COS Brews incorporates a variety of game types that are designed to get people up and exploring the Colorado Springs craft beer community.

Map Quests - Users must check-in (aka "redeem a promo") at various breweries around town. The larger the area covered, the more points they earn. Breweries should see a lot of new faces coming in playing these games.

Treasure Hunts - these are a little more oriented for tourists, but locals can enjoy them as well. Essentially COS Brews curates a list of "things to do around our breweries", working with local restaurants, community happenings, landmarks, and other organizations to create "treasure hunts" that users follow (scanning QR codes and answering questions along the way) to earn points and explore COS.

Earn Ranks - these are points that are earned by high frequency engagement. Very similar to "achievements" in console gaming, ranks are earned by completing various milestones and conditional objectives. For example "after 15 check-ins a user earns 500 points along with their 'Amateur Craft Goer' rank".

Trivia and Surveys - These are designed to be fun and fast for customers to earn some quick points, while providing the COS community with invaluable new data and information opportunities that informed, actionable decisions can be made from. "What's your favorite brewery event?", for example.

Quick Points - These are points that can be earned by writing reviews (that are approved), sharing various COS Brews listings on social media, referring friends to join the platform, and other conceptually "quick" ways to earn points. 

This was actually a big part of our delay to rolling out COS Brews, we were going to "put food trucks in later" but we quickly realized after getting initial feedback from COS residents and beer lovers, food trucks are incredibly important to their decision making processes. So, we delayed a few months and installed some food truck features.

To get to the point, breweries and food trucks have a "cross-relationship" established in their listings. This means that a brewery can set a food truck to "active" from their account, or a food truck can select a brewery to set as "active at". Either way COS Brews will notify customers who have selected that notification option, that "food truck X is now active at brewery Y". Additionally, the food truck will show up on the "active food truck" map and be displayed to customers on either the food truck's page or your brewery's page, that there is an active food truck at my brewery.

Additionally, we are currently building out a "discovery, scheduling, and coverage" portal in the COS Brews platform that will allow real-time communication and direct requests between breweries "needing a food truck" and food trucks "needing a brewery". We are hoping to have this out in the next few months (April-June 2022).

This is handled by creating a separate "brewery owner" subscription for each location, you can use either the same business account and "own" both listings (recommended) or create the listings under a separate business account for each site/business.

The biggest and most important reason each location requires its own subscription, is because each brewery site operates as its own listing. This allows you to independently control/monitor each location's events, tap list, food truck activity, etc.  

That said, We are constantly working to improve the platform and your experience. Please reach out to support if you have any questions, need assistance, and/or have a suggestion.

COS Brews is a deployed "Local Hybrid Experience" platform, created and provided by Platyform LLC, a Colorado Springs based technology and consultancy-as-a-service business on a mission to help empower local business communities to establish their own locally-designed technology solutions as opposed to poor adoption of "top down" agendas and pre-packaged solutions that assume powerful technology can be effectively implemented on a one-size-fits-all basis.

COS Brews is Platyform LLC's first deployed iteration of this mission, and one that owner, Matt Blanchette, pursued specifically because of his personal enjoyment exploring the local craft beer community when he was visiting COS annually as a tourist (2013-2019) and ongoing fascination with the local market and community upon his move to Colorado Springs in 2019. In light of this research and personal experience, COS Brews employs many concepts and strategies that emphasize a highly structured and feature-rich community experience - designed specifically and exclusively for Colorado Springs' local craft beer market and associated food truck circuit.

COS Brews' functionality and notifications technology suite has been actively crafted with feedback from the Colorado Springs' brewery community and desire to "incentivize exploration" in a new and highly engaging way. COS Brews' position is to operate this platform on a daily and ongoing basis in a way that actively enhances, regulates, and protects each engaging parties' interest (customers, staff, breweries, etc.) under its rules, guidelines, and operating principles while continuously improving the local technology opportunity it provides the Colorado Springs brewery community and its customers.

COS Brews is a registered DBA of Platyform LLC, a Colorado Springs based technology and consulting-as-a-service company owned by Matt Blanchette, also local operator of COS Brews.

COS Brews represents a deployed and functioning "Local Hybrid Experience" platform as provided and maintained by Platyform's library of trainings, technology, and processes. Platyform operates on the philosophy that "top-down" strategies of giant technology firms and big business agendas will never truly cater to the local beauty, character, and charisma of the communities and locales that they service. Platyform (starting with COS Brews) is seeking to prove that local communities and leaders can effectively lead "bottom-up" strategies and initiatives that cater to their local, personal communities with not just access to powerful functionality, but the community's collective creative thinking in unison with guided execution.

Charging for customer memberships is an important differentiator compared to other competing platforms who try to grow audiences quickly with "Free For All" pricing models (not free for businesses but we'll get there). While at first glance charging for memberships might seem counterintuitive to growing an audience, COS Brews actually implements this pricing per our "community-first" philosophy.

While it should be noted that COS Brews does provide a free membership option, it is very limited. COS Brews is intentionally not a "Free For All" platform, and encourages paid subscriptions on the basis that

1) COS Brews will never intrude its provided platform experience with third-party, non-craft beer related ads (even for free members - constant annoyance is not a fair incentive to upgrade, and it cheapens the perception of our platform).

2) It is not fair or sustainable (in our opinion) to build a platform's model to procure all of its operational costs from the direct and immediate "business class". While we could debate the greater concepts of this, this simply doesn't work for COS Brews' small market footprint where each participating business's operational costs would be exorbitant to pay for the level of support and technology services provided the hyper-localized community.

3) A platform model with discrepant pricing opens the door for unfair business practices, where the platform is encouraged to cater to its "highest value" customers, which are simply the businesses who can afford to pay the most OR on the flip side, the platform fades into obscurity because it has not effectively incentivized itself to improve with its actual users on all fronts. In other words all it can focus to do is acquire more paying businesses (vertically), because improving its user experience and/or offering is no longer in direct alignment with its revenue opportunity (this is the basis of "top down" don't get me started). 

To resolve all of the issues above COS Brews simply asks that customers pay a small monthly fee to join the Local's Club or purchase a Tourist Pass, in order to support COS Brews as a local initiative, and offset the costs that would otherwise be pushed on the participating businesses - stifling overall effectiveness and desire to use the platform. The bottom line is that COS Brews is not just built on the community, but actively dependent on its ongoing support and engagement to build and maintain its userbase fairly, for the local Colorado Springs community, and without ads or conflict of interests.

To accomplish a high-value and mission-forward relationship with each participating brewery, COS Brews provides and maintains a local support representative, available on a daily basis, who can provide on-site, face-to-face support opportunities on request (currently Matt Blanchette for Colorado Springs area) to breweries and food trucks. Your COS Brews support representative also fields support topics raised by customers and serving as a mediator between brewery interests and customer requests in Colorado Springs through the COS Brews platform.

All that said, COS Brews intends to engage with your brewery at the level you would like to engage. While we will definitely reach out on a semi-frequent basis to check in if we haven't heard from you, COS Brews offers various marketing and content opportunities that we will actively communicate to our participating breweries. We fully expect to engage at an individual level with each participating brewery at least a few times throughout the year in regards to these mutual initiatives and opportunities. Otherwise, support will be available via phone, email, support portal (coming soon), or in-person on request.