After identifying several pain points in the nightlife experience, two friends and I founded Relio as a part time project as a means to solve these reoccurring problems. As we put our experience design hats on and conducted discovery on the problem, we uncovered that we were not the only ones experiencing this.
The problem we were trying to solve was how might we create a new way to explore city nightlife?
In typical new concept validation fashion, the founding team and I conducting discovery on the problem we were trying to solve. We created an interview guide and started interviewing our friends and friends of friends. As we started to validate our initial concept, we expanded our research by interviewing a random selection of potential users with different backgrounds across a range of demographics. This resulted in us refining out proposition several times until we had greater certainty we had conceptual market fit.
With our new found learnings on our problem space, we synthesised the learnings across our data points and came up with valuable insights where we created hi-fidelity wireframes. We then took these wireframes to a range of potential users to see what we could learn. As expected, lots of learnings came out of our wireframe testing. We synthesised the learnings for more insights and created v2 wireframes and repeated the process. By the end of this stage, we had greater confidence that we were addressing problems people really wanted solved.
We knew the value proposition we needed to position to our users, so we created a landing page and ran a few marketing campaigns to further validate interest. We had hundreds of sign ups and demand from users to launch our product faster in cities other than Sydney. We used this information to acquire venues on our platform. We had 6 venues sign up to be the first customers on our platform for our launch.
We were confident we had identified product market fit given the data and traction we were having. So, we decided to speak to the NSW Department of Investments. The reason why we decided to speak to this department was because we had read a white paper on the 24 Hour Night Time Economy produced by the NSW Government to essentially increase nightlife activity across Sydney and address the same problems we were solving.
After sharing what we were working on, the NSW Department of Investment loved what we were doing and offered us grant money to kick things off. We have now finished our MVP and have taken the NSW Department of Investments through our roadmap for v2 and have linked it to some of their Smart Cities Acceleration Program initiatives and offered to white label our solution for key parts of the program. They loved the idea and now we are working with each other to determine how a white label solution will work.
You can download Relio from the app store. We'll be adding more features over the coming months centred around our discovery value proposition. Stay tuned!
