Testing…Testing…1,2,3 — Vol. 8

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, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, Vol.4, Vol. 5, Vol. 6, Vol. 7

We recently reached a huge milestone for Nande.

As many you already know, for the past several months we’ve been heads down designing and building out the Nande mobile app. We’ve finally reached the point where we have a feature-complete app that we’re beginning to test.

So what have we been up to since our last post?

Last year we began kicking around ideas on the best path forward for growth.

One option was to pursue an aggressive user acquisition strategy through paid channels. We experimented with this and found the unit economics worked in our favor.

The other strategy was to look to our current subscribers and optimize Nande for them. The goal being to take them from liking Nande to loving Nande. For any subscription business, the long game is more about retention rather than acquisition.

We’re focused on the long haul and decided to devote our time and resources on building something our current subscribers would love even more.

We started by conducting individual interviews with our subscribers. From those interviews we gathered that users love our content, but there needs to be a better way to consume it and find relevant content faster.

Relevancy, as we found it, mainly meant location context. With that in mind, we revamped mobile experience to integrate maps and location data into a core part of the experience.

Over the course of several months, we went from testing these paper prototypes on our users.

To here. Building out a feature complete app that we’re getting ready to private beta test.

We’re getting ready to roll out a private beta launch of Nande. If you’re interested in taking the app out for a spin and providing feedback, you can sign up below.