Now That’s A Good Deal — Vol. 7
Nande is a membership club started by a group of Chicago based travel writers, photographers, and filmmakers. Our mission is to help members discover every corner of Chicago, cross neighborhood lines, and make the most out of their Chicago experience. This is where we document our experience building Nande. Here are links to Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 and Vol.4 and Vol. 5 and Vol. 6
Everybody loves a good deal. And when it comes to a monthly Nande subscription, or any type of subscription for that matter, the question we ask ourselves each time we’re charged is: Am I still getting good value?
In the case of Nande, are we giving our subscribers at least $5 worth of value every month. I like to think so. But is there even more we can do? Yeah, we can.
In the latest issue of the Chicago Field Guide, we included deals and special experiences to the places we featured — about $100 worth of stuff. Our thinking was that if we could help members save money, then it would be a lot easier for subscribers to quantify the value they’re getting. Doing some quick maths, $100 of deals > $48 annual membership cost — not too shabby.
This was an interesting experiment, but is there a way we can do more?
The Problem
The deals in the Field Guide are a nice perk, but in order to redeem those deals, you have to have the Field Guide with you, which makes it a bit harder to utilize. Also, how can we bring more deals / special experiences to members without printing a different Field Guide (which takes a long time for us to put together on our end!)?
The Solution
This one seemed pretty straight forward. We’re making deals a core part of the new mobile app we’re building.
At the end of each city guide, if we’ve managed to negotiate a deal / special experience then you’ll find those at bottom. You can then save them to your profile for easy access. Here’s how we’re going to implement it.
The redemption process is easy too. There’s nothing to purchase in advance. Just tap the deal to redeem. Show it to the owner. And then the owner will be prompted to accept the deal. Here it is in action.
The Deals
When we started thinking about how we wanted to implement this, we wanted to make sure we didn’t go the Groupon route. We didn’t want out subscribers to have to buy deals. We didn’t want business owners giving us a cut of anything. Most small businesses are already operating on pretty thin margins at it is.
This approach gives us a lot of flexibility on the types of deals we can offer our members. Some businesses will want to give discounts, but we think it’s a lot more impactful if we can work with businesses to offer unique and special experiences to our members. It’s something we did in our Field Guide. We worked with a magician to give our members a special after show performance, we worked with a burger joint on a secret menu item, and we had a bar give out complimentary shots of malort to all our members (though, not sure that last one is necessarily a perk).
So that’s they type of stuff we’re looking to fold into our mobile app. Speaking of the mobile app, we’re right in the middle of building and for our next post I’ll be detailing our build process for that.
