My cat broke my business, by closing the server of my SaaS app LoyalXpert and you can see it in the video:
Starting with November I developed the app LoyalXpert. A loyalty system app that digitizes the loyalty of small businesses.
The MVP targeted the coffee shop owners because they already have some experience with classic stamp cards. I was thinking is a good start to offer them this app, because they may adopt it faster and already understand the need.
It started promising with a few coffee shops that agreed to use it in their locations. Later some of them changed their mind. And that’s how I started on the launch day with only one paying customer.
Since then I had more discussions with other coffee shops, but the app was always seen as a nice to have, and not as a must-have.
From my experience, is not impossible to sell nice to have, but is harder. You must target a specific client, make them understand the benefits and then try to sell.
In this market there was already a competitor, in Romania, when I launched, its name is Stampino. They have a really cool app, good looking, and it seems they face the same issues as I faced. With around 30-40 locations in 3-4 years, they are literally doing much better than I did. This was scary for me from the beginning, but I tried to see it as a challenge. you cannot know why your competitors are at that stage and it doesn’t mean you cannot do better.
It seems my fear was accomplished. The market doesn’t see too much value in the product I built. And I figure out this by talking with real clients. Most of them were telling me the hard truth “we do loyalty anyway, we know clients that are daily here, and they get usually free stuff. So your app sounds nice, but it adds friction for the barista.”
And that’s how I decided half year far away from the launch to close this project. Probably at some point I’ll make it open source because maybe someone else will decide to use some code. If you are interested in doing that, just drop me a line and we can discuss it.
What I know is my journey just started, building products. I’m fully focused on Manager Flota in this period and sketching the other 2 ideas.
