Maybe they will like what we made

huggg
huggg
Jul 22, 2017 · 4 min read

I don’t write blog posts or even really use social media that much, but I had to record this.

Before working in tech I was in the cut-throat world of banking, where I spent a lot of time analysing businesses in a very technical manner, with some amazingly bright and talented colleagues around me beavering away into the small hours writing credit reports. Back then you might have heard me say:

‘Why did gross margin move adversely 0.4 percentage points in March on this cohort of SKUs?’

‘A 5% movement in debtor days would cost 50% of EBITDA — it’s not leverage-able’

I know, pretentious. And actually important too, really important, the numbers tend not to lie and they deserve a focus. But they aren’t the whole story.

This week we’ve been launching Huggg, which we’ve spent over 2 years creating: crafting the messaging; tickling the technology until we could find no more bugs (famous last words); working out what marketing messages might resonate, which image would stop people in their tracks. And what have I learned so far? It all boils down to people. Their emotions, their habits, their communication needs.

Huggg delivers a product in a message (that’s what a huggg is), to supercharge that message into something with added dimensions (the sights, sounds, tastes, ambience that comes when picking up the huggg). It’s structured as an emotive transaction, not a monetary one, delivered with ease and immediacy but not transactional. The tech is pretty slick, the design is clean, and actually it all fades into the background because the most lasting impression of the entire experience of using it boils down to how great it felt to the recipient when the huggg was collected. Actually that’s out of our hands, as our brand partners handle that, but I’ve been able to get closer to that than I ever could in my old job. This is how I have learned the people thing, and here’s a great example that drove me to write this post.

As part of the launch week we announced Byron Hamburgers as a launch partner. We ran a giveaway in Bristol to celebrate that, whereby a passer-by was handed a flyer (a recycle-able one before you ask) and told that lunch was on Huggg for all downloads occurring before 2. It was an act of kindness that we didn’t ask anything for in return, merely that it is in line with what Huggg is all about, acts of kindness. To monitor it more easily I sat in the corner of the restaurant all afternoon.

At lunchtime a man took one of the flyers from outside and returned to the restaurant 40 minutes later to enquire. He couldn’t download the app because he wasn’t in the correct app store, so I helped him out with that, secretly hoping he hadn’t been trying the entire 40 minutes, and he was taken to his seat. The service member then walked him through how to plug in a few details to access the app, and suddenly he was in and received his huggg, ordering excitedly and wondering whether it was all too good to be true.

I was on the next table, laptop in front of me, download pinging up. Were I in the office, it’d be a name and a number on a database, but I was there, he was real. I don’t think he’d been in Byron before.

The food arrived and he tucked in, mayonnaise around his mouth, happy. Then afterwards the bill arrived and it wasn’t too good to be true, he’d been huggged, the food had been paid for by the sender (which was us in this instance) and he asked to break a note so that he could at least leave a tip.

Will that person ever use Huggg to send something to a friend? Actually I have no idea. He now thinks that Byron is great, because they’d helped him out with his phone and he’d really enjoyed the food. But, for 2 years we’d hoped that the recipient of a huggg would feel great, and that the sender therefore would get a glow, and I just saw that happen first hand. He’d just nipped out shopping but now he was in a restaurant, excited. I was the sender, I don’t even know him but I can’t describe the glow.

Software facilitated the interaction, but when mixed in with the right branding, tone of voice and most importantly the exemplary service in Byron, we’d made a regular guy’s day with one message. So I don’t care if he ever uses it again, or about the margin on that transaction, he’s just shown me that kindness can facilitate a powerful thing, and now I’m welling up as he tips and walks out of the restaurant, because maybe we did build something that people will love.

Paul, CEO