The Happiest Hour, is your wingperson in the world of food & drink offers, hooking you up with the hottest specials around. The Happiest Hour’s mission is to empower people to find great offers and to eat and drink out more with family and friends, whilst supporting great local venues.
Joonas Karppinen says:“I co-founded The Happiest Hour as Australia has some of the pubs in the world, and many have great happy hours and weekly food specials, but they are difficult to find on a reliable platform. What’s better than visiting a great pub special with family or friends?
The business was launched in 2004 well before even smartphones existed. The first version involved having an email database of people who wanted to receive a weekly email on the latest pub specials in their area. Pub managers would email us their latest offers and we’d then let our database know what they may be most interested in.
Then in the late 2000s, the launch of the iphone as the first smartphone led us down the path of creating a user-friendly app to allow people to find the most relevant pub specials to them, and we’ve had a live app since then, with well over 250k organic app downloads over the years and over 150k monthly searches on our platform.”
COVID shut down the hospitality industry for two years. The Happiest Hour just relaunched their new platform. The Happiest Hour has over 1000 pubs in Sydney and Melbourne on board with plans to expand nationally.
Joonas concludes: “Firstly, Covid has caused a shift of over $1b of revenue from on-premise dining in pubs to food delivery. We want to support local pubs and move a large chunk of this revenue back to on-premise.
Secondly, Covid instigated antisocial stay at home habits which have lingered on much longer than many anticipated. We want to play a role in getting people back out to local venues with family and friends, fully aware that social connections are the key to happiness.*
Finally, the reality of the current economic climate and the cost of living pressures associated with it, are that the two factors mentioned above are further reinforced. Our users tell us that our platform enables them to get out more with family and friends, while supporting local venues. “
