Amble

You own a bar. You bartend. You take inventory. You do it all.

Your business hours are about to change for the summer. Now you need to log into Facebook, Untappd, Google, and your website to update them.

You’re hosting an event. You create a quick Facebook event for it between shifts, but people who’ve moved on from Facebook never see it. It doesn’t show up on Google, and you can’t figure out how to add it to your website.

Imagine you had an app on your phone where you could update your hours, hit save, and every one of your platforms (including your website) updates all at once. That event you’re hosting? Add it to the app, and when you hit save, it posts to your website and pushes to Facebook and Google.

This is what I’m building for Matinee, my friends’ bar in downtown Buffalo. They’ve been open since 2016, and I actually designed their logo as my senior project in college. They’ve kept the place going ever since, and I want to make their lives a little easier.

I really want to take everything I’ve learned about tech and design over the past decade and use it to help more small businesses, which seem to get overlooked by the newest innovations. I want to build Amble as a repeatable platform for other businesses so I can keep it affordable. I want to make sure they have an option between a basic Squarespace site and a $15,000 custom build.

That’s my goal with Amble, and I’m super thankful that Rex and Kev trust me enough to trial it with them.

I started my career at an agency, designing a whole bunch of WordPress sites. Well, okay, customizing themes, throwing a bunch of !important tags in the custom CSS box, and crossing my fingers hoping it made things look right.

Then we got busier, hired some developers, and started pumping out killer websites for small and medium-sized businesses. They looked awesome and our clients were really happy with them, but over the years I noticed almost every single one sat stale for a couple of years until it got rebuilt. Rinse and repeat.

But why? We built them on WordPress, made the CMS really friendly, and trained our clients on how to make updates.

It feels obvious now. They’re busy! They’re running the day-to-day at their business, focusing on the things that affect revenue. Updating their website is literally the last thing on their minds. Social media gets the updates, and the website sits and collects dust.

I’ve spent the six years since the agency working as a product designer, still making things look nice and easy to use, but now also very focused on the bottom line for the companies I work with. Now the answer feels crystal clear to me, and I’m calling it Amble.

Amble has been in the back of my mind for a while now, and thankfully, my friends at Matinee are letting me trial it with them. More to come!