Make time for the hobby projects
Let’s throw this all the way back to 2019 (such a long time ago!). It was the Summer of ’19, no care in the world, no global pandemic — a time when we could collaborate with others, sit around conference rooms and whiteboard, gather around the company kitchen, eat some ‘za, share some cake. Good times.
That summer, our small digital product / engineering team at Ritual had decided to throw our first company hackathon, teaching the rest of the company (only ~40ish employees at the time) how to “hack” together. Since we were a small startup with ambitious goals for the year, we couldn’t spend a whole week of avoiding our primary jobs, so we opted to do a day-long hackathon as a full company, pulling people from all different specialties together, making sure no two people from the same department existed on a team, and encouraging passion projects to come to the forefront.
We taught our non-technical coworkers how you could apply engineering and product development to impactful projects, and they, in turn, taught us how our science, creative, and marketing could drive interesting customer experiences. And on a Tuesday afternoon that June, almost everybody stopped working and self-organized to GSD. The next morning, everyone returned to the office, greeted by homemade Chia pudding, fruit, and granola, and went back to work on their projects, knowing they’d have to present to a panel of esteemed judges later that day — they had one day to deliver, and boy, did they.
By the end of the day, we saw concepts for a Ritual tamagotchi, a marketing partnership with a food delivery service, an Apple Watch app, and many more. Guess which won? Did you say “tamagotchi?” I would have. A Ritual tamagotchi would be siiick. Imagine feeding a virtual pet multivitamins every day. Miss too many days, your poor virtual pet becomes nutrient deficient.
Instead, the Apple Watch app concept won. (As an Apple fanboy, I’m cool with that.) The judges and our team saw a real opportunity to be a first-mover on creating a standalone, independent Apple Watch app — free of all the burdens and baggage associated with full-fledged iOS apps. An app that could be so simple, so focused, and completely driven by one goal: to help our customers keep their vitamin habit going every day.
Two weeks later, we hired our first freelance iOS dev, and by September, when Apple launched the App Store on Apple Watch, we were on it.
And that’s it, right? The story stops there?
No.
Anyone in software development can tell you — getting to the launch is only the start. Cue marathon reference… There’s a lot that you have to do just to get to the starting line. If you arrive at that starting line out of shape and with worn-out shoes, that marathon is going to be tough. You still have miles to go, hydration booths to run through, and your own internal and external pressures to overcome. If you arrive at that starting line in shape and ready to go, you’re still going to face challenges, but you’re going to be in really good shape when they come.
Over a year later, the app hasn’t changed too much, but we’ve added many changes that make the customer experience better. Each change we’ve made has been done with careful consideration and in small increments. For example, each time we launched a new multivitamin product this year, we updated the app to support it and its nutrient composition to track it accurately in Apple Health. Later this year, we added new Kids and Teens multivitamins, and we started to break our products into multiple categories.
We’ve also paid close attention to our customers’ feedback on the app. Our users don’t always wear their Watch every day, so they wanted an easy way to track the vitamins they took recently and we responded by adding a feature to track yesterday’s vitamins. They also shared that they want to keep their vitamin streaks going, and changing watches or uninstalling/reinstalling the app would clear out their well-earned streak, which is a major bummer. So our team decided to finally enable customers to login with their Ritual account on the Watch, saving their streaks and vitamin tracking history back to their profile, and also opening us up to new opportunities like checking the status of their next bottle of vitamins and enabling them to change the delivery date. These may not seem like huge improvements, but we’re ok with that — right now, we’re learning from our customers and we’re focused on delivering a simple experience, not a comprehensive one.
As a hobby project, our app doesn’t yield the conventional outcomes you might look for from a direct-to-consumer eCommerce company, like driving conversion, increasing the number of items our customer buys, or their tenure as a subscriber. Our app is a proving ground for the smallest engagements we have with our customer. Our app gives our customers a little bit of extra value out of our products. For now, it’s enough for us to create a delightful experience for our customers. It’s our way of saying: “Thank you.”
Download the Ritual Apple Watch app on the App Store.
