Summary: Gamified marketing platform for bars and clubs

Roles: Strategy, front end development

 

“Ja Tak” means “Yes Please” in danish, but also captures enthusiasm and approval. It’s the kind of thing you can say both when you’re offered a drink or your home football team scores a goal against their rivals.

 

The project was founded in 2017, and back then local bars and clubs would often hand out tickets for drinks at colleges and schools. We built an app where they could give them away electronically. It would track in real time how many offers were left, encouraging users to show up earlier to get the best stuff.

 

The value for users was obvious – free drinks. For the bars it meant customers showing up earlier and a free marketing platform. Our plans included in-app payments for drinks and various data tracking offers. Gamification was key to the strategy with rare offers you had to ‘roll’ for at the bar, and raid offers that would only be available for larger groups. Filling up the dancefloor fast was a strong value proposition.

 

The app practically marketed itself. On launch day we went into the city to promote it, and a group of strangers came up and started telling us about it. Everyone had it. Virality metrics were the best I’ve seen, which led to long term user acquisition costs close to zero. We had decided to use a single city as testing ground and got great traction.

 

There was a problem though – the local bars and clubs eventually came to the conclusion that when they were all giving away their drinks for free, the only ones winning were the guests. They were not wrong. They were competing in a zero-sum game, and the additional streams of value we had planned were not yet ready.

 

In hindsight we should have paid back the bars purchase price for their offers. Operating at a loss while scaling the app would have made sense. The users were valuable, so selling data and advertising space could have provided long term revenue streams once integrated. In the end we decided to kill off the project to focus on other projects, but for a short period of time we were kings of nightlife. Next round is on us!