In the world of design it isn’t always easy to find work that creates purpose. We wanted to initiate a start-up within our company that focused on a social issue and create an application that helped our local community.
Our initial product offering started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exo Digital had recognised that local hospitality businesses were suffering from the recent downturn of the economy from COVID-19, the predatory nature of larger tech companies, and the percentage they took for delivery of their products. Our goal is to create a mobile application to support local businesses by driving users through challenges that direct their attention to supporting the community.
We had colleagues in the hospitality industry who explained the current state of delivery companies charging 30-35% to deliver.
We ran research to understand the pain points and needs of the businesses and test their assumptions.
Our initial idea was to empower hospitality businesses by promoting their brands instead of the brands of the large aggregators.
We had a lot of great research around the local community and what they were looking for.
Knowing that businesses were doing it tough in COVID, we wanted to encourage people to get out and support local businesses.
We pivoted our offering to focus on how to deliver value into the businesses from day 1.
We landed on a reward system that incentivised users to get out and support local.
We designed our offering to focus on delivering value to local government, businesses and end-users.
Our mission was to connect people and businesses through a fun experience where our users could feel rewarded, and businesses felt like they had gained a powerful tool.
