SpurDeal
SpurDeal was a Waterloo, Ontario restaurant tech startup that was accepted into Canada’s largest startup accelerator, Velocity. SpurDeal was the first-of-its-kind, mobile marketing platform that instantly connects local restaurants with consumers in real-time. It provided time-sensitive, location-based discount deals for consumers while providing restaurant owners complete control over the utilization of their resources.
My Role
As Head of Product, I worked with our multidisciplinary team to take SpurDeal from conception to launch. I conducted market research and experiments, and user interviews, managed restaurant onboarding, and worked closely with the CEO, lead engineer, and their team.
As the co-founder of SpurDeal, I had additional responsibilities including product ownership, writing copy and business plans, and aiding in fundraising.
Problem
$17.5 billion of potential revenue is left on the dining table because restaurants cannot monetize their resources during off-peak hours. To capture some of this revenue, restaurants resort to daily deal sites such as Groupon and Hooked. However, these sites dictate offer terms, such as the discount amount and redemption details. This erodes profits for restaurant owners and drives traffic to restaurants during already busy peak hours.
Product & Solution
SpurDeal was a Mobile/tablet/web-based application that provided benefits to both the restaurant and the customer. Restaurants got complete control and flexibility about what deal they posted, when they posted, including off-peak hours, all in less than five minutes. Customers got geo-targeted deals that they needed to quickly buy and redeem, otherwise, the deal voucher would expire. This gave customers a chance to try great, new restaurants at discounted prices and provided restaurants with the ability to monetize their resources during off-peak hours.
Evolution of the Product
The lean startup and hypothesis-driven entrepreneurship frameworks were used to take SpurDeal from an idea to a commercial launch in southern Ontario. The video to the left explains the process used for market and problem validation and was our application to the 2017 International Business Model Competition in California. Not only were we accepted but were semi-finalists in a competition with over 6,000 applicants from around the world.
We launched SpurDeal in November 2017 after onboarding over 150 restaurants in Southern Ontario. SpurDeal ended up closing down in Q3 of 2018. Multisided platforms require a lot of marketing budget!
Achievements
Over 150 restaurants were onboarded with over 1,500 monthly active users.
Over US $50,000 in funding from start-up competitions across North America & US $100,000 in revenue.
Key Learnings
Strengthened my understanding of the lean startup framework and UI/UX, giving me the ability to work from ideation to launch with a talented Product Designer and a 7 member team who helped to push the product vision forward.
This was my first attempt at using the lean startup method and hypothesis-driven entrepreneurship and really allowed me to develop my customer interview and problem validation skills.
How to approach a multi-sided platform and make sure you're solving for the correct side, aka "When the user feels X, the business feels Y".