Oct 2, 2024
What I check before saying yes to a loyalty app
Four quick tests I run with bar/café owners before building a loyalty app so we avoid shiny-but-unused software.
A loyalty app sounds great until it slows the bar down. Before I commit to building one, I walk through a short checklist with the owner:
- Do you already have returning customers? If not, a loyalty app won’t fix the funnel problem.
- How will staff use it when the bar is busy? Two taps max, no new hardware, and it must work when Wi‑Fi is shaky.
- What happens when the internet is down? We design a graceful offline path or a fallback punch-card flow.
- How will we measure success? Repeat visits, spend per visit, or reduced no‑shows? We pick one and keep it simple.
If we can’t answer these, we pause or start with a pilot. The goal is to help the bar, not to ship another abandoned app.
Related work and writing
Replaced scattered timesheets and manual payroll processes with a single source of truth. Consultants log hours in one system, managers approve in real-time, and exports are audit-ready by default.
Replaced cash handling at the company canteen with NFC tap-to-buy. Employees tap badges, purchases sync to payroll, and the canteen eliminated cash entirely.
The steps I use to go from a sentence-long idea to a scoped, buildable MVP with realistic trade-offs.
How a three-person dev team at a Copenhagen consultancy decided what to build, what to buy, and what to hybridise, and why those decisions weren't really about preferences.