Your Mobile App Collects A Wealth Of Data. Use It!

Dan Frommer of SplatF has an interesting write up on ShopKick - which was one of the earliest location based deal services. That they've somewhat pivoted is nothing new for a tech startup; what's interesting is the process itself:

Shopkick — an app that lets you earn points by walking into stores, shopping, etc. and then redeem them for gift cards, etc. — just launched a totally rethought version of its app. Beyond a facelift, it’s also changed a lot conceptually. Instead of just being useful for when you’re actually shopping, it’s now an app-sized catalog for partner stores, designed to plan shopping trips in advance.

Why? Because user data suggested that might be a good idea. Shopkick CEO Cyriac Roeding tells me:

In January, we took a step back and looked at what we’ve learned from our users, from data, and from feedback in over 1.5 years. [...] There’s a lot of information that comes together in 1.5 years. So we looked into the data and found out some really interesting patterns. For example, the average Shopkick user opens Shopkick on 9 days out of 30 per month. And 6 days out of those 9 days turned out to be not at the store. People were at home on the couch or at work.

So we wondered, what are they doing with the Shopkick app? Because it was built to be mostly for in-store. Turns out, they’re using the Shopkick app to look at what’s hot at stores, what’s cool there, which offers they have, which products are new, what’s on sale, and so on. And we thought, wow, that’s really interesting, because our app makes it anything but easy to see those things today. So, there is a really interesting opportunity for us to prepare people at home for their next shopping trip. And that is intent generation par excellence, at its best.

When your active users are using your app twice as often for something it wasn’t designed for as for what it was designed for, and only three times a month for what it was designed for, sounds like it’s time to take a fresh look at the product.

You should really go read the entire piece at SplatF!