Archives for May 2011

Not quite a year ago, we decided to delve into the world of application development for Android phones. Grand visions of a level playing field where deep pockets and large development teams didn’t have an insurmountable advantage over the little guy drove us forward. We teamed up with another old friend to port some games we had done in the past for another platform. It was a great learning experience, but we found that the mobile market revenue models are still in their infancy. We tried several approaches, from alternate markets to integration with social gaming providers such as OpenFeint. It became clear to us that we would need to build content that could capitalize on micro transactions. We had the beginnings of a great design but the technology was not yet there to support it.

We re-grouped and decided to attack the revenue model first. From our experience, it appeared that consumers weren’t yet willing to spend a lot of money on individual mobile apps in the Android marketplace. Merchants, on the other hand, are very interested in promotion within this growing market. After many late night whiteboard sessions, we settled into the “deal of the day” space made popular by the likes of Groupon and Living Social. Coincidentally, we were friends with some local business owners who had used these social deal services before and regretted every part of it. They found many of the customers were one-time deal watchers and unlikely to turn into repeat customers. This, added to the fact that they were taking a loss on the highly discounted deals offered, made them uninterested in using similar services again. Some may call it a sign if you believe in that kind of thing, but this provided us the insight we needed. A bit of quick research showed that our business friends weren’t alone in their feelings on these services. After a few conversations with them, the pieces all started to fall into place.

Consumer loyalty is nothing new. It seems everyone has ten different supermarket key tags on their key chains and a punch card for the sixth sandwich free at a local sub shop. Or, if you are like us, you scanned the key tags into your phone and you have a handful of those sub shop punch cards sitting on your dresser, never with you when you’re actually getting lunch. This is where miPlaces was born. If we could make it easy for merchants to manage these loyalty programs, as well as make it easy for users to always have their “punch card” with them, we’d have a marriage made in heaven.

As it turned out, technology wasn’t the real challenge. The true issue was how were two tech guys going to convince merchants to offer great deals to users of our application. We felt it was critical that they offered something better than the run-of-the-mill deals that come in your mailbox every week. It needed to be something people would get excited about. However, we also wanted our approach to not overwhelm the merchants either. So after mapping out the application overview and detailing all of the powerful marketing tools we could provide to the merchants, we decided we needed to start small and grow into the end product. The key to our system was having the user’s mobile device know when you were at the merchant’s location, then having a secure way of counting and tracking the user visits for the merchant. We wanted to be able to reward loyal customers while generating foot traffic, and possible sales, for the merchants. Our system allows the merchants complete control over deals, redemption criteria and reward points accumulation. To get a foundation, we decided to build upon Facebook’s check in functionality, build a user base and develop reliable backend infrastructure while we get the rest of the tools in place.

Neither of us were big fans of “The Check In” and the idea actually seemed a little creepy. We tried all the existing check in apps and none of them appeared to be particularly great. We too were saying, “what’s the point?” But in the end, we’ve both become a little addicted to it. It’s more fun and less creepy than we expected. Even with mundane check ins we usually end with a handful of comments on our Facebook wall. You should give it a try, with our app or any of the other check in apps on the market. We’d love to hear what you think about the whole check in idea. Feel free to be honest as our feelings won’t be hurt. This isn’t our long term goal, just a fun little stop on the way.

Next Time: Wheels in Motion, over coming more obstacles.