Where consumer desire met business opportunity
The mobile app that could
A specialized "explore” team within the R&D function of a major CPG business had been toiling away developing a new technology.
No, not something that would revolutionize the products in their category… they were playing around with software that had the potential to guide and strengthen the relationship consumers had with the category.
Or so they hoped.
They had a great theory: consumers appeared to be actively putting effort into manually solving what this app was designed to solve. But, they had been developing it behind closed doors and didn’t yet know how consumers would respond to their baby.
Had they designed the right thing? And if the thing was right, had they designed it right? Did the user experience make any sense at all to the consumers in their category?
And if so, was there a business model that made sense for the business to invest in?
The app was ready to go. The team was excited. They even had scientific validation of an AI-based module they had been built into the app as a key feature.
Would consumers download it? Would they use it? Would they make a habit out of it? We were there to help get to the bottom of it all.
Our Challenge?
Figure out if this mobile app had true potential in the market.
Our approach
The app was ready...
So we launched it!
Over the course of two intensive sprints over 12 months, we seeded it into the market to learn:
What did real people do when they discovered it in the wild?
And we experimented a lot to find out.
We were systematic in our approach
We didn't just willy-nilly start testing, we developed a robust learning plan to get to the bottom of things.
What made consumers want to download the app? What did they do with it? And could we make the economics work for the business?
Net net, did the app have a chance of finding Product / Market Fit?
Key outcome
We discovered that (with some work) the app could play the role of a category-wide CRM tool
Throughout this project, we had three interconnected learning goals:
Is there a value proposition that the app can provide, which consumers show serious and scalable interest in? (ie: Desirability — shown by “Cost-per-Install”)
What does the app experience need to provide to fulfill the promise of that high-potential value proposition? (ie: Feasibility — usage activation & longevity, and what consumers did within the existing & then improved experiences)
Will the app be able to provide enough value for the business to profit from the investment in acquiring users? (ie: Viability — with the app being free, we were looking at the value of the usage data, plus the value of any purchase influence the app could have over the ecosystem of products the business offers)
Our experimentation helped us learn & validate a ton across each.
Desirability — we were able to iteratively experiment to nail a juicy & clear value proposition that consumers wanted so much our CPIs became incredibly low (below app-industry benchmarks)
Feasibility — the specific validated value prop along with our observations of consumer usage within the app lead to a complete re-working of the user experience that consumers loved once launched
Viability — not only did the data from the un-optimized version of the app show significant value to multiple teams around the organization, but we discovered that the optimized version could play as a category-wide CRM tool given the type of guidance & interaction consumers received from it. This unlocked significant value potential for the business, far out-pacing the cost to acquire each user.
The app’s new user experience is now being re-launched under one of the business’ major brands.
Notable statistics
Armed with only static ads & stock photography we were able to achieve a user acquisition cost of $3 USD (after starting above $700)
Across the two sprints, we were able to bring over 20k consumers into the app to try it out
In the pursuit of all this, we iteratively developed & deployed over 200 different ad versions and 6x different App Store page designs