What I check before saying yes to a loyalty app

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:

1. Do you already have returning customers? If not, a loyalty app won’t fix the funnel problem.
2. 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.
3. What happens when the internet is down? We design a graceful offline path or a fallback punch-card flow.
4. 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.