Hey Everyone,
Key Updates:
- - New Hires
- - Release and Scheduled Updates
- - Marketing
- - Re-opening Raise
We have added two new people to our team, Alice and Domenic! Alice has worked with us prior as an intern and was part of our initial new designs for AppApp’s rebuild. We are super excited to have her on board as she has a wonderful eye for design and does so with a fun and quirky vibe to it. With Alice we have been able to turn our redesigned concepts into reality, clean up our brand imagery, and create lots of great content for our users to enjoy. Domenic has been brought on to handle many of our marketing needs. Since his being brought on we have adjusted our website and domain, set all proper tracking tools, and are launching an upcoming cider & food event (with more planned after) to drive awareness and community from current and prospective users. We are pumped to have Domenic on board and are confident both he and Alice will be a great base to our hiring needs!
The redesigned AppApp was released this October for both Android and Apple. This release was designed to get it out and in specific people’s hands while we have a series of updates and features being added to it every two weeks until the end of the year. By January of 2020, AppApp will be fully released with all of the features that we had intended it to have! That said, we have been moving very quickly and are ahead of schedule on many of the features being released this quarter.
We were part of 2 events in early October, Propelify and a guerilla campaign for Eeeeeatscon. Both of these events went well. Propelify was a little rocky at first as the weather was terrible (cold and rainy for an outside festival), but we actually got a lot of interest and contact info as well as a few downloads. Eeeeeatscon was purely about brand awareness and getting our name out there, which we did quite successfully. We are now moving more towards smaller events around the city, at our partner restaurants. These events are designed to get people aware of us as well as build a community around AppApp. This also gives potential users a great opportunity to see AppApp in action and fully understand the value prop.
Finally, after a lot of internal talks, we have decided to re-open our crowdfunding raise. Initially our goal was to raise about $30-50k from the crowd and then springboard to larger angel investor numbers. The fact that we raised over $250k really changed the view on this. More importantly, since our rounds close I have received hundreds of personal emails from interested investors like yourself wanting to be part of the AppApp family and join us on this amazing ride. This opportunity lends us to actually completing a full seed round quicker than anticipated, allowing us to accelerate our roadmap. The additional funds will allow us to bring on additional staff for restaurant growth, as well as work with a marketing company that has specialized in building out early user bases for apps in the food/drink/entertainment space (Hooch, an indirect competitor, being one of them).
For Q4:
- The main focuses of Q4 will be on finishing up development of the app. As mentioned previously, we anticipate having all features initially intended in the app by the end of the year
- Utilizing events to drive interest - building a sense of community for our users is a great way to reach out and drive initial traction
- Fundraising, we are looking to finish up our full $1m (total) round this quarter.
Asks:
- For any of you in Miami, FL, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. We would love to chat with some of you! These are some of the first initial areas we would be looking to expand to and getting to know the area from you would be amazing! Feel free to shoot me an email if you have time to chat about it and we can set something up. [email protected]
Best,
Todd Folk
CoFounder/CEO
AppApp