The problem
EscapeRank's founders contacted us initially to do the design of the app. They were already working with a freelancer to develop the backend and web application for their clients. One of the founders was a techie and his idea was to build the app himself. But this approach had two problems:
- The backend and web app was too big for a single freelance
- The techie founder was too busy dealing with the business side
In the end, the pace of development was not meeting their expectations to release the app on time.
Finally, they decided that we would take care of everything: design and development of the app for escapists and the web application for escape room companies.
Solution
During the design phase we saw that its list of features was too extensive. Especially for a product that had not yet found its market fit. We recommended them to define an MVP together with a product roadmap that allows them to shorten the time-to-market and add new features in future iterations.
First we launched the marketing website to publicize the product and start attracting companies. To reduce development costs we used Webflow for the website. This website linked to the web application so the companies could sign up and add their escape rooms to the platform. In this way, they started filling the database with escape rooms before launching the app.
We later launched the app, built with Flutter, so escapists could search for rooms and save them as favorites. From there, we added the reservation from the app. The booking flow was integrated with Turitop, the reservation engine they had chosen to manage room reservations.
Finally, we complete the app by adding all the part of team creation and rankings to encourage competition among users. From the web application, companies could highlight their rooms in the app.
The results
We managed to comply with the proposed roadmap, allowing EscapeRank's commercial team to start attracting customers on the scheduled date. The result was a very usable app with a dark-style look&feel that generated great acceptance among the escapist community.
