I'm a just a dev on the site, but here's my point of view. The news has overblown the actual laws concerning the marketing of drink specials. We have actually been in touch with the Virginia ABC since the start to make sure nobody gets in trouble as a result of this site. The laws are in place because Virginia is afraid of underage drinking, and they believe that drink specials encourage underage kids to drink (of course, they wouldn't be able to get into the bars, but that doesn't seem to concern the legislature). As long as the drink specials are advertised in a responsible manner, the state doesn't seem to have a problem with it. Luckily, being developed in VA means that if it works with the laws here, it will likely work with the laws pretty much everywhere else.

Me, I would think long and hard before I dropped barriers, even informational ones, between stupid college kids and excess drinking. Yes, they will drink, and yes, they are hearing about these specials from their buddies. But if something like this accelerates the process of drinking, especially by novices, isn't there the chance that someone gets hurt?

Also: After you've ignored me -- free country, go ahead -- and should I prove right -- happens every now and then -- you will NOT want legal discovery turning up statements like "fuck the world" in reference to your compliance with alcohol advertising law.

More important, you won't want your own self-discovery coming across such statements at 3am when you can't sleep because some user of your site has suffered something.

There are lots of clever ideas in the world, you don't need this one. And if you're going to do it, you need to be a lot more careful than you are here.

"Stupid college kids" are going to drink in excess regardless.

More importantly, though, I don't think price is an issue that's stopping a substantial amount of college students from getting bombed. Unless something has changed drastically in the 5 years since I've been out of college, there are always ways to get free/cheap booze. With that said, I highly doubt you'd see a big increase in drunk college students doing harm.

Maybe this is hopelessly naïve, but I almost feel like having to navigate through sticky legal restrictions offers some advantages to a startup. For one, it's a barrier to entry for competitors. But even more, it forces you to be creative with monetization, and lets you tackle some interesting problems others may have decided to skip.

That's one way to look at it - like many of the risk factors we struggle against (market, product, incumbent), if it can be overcome it can be a definite barrier to competition.

On the flip side, it's still a risk.

We've considered this issue and done a lot of research on it, there's really only 12 states to worry about, and even those the problems can be overcome. It's never a good idea to see barriers and say "nope, too hard". Figure out a solution, there is one, it's the Hacker Way.