Hi there and welcome to Ultimate Happy Hours. This website was started back in 2018 by a friend and me. As a couple of Canadians who travelled to the United States, we wanted to experience happy hours because they weren’t a thing in Canada. We got on the topic because when travelling to different cities, finding happy hour deals in other cities took a lot of work. The search results were full of old articles or articles listing only a few happy hours.
The timing of this conversation worked out fantastic as I was heading down to Los Angeles and San Francisco for the week. While chatting with a friend back home in Canada about the idea at a bar in Venice Beach, a man beside me heard my conversation. A few minutes later, he chimed in, stating that he liked the idea of a happy hour website and that he had created a pilot for a TV series going around to happy hours. This seemed like destiny to me, and the next day, I sketched out the website’s UX.
Since 2009, I have been playing around with websites and digital marketing. At the time, I had just left the golf industry to pursue a different path, to be able to travel more and work from anywhere. This experience helped me create this website.
We started slow and only had a few cities listed in the first two years. But when COVID hit in early 2000 and my business slowed down, I went to work and added a bunch of other cities. Here we are in 2024, and the website lists well over 100 cities globally. I update all the menus on the website using a spreadsheet which links to the happy hour menus on a restaurant website.
My main reason for starting this website was to help people save time and money. You can quickly find a happy hour and save money when enjoying the deals. I am trying to be more frugal with the rising costs of eating out, but I still enjoy going out to eat since I work from home alone during the day. It’s my chance to see and hear people!
Outside of maintaining this website, I DJ and produce electronic music under the alias Joca; I work for 3rd Avenue Label as A&R, run a local SEO company called Meaningful Marketing, and specifically help therapists at Marketing Well. When not doing these things, I enjoy running, hiking, keeping my plants alive, connecting with friends and playing a little golf.