First Pilot — Wild van Geest festival! 🎉
Let’s delve into the highlights and learnings of a weekend to remember for Bitz
September 1st 2018 marked the day Bitz saw the light for the first time. The beautiful weather and natural environment of Stellendam offered a unique vibe for the first edition of the Wild van Geest festival.
Let’s look into the experience of the attendees and the Wild van Geest organizers.
Attendee experience
As the day started flyers valid for beers were handed out to attendees in two batches: one at the beginning of the day and the rest approaching the end.
This flyer had instructions in the back to download the app, get tokens, order and pick up at the bar. Simple as that!
The goal of this pilot was to validate the following assumptions:
- Are people willing to use an app to order drinks in a festival?
- Are people willing to buy tokens through an app?
As the day went on and the beers were served both assumptions were put to test. While we talk to people and watch them interact with the app by themselves no one seemed to have any issues.
However it was after the festival that through customer interviews we could validate what in the moment was evident. The results were beyond positive.
Let’s take a look.
The ordering process within the app was easy, they are willing to use it at another festival, buy their tokens with it and tell their friends about it.
Let’s also watch what one of the attendees had to say about it
Organizer perspective
The experience of the Wild van Geest organization was also a top priority for us. Our main assumption for this pilot on their perspective was:
Can we provide relevant insights to the organizer about customer behaviour?
Let’s see.
Here we can see the following:
- Beer was by far the most sold drink during the festival
- Of all redeemed tokens, 89.22% were spent. This confirms what we have been discussing with major festival organizers who claim that 5–10% of tokens end up not being spent during their events.
- We can also see two consumption spikes, one at 16hs and the other one at 21hs. The last one is the most interesting one as by that time it was announced that more tokens were offered to people to buy drinks which, as the graph shows, clearly caused excitement among everyone.
- The type of drinks graph is also fascinating to see as it shows that almost no one was interested in buying anything other than beers up until the night. Later, however, soft drinks were more appealing while the beer consumption started to crash.
Main takeaways
This was a weekend to remember for us as a team and a big milestone for Bitz. The main learnings from this first pilot are:
- Extremely positive user feedback about the app and ordering process.
- The app showed no performance issues at all.
- The backend architecture handled the usage overload remarkably, leaving enormous space for scaling.
- The Bitz payment infrastructure worked 100% hardware-less!
- We could provide the first version of the Business Intelligence Engine sales summary which in the near future will be automatically generated and distributed to organizers.
- The Wild van Geest organizers, José Oudijk and Marit Wüst, were thrilled about the experience and we expect to work together again in the next edition of the festival.
Oh, and we can’t just say goodbye without a team pic and some dance moves :)
See you in the next one!
