Scanable

It took me a few months to finally mash together an MVP to go to market with. The whole system runs on a combination of Firebase Hosting, Firebase Functions and Stripe.

We have a Merchant Dashboard to allow the merchant to scan, search memberships and redeem the mebership visit.

Alongside that we also have the merchant membership page which customers can choose a membership and checkout, to which we deduct the membership cost on behalf of the agent every week, month, half-year or year.

A few years ago, pre-COVID my widfe and I ran a Beauty Salon in North Sydney. We did quite well considering the location and the initial capital investment, however...

While running the business we struggled with retaining customers - not because we were bad at our job, but because customers were not really all that loyal. Regular customers would disappear for a few weeks or months and then come back complaining of a bad experience elsewhere which they were drawn to via a promotion, convenience, etc. We had a punchcard system, but even then people moved around a lot and it also didn't help that we were running out of the CBD and not really where customers actually lived - just worked.

Eventually we decided to create a membership system where customers paid 6 months upfront for a package (essentially 1 visit per month at a discount of 20%). A huge uptake followed this and revenue doubled. We ended up getting customers paying on a 4 week basis instead of a 6-8 week basis resulting in more customer spend over a longer duration (6 months - 1 year).

Fast forward a few years, hearing all the stories of small businesses struggling to survive and knowing all the issues surrounding that, I thought I would try my hand at turning this strategy into a software for small businesses to manage and create their memberships for their customers.