Donuts, Snakes, and Nouvo

If you’ve ever visited Southern California, there is a high possibility that you are familiar with Venice Beach — the colorful and diverse neighborhood by the Pacific. A stroll down the infamous boardwalk will lead to encounters with vendors fitting your name on a piece of rice, breakdancers putting on a show, and, this past Sunday, members of our Nouvo team asking you to download our app in exchange for a donut.

It was important to us to test our app for user feedback and test the automatic cashback component as well. To do this, we set it up where if they spent 10c at the pop-up donut shop, they would get $1 back.

Here are the results:

1. The “less is more” approach works wonders for our consumers. Most people understood the app as soon as they downloaded it and looked at it. Regardless, we will implement a simple tutorial during the sign up process. We had to help a few consumers towards what to do, but we won’t always be standing at people’s shoulders in the future.

2. The most validating thing you can hear about your product is “When can I use?” Most of the people who gave feedback were very excited to begin using Nouvo at local merchants.

3. We learned that people love Krispy Kreme donuts (even snakes).

4. We discovered a small bug during the sign-up process. This is a big one, since it saves us trouble when we do our pilot.

We are pleased that our small demo day went so well. We will be doing a follow-on event soon at one of our first merchants! Stay tuned and be sure to follow our social media pages (@Nouvoapp) for updates.