solved in-store
Finding the right craft beer in a wall of cans is a guessing game. Crowler — an app I founded alongside my good friend Matt — ended it: point your device at a label in-store and the app identifies it through image recognition, then pulls in ratings from leading beer platforms so you buy informed.
In 2015, this was hard
Today you'd hand this to any vision model over lunch. We built it in 2015, with no foundation models and no vision APIs worth the name: image recognition wired up by hand and shipped to a phone. The app is a museum piece now, but it marks the start of a pattern. I've been betting on machines that can see and reason for a decade, and these days the bets pay off in production.
