Innovative MVP for Custom Loyalty Campaigns

The challenge

Closer's founders came to us to build the MVP of an app that allowed stores to create custom loyalty campaigns. The idea was that store customers would get loyalty points automatically at every purchase and get different rewards from each store depending on rules of the custom campaigns they've created. Most of the challenge revolved around the huge amount of business rules involved for each store and how to correlate them in a coherent visualization tool.

Building from Scratch

Closer's Minimum Viable Product was designed and built from scratch by Vinta. The customer-facing part of the MVP consisted of a HTML5 mobile app, non-native apps are specially faster to produce and ship, making them ideal for MVP validations. We gathered the requirements from interviewing Closer partners, following a Lean Startup approach and just then went on to develop features. It turned out that Closer's killer feature was its automatic sales capture module, which ran in stores' computers and was also developed by Vinta.

Once the MVP was done and tested with success in a single store, We agreed with Closer that the best action in line was to move the app to a native mobile development shop. It'd be easier for them to produce a more robust version of the MVP to properly attend the needs of multiple stores. Meanwhile, Vinta focused on adding more features to the backend and web administration. When the post-MVP version was delivered, the web interface included complex reports and metrics for loyalty campaigns, sales, and customers, allowing stores and Closer's administrators to extract valuable insights on campaign performances.

Technologies used in Closer included Django for backend, HTML/CSS/JS for the web administration interface, and Django REST Framework for the RESTful mobile API. Closer's Minimum Viable Product was designed and built from scratch by Vinta. The customer-facing part of the MVP consisted of a HTML5 mobile app, non-native apps are specially faster to produce and ship, making them ideal for MVP validations. We gathered the requirements from interviewing Closer partners, following a Lean Startup approach and just then went on to develop features. It turned out that Closer's killer feature was its automatic sales capture module, which ran in stores' computers and was also developed by Vinta.

Once the MVP was done and tested with success in a single store, We agreed with Closer that the best action in line was to move the app to a native mobile development shop. It'd be easier for them to produce a more robust version of the MVP to properly attend the needs of multiple stores. Meanwhile, Vinta focused on adding more features to the backend and web administration. When the post-MVP version was delivered, the web interface included complex reports and metrics for loyalty campaigns, sales, and customers, allowing stores and Closer's administrators to extract valuable insights on campaign performances.

Technologies used in Closer included Django for backend, HTML/CSS/JS for the web administration interface, and Django REST Framework for the RESTful mobile API.