2014 – 2017

What We've Learned From Complicating Our Sweet App

A case study of Everytap 📱

What We've Learned From Complicating Our Sweet App

AI-generated podcast

21:05

This case study is about Everytap, a startup I co-founded in 2014. After being acquired by TVN Scripps Network, the product was rebranded and lives on today as Finebite.

Hollywood is that kind of place where you come in for a while, grab a drink, slide into the swimming pool and kaboom — you're an octogenarian. Developing a product can be similar. You start with the simple idea, and then something crazy happens. You're meddling with improvements, adding features and within a blink of an eye, you've complicated your magnum opus. We've been through the same thing 💩

First Things First

This is the story about the ups and downs of a startup named Everytap. For the last three years, I've been responsible for UX/UI of our mobile application. Our primary market was Poland. Here's the elevator pitch:

“With Everytap you will discover the best places in your city and save money when making orders with a single tap in the app.”

Maybe it's not a big deal for you but it's taken us almost 36 months to name it. Phew, the introduction is over! Now we can get down to brass tacks 🚀

The Badass Superhero, You Aren't

For the last three years, I've been trying to be on guard of the UX of Everytap users. I'm supposed to be this omnipotent, badass superhero, making our users' lives easier. The problem is that for a long time I wasn't. We made many changes in our app, so it was easy to mess something up. In the beginning, the market environment of our product was too complicated for us. And you know what? Thank God we were so blind to it back then, because otherwise, we wouldn't have even started.

From a distance everything is simple but let's inspect it. We made many wacky decisions which led to one thing — a more convoluted product and more mess in the heads of our users. Today we know it was a part of our learning process. Hopefully it didn't kill us, but instead made us stronger 💪

Bad Can Be Good

Spoiler: Sometimes complicating a simple product means nothing was wrong. These findings have helped us attain more than 150k users, materialise profitable partnerships with around 600 businesses, deliver marketing and sales campaigns for brands such as Jägermeister, Red Bull, Jim Beam and Bacardi, and win a few prestigious awards such as the Mobile Trends Award, and the Central European Startup Awards in the category of “People’s Choice” 🏆

In the process, we have also been featured by Apple and Google in their ‘A Growth Engine for Europe’ project. And last but not least, we still rank high in both the App Store and Google Play in our category “Food & Drink”, having the best users' reviews. As you can see some things have gone well. I'm not #bragging here but trying to present you with the big picture.

Expectation Meets Reality

Let's rewind to 2014 when the world seemed to be a more civilized place. Maybe that's why we imagined creating a new product as a smooth ride in the sun. There is some idea you're working on, and soon you'll have a masterpiece of your dreams. Everyone can be the Michelangelo of his David, right? In our naive head it sounded legit and looked like that:

Yep, feel free to laugh. What happened to us looked wholly different and is reminiscent of Frodo's perilous journey to Mordor. We started with a sharply simple concept of making our app a useful tool to build the loyalty of restaurant customers. Everytap revolved around earning points for visits and purchases. Our ace in the hole was the new technology called iBeacon. We believed it could be a game changer. The proposed process in three steps:

• Step 1: A user with the Everytap app on their device enters into the restaurant. In some venues, it automatically awards the user with new points per visit. Hands-free. No need to check-in. No need to unholster your smartphone. We owe it to the background communication of smartphones with beacons.

• Step 2: Once inside, the user receives a personalized push notification with a catchy incentive to grab more points for an order. Again, praise beacons.

• Step 3: Earning points for orders is hassle-free. The user has only to tap their smartphone to the beacon laying at the bar. Sort of NFC experience.

Now the tricky part. At that time we were blazing a trail with commercial use of iBeacon technology. Beacons turned out to be moody and suffered growing pains. The communication between them and users' smartphones was painfully unstable. Let's face it — if you are a new Everytap user and your first use of it ends with nothing it means one thing — the magic is gone. Instead of a game changer, we had a game over.

What's more, we came to three supplemental conclusions:

1. Rewarding for scrimping points is a far-away perspective. Users have to collect too many to get a free coffee or burger, so it's hard to keep them motivated. Solution: We need to deliver instant perks.
2. Our app didn't contain any place for commercial promotions. Solution: We had to redesign our main screen adding a space for it. Follow the money you must, said Master Yoda. Do or do not, there is no try, he added.
3. Talk is cheap. Owners of restaurants like to oversell how important it is to build loyalty, but in fact, it isn't. At the end of the day, they only care about making more money. Pro Tip™ — don't rely on people's declarations. Real desires are unspoken.

We rolled up our sleeves and started to improve — which in our case means complicating — Everytap. The road we crossed over the subsequent months looked something like this:

In Search of Product-Market Fit

Everytap has endured multiple revolutions in its lifetime. We kicked off as a fancy loyalty program. Then we added discount coupons, meanwhile fighting to emphasise the gamification aspect of our app. Finally, we failed to recognise who we really are and what we can say about our product. And that was a serious problem with brand communication.

Developing a product doesn't happen in a vacuum. At every stage of our existence, new users appeared, having various, diverse ideas of what exactly Everytap is. Let's say that someone joined us in mid-2014, interested in earning points. It means that for that person our newest updates are just putting obstacles in their way.

For a product like ours — which has invested a huge amount of time in finding its own market fit — it was a big challenge to meet our different users' expectations. We were trying to present our disruptive acts as a natural, smooth evolution. With the passage of time, Everytap focused on very different features, but we've never dumped any functionality which was used by our existing users in their favourite venues. Well-intentioned, but it gradually morphed our application into a Hydra. The process looked something like this:

All of our changes have been motivated by two main factors:

1. On the business side: finding enough profitable source of revenue
2. On the user side: attempting to simplify what we complicated a while ago

What's important: Everytap from launch day has generated revenue. The two first stages — in Excel sheets — promised quite good revenue. Individual deals with venue owners were the primary source of income. They accepted monthly subscriptions but — and here's the thing — they didn't pay on time. Speaking the language of chess, it was a check for our business model.

The history of our app can be divided into four main stages:

1. Loyalty Program — Points for visits and purchases
2. Deals & Coupons — Encouraging venue visits using bait
3. Marketplace — Generating sales in venues via mobile payments
4. Prepaid Plans — e.g. Preorder five breakfasts (don't have to eat at once!) for the price of two

Someone smart said:

“If you don't like how the table is set, turn the table.”

From month to month we grew to make a crucial decision — the real money has to start flowing through our app. Solution? Everytap is going to be a 24/7 mobile marketplace with good prices. And we can easily add here a better version of a loyalty program — working completely stable and in the background. You sleep, your venue is closed, but Everytap still generates your sales — that sounds like something attractive for owners. Owners, users, and us — everybody wins.

From now our main profit is a sales commission. In this deal, we don't wait for a money transfer from venues any longer. Now they wait for a transfer from us. The table is turned. Checkmate!

The Money Starts Flowing

Based on our experience from previous marketing campaigns we decided to focus this time on a particular niche. Our choice fell on selling breakfast sets. It's a rewarding subject giving an opportunity to marry Everytap with the pleasant moment of starting a new day. We brought over 200 venues from 8 of the biggest cities in Poland into our idea.

The deal between us was straight as an arrow: venues agree to sell breakfast at a low price only via Everytap, and in return, they get access to our marketing tools. The price and rules were the same in every place. And that was our clear message to the world 🌍

The Kraken was released. Result? People started to use our app en masse. During the first day of the campaign, our servers were close to overheated. For the next two weeks, we sold almost 30,000 breakfast sets worth close to 300,000 PLN. Kaboom! 💰

Everytap Comes Full Circle

Finding our market-fit has taken about three years and now the fun begins again. At last, we can simplify a profitable product, present to our partners transparent offers, and build effective marketing communication.

To sum up — it was a wild ride! 🎢

Three Final Conclusions

Thanks for reading 👊