Overview:
MyDallas is a city discovery app designed and built by me and my brother. My brother was the front end and backend developer while I designed the brand, application, and application assets while also running our social media marketing. I was also in control of all business development, and I also collected and created all of the data and content for the mobile app.
Problem
While we were creating RewardCoin, we formed relationships with local restaurant owners in order to do research on the restaurant industry as a whole. Through this research we also discovered a huge communication problem between local restaurant and existing and potential customers. Their primary medium of communication was either email or Facebook, both very ineffective and with very poor visibility. We also discovered that most ‘city discovery’ was done on Instagram. While discovering new places to go and things to do on Instagram is convenient in that many people already spend a lot of time on Instagram, it is a bad medium for city discovery in almost every other way. Finally, one of the primary mediums for city discovery, Yelp, is despised by their own customer base (restaurant owners) because of the blackmail tactics they use to milk them for more money.
City discovery was broken. Yelp is despised by restaurant owners, communication between restaurants and their customers is done through barely seen facebook pages, and most city discovery is still done through Instagram and blogs.
Solution
Our solution was to build a mobile-first application that solved both of these problems simultaneously. City discovery was not a new problem, and there had been plenty of businesses that had tried to solve it in different ways. However, we believed that we could build a novel solution that would not only make city discovery much easier, but also allow local business owners to communicate with customers and potential customers in ways they previously could not. We built a mobile first application that would answer every form of the question "what's happening in Dallas?" by providing a direct line of communication between local businesses and Dallasites. This meant building the app itself and also building a backend portal for businesses to input deals and events onto our app. For our initial build, though, I collected all deals and event information myself and input it directly into our app so that we did not have to wait for businesses to get onboard to have a complete and useful app for our users.
We built a mobile app for city discovery and direct communication between local businesses and thier customers. Our goal was to answer the question "What's happening in Dallas?" as effectively as possible.
Limitations
Our limitations are much the same for all of my case studies. Like with RewardCoin, we were a two man team with essentially no marketing budget, so we had to balance quality with speed while doing what we could to market organically. As with all early products, our primary focus with the mobile app had to be function, prioritizing quality data and ease-of-use over things like micro-interactions or other nice-to-haves.
Our two-man team and no marketing budget meant growing slowly at first and prioritizing usability over design.
Marketing
For a month before launch, and continuing post launch, we did organic marketing through a myDallas Instagram account. We posted the same types of things a Dallas blogger would post informing our followers about new restaurants and things to do and places to go. Pre-launch, I created a short marketing video and we ran $150 of Instagram advertisements to build awareness and hype. Post-launch, we ran a $900 giveaway (free for us) on Instagram/the mobile app by partnering with local businesses.
Because Instagram is the primary place that city discovery happens, it was important for us to establish ourselves on Instagram where our potential users were. We ran the ads pre-launch using a mix of a few marketing videos.
We marketed organically through our myDallas instagram account, ran some Instagram ads and held an in-app giveaway to celebrate our launch and encourage downloads.
An Instagram story series I created called "Happy Hour Highlight" in order to share the details of a new happy hour around Dallas every week.
MVP
Our first release was designed to test the viability of a mobile app as a answering the question: “What is there to do in Dallas tonight?” We decided the best way to test the idea and the best place to start was by creating an app with two functions: Happy Hours/Daily Deals at restaurants and Things To Do around the city. These two categories would make the app useful for most people living in Dallas from the start. Also, it was very important that we were able to gather all of the information ourselves with nothing other than hard work and some time, so that we did not have to wait around to start testing the idea.
Our initial launch had two tabs: happy hours/daily deals and things to do. Since I was gathering all data manually our goal was to keep it as simple as possible while still being useful.
There were only two tabs on the original version of MyDallas: Events and Deals. Both tabs looked identical (outside of a different color scheme) and had at the same UI/UX. This is the UX of the deals tab. Pressing on the deal flips the card to see the details of the deal. At the top are three filters: Location, Deal/Event Type, and Date. After every third card in the list was the horizontal scroll bar featuring things like our giveaways and our later added features.
Additional Features
Once we had released our MVP, we began to add features that had proven to be valuable to Dallasites through other mediums like Instagram and local bloggers. A popular local Instagram account/blog called Dallasites 101 sent out a weekly email with lists of things to do in Dallas the following week, and we decided this was a great next feature for our app.
A weekly list of the top activities happening that week, but in an easy access location in our app, rather than a crowded email inbox. Another prominent feature of Instagram accounts and blogs were “top” lists that told people what the best of the best in a certain category were. We released our own version of these lists called the Drop 10, as our original plan was to drop a new list on a biweekly basis. Again, we were not trying to copy what was already being done, but we believed that, if done correctly, a mobile app was a much better way of getting this information than Instagram or blogs would ever be.
We added new features over time as quickly as possible, including a weekly list of top activities in Dallas and also our own version of "best of Dallas" lists called Drop `10 lists.
Our next big release never fully reached completion and was in beta as COVID-19 hit and turned everything upside down. Places was designed to be our Yelp killer. Want to find a Mexican restaurant within 3 miles of you that had an outdoor patio with trivia on Thursday nights? No problem, you can do that right in the myDallas app with a few clicks. Pictures, menu, weekly events and deals, open hours, and more all from the app. We had just released the feature about a week before COVID hit and we realized we needed to pivot as no one had any idea how long things would be closed down for.
We had a huge app overhaul/update in the works and almost complete when COVID changed everything. We never released the update.
COVID Pivot
We took our platform as a source of information on all things Dallas and did our best to continue to do exactly that. While completely redeveloping our mobile app in order to adapt to a COVID world was not possible for us, we began creating new products to provide for Dallasites in new ways. Our first new product release was a marketplace called Giftlove, which you can learn more about in this case study.
Next, we released a website with a filtered list of 250 restaurants that detailed everything someone might need to know to order to-go or delivery anywhere in Dallas. If you wanted to find a Mexican restaurant in Deep Ellum that had alcohol-to-go, you could find that in a few clicks. I built this website and backend from scratch using Bubble. I needed a more functional backend than Webflow offered because I needed to be able to update the data using another source while also having dynamic filters on the list of restaurants. If you would like to see the backend build I would be happy to show you!
We tried to adapt to the new environment by building resources for the new normal as quickly as possible. We released a website and backend for Dallasites to see what restaurants were delivering, doing takeout, etc.
DTXT (Text-Bot)
Finally, we built a text bot to make accessing the extensive resources we had complied and put on our website in filterable lists even easier. We built the bot using Twilio Studio and Python and many hours of thinking of common phrases someone might use to ask for information in order to “teach” the bot. Someone could text essentially any form of a question about the information we had and get an answer.
Conclusion
MyDallas was a product that never really had a proper ending. Our paid ads campaign and newly redesigned app, with new features like a bucket list and user profiles, were just set to be released before COVID changed everything. With less than $200 of paid advertising, we had over 2,000 downloads and over 200 weekly active users within a few months of our release. Unlike RewardCoin, MyDallas gave us a chance to release a product into the app store that was actually used, and it was an exciting journey that taught us a lot about product design and marketing. However, our progress slowed once COVID hit and we decided ultimately that there were too many questions about when things would return to normal to continue working on MyDallas, so we decided to pivot once again rather than completely rebuild the mobile app to be useful in a city that was mostly shut down.
