Situation
Serial entrepreneur Dave Payne was looking to develop Scoutmob, an application for the burgeoning location-based advertising market, to provide deep discounts and promotions for large groups of local buyers. After raising a round of angel funding to build the initial application, he chose to launch the application in his local market of Atlanta. Dave has access to an email list of 25,000 users in Atlanta from another WiFi venture of his, which gives him a ready audience for opting-in to promotions. As well, he has relationships with 150 businesses in the local area.
Dave envisioned that Scoutmob would send out an email to users every morning highlighting one local business with a discount or promotion. "The discounts would be significant. Not your standard coupon, but more like 50% off of a dinner, product, or service."
Once the daily deal became available, iPhone users would receive a push notification, which could be acted upon that day. The offer would remain active for 60 days after it’s featured, and could only be redeemed onsite.
The problem: how to create hyper-location promotions in real-time
Mobile applications can provide merchants with the ability to target customers in proximity to their business, driving customers to their location. Promotions typically work best in a real-time scenario, so users need to be alerted as soon as promotions become available.
"Advertisers want to push a promotion to someone who is most likely to act on it, and they’re willing to pay a premium for this capability," explains Payne.
"Hyper-relevant promotion can only be delivered using the native location and push notification features of a mobile phone."
With these requirements in mind, the question now became how to build these features into an application in a timeframe that could get him to market quickly.
Titanium does native location-based apps fast
Dave tapped Andrew Zuercher and his team at Zuercher Technologies to develop the application, and to do it quickly and cost-effectively. "We needed to develop a mobile app for multiple platforms that could also utilize the native iPhone features like geolocation and push notification," said Andrew. "Titanium fit the bill on all fronts."
Andrew put together a prototype with the following features:
- Push notifications – All iPhone users receive a daily notification of the promotion. Users are also pushed incentives to return to merchants after their initial visits.
- Geolocation – Scoutmob allows users to search for the deals nearest to their current location, and uses location as a redemption criteria.
- Native user experience – Scoutmob uses a native iPhone UI and displays results in a native table view.
After an initial 5 day prototype, the rest of the app was completed in just 2 weeks – far shorter than going the Apple SDK route.
What’s Next
Scoutmob launched in the Atlanta market in January 2010, and plans to expand into other top US markets like Chicago, New York, and LA later in the year.
"By using Titanium we were able to get a high-quality, location-based application to our first market quickly," said Dave Payne. "As we grow our business, we look forward to adding additional functionality like support for camera and in-application map overlays. As well, we look forward to adding support for Android through Titanium and expanding into other markets."
