THE ENTREPRENEUR
NEIL JIRELE, 33
Founder and CEO, AppyHour Technologies, Tampa
Growing up in Minnesota's Twin Cities, Neil Jirele was fascinated by technology, even before his family owned a computer. He remembers running to a neighbor's house as soon as their family got one: "Since that first time I pressed enter on a keyboard, I was hooked."
By age 11, Jirele was building his own PC. By 12, he was creating video games. He devoured computer books at a time when YouTube tutorials didn't exist and attended an all-male military college-prep high school, thanks to his stepfather's job there. Straddling two worlds, computer science classes followed by football practice, "I was kind of a jock but a nerd. I got along with everybody."
At the University of Iowa, Jirele chose to study business and Spanish. Technology, he believed, could be self-taught. That decision — learning how markets work while building technology on his own — would later help define his entrepreneurial trajectory.
During his first week of a summer internship in Madrid, Jirele invited his new coworkers out for beer, but picking up the tab burned two weeks of spending money. Later that evening, another proprietor tried to lure him into his bar where the same beers were a quarter of the price, with live flamenco music, too. That would've been nice to know earlier, Jirele thought. More than a missed deal, it felt like a broken system that left consumers guessing and bars with no way to reach people at the moment they were deciding where to go.
That moment would become the spark for AppyHour Technologies, a tech startup that Jirele founded and built with his college friend Jake Dye, AppyHour's CTO. The initial idea: Help people find food and drink specials nearby, while helping bars and restaurants fill seats. The establishments would pay AppyHour to have their specials featured on a consumer-facing app. But as startup life often is, it's been a learning journey.
A New Twist
The initial reception was good, but the user base stopped growing. After graduation, Jirele continued bootstrapping AppyHour but took a job at a beer distributor in Minnesota. From the inside, he saw how alcohol brands and distributors spend billions each year on marketing and activations, but due to market fragmentation and poor timing, "up to 70% of that just gets lost amongst the noise," he says. They weren't reaching consumers at the moment of decision, or delivering measurable value to the bars.
That insight triggered the big pivot that would make AppyHour's platform scalable.
Instead of going door to door selling the AppyHour concept to individual bars and restaurants, Jirele set out to rebuild AppyHour as not only a free discovery tool for consumers but also as a data-driven brand activation and sales platform for beer, wine and spirits distributors. Bars and restaurants could advertise their food and drink specials and events like music or trivia nights on the AppyHour app for free; their distributors would foot the bill to engage their target customers and "drive more butts to bar stools and lips to glasses," as Jirele puts it.
At the end of 2019, Jirele turned down a promotion at the distributor to pursue full time what he believed was AppyHour's much larger opportunity. When the pandemic hit, closing bars and freezing marketing budgets, he continued talking with brands and building AppyHour to be ready when the world reopened. By late 2021, he realized the best place to scale his hospitality-focused startup would not be Minnesota but Florida — the state the brands kept mentioning as a priority market. After moving to Tampa, Jirele plugged into the local startup ecosystem at Embarc Collective.
Raising the Bar
Since then, Jirele secured pre-seed funding and is raising a seed round, targeting $3.5 million. He filled his team and board with industry expertise — including a founder who built and sold a major beverage-tech company — and began piloting with household-name beer brands. Today, customers include Constellation Brands' Corona and Modelo, Heineken USA, Good Boy Vodka and Real American Beer.
"Every time we put out an app update or a new release, it's based on what users are saying they want, not what we think they want," Jirele says. "And the same goes for our brand and retail customers — what actually solves their problems and would they pay for it?"
What differentiates AppyHour is the data. Its tech tracks when consumers search for specials, what price points convert, and even when users physically enter geofenced venues. Brands receive insights that help them optimize their marketing dollars, identify high-performing accounts, and uncover new sales opportunities.
The app is available in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Florida's Emerald Coast, Miami and a few other areas, including Chicago. Early this year, the startup — now a team of five, plus advisors — kicked off its first multimarket supplier partnership with Constellation Brands' Modelo in Miami — its fastest and largest rollout yet. On tap for 2026: the Orlando market, then Jacksonville, Gainesville and other cities.
As AppyHour prepares for national rollouts, Jirele remains grounded in the lessons that got him here: Find mentors, build relationships and accept that every new stage brings unfamiliar challenges.
His advice to entrepreneurs: "As you continue to level up, the challenges become new. So it's just continuing to have that grit day after day after day, knowing that there's going to be a ton of micro-failures along the way as you get closer to your goals."