- Lukas, founder of BravoShop
This is the first "What's New" ever. Since BravoShop itself is new, let me first tell you a bit about how it started.
Backstory
I spent most of 2022 creating custom mobile apps for clients. One day, I was approached by an e-commerce brand. They were interested in creating a mobile app for their brand.
They had all the selling points prepared:
- We want to be closer to our customers
- We want to create a community around our brand, and be more than just a storefront
- We want to reward our best customers
- ... also, we heard an app converts at a much higher rate than a website
All very good arguments!
This was not a major brand. It was a fairly small, family-run business, who took great pride in providing the best service for their customers - and they wanted to take that even further.
After talking for a bit, they were less interested. Turns out building a custom app from scratch is... expensive. While they could see all the benefits of an app, the cost of building and maintaining a custom app from scratch was simply out of their reach.
New plan: Don't create an app. It's way too expensive!
But wait...
... what if it didn't have to be?
I mean, most e-commerce apps have the same core functionality:
- View products and categories
- Add to cart
- Pay
... right?
So we got to work.
The product
Here we are, almost half a year later. In the last months, I have spoken to a lot of e-commerce owners and operators. Based on their feedback, BravoShop is now ready to launch to a select group of e-commerce brands. We don't have every feature yet, but we are releasing new ones every week.
This is what it currently looks like (taken from a demo I recorded a while back):
We are launching with these features:
- A drag-and-drop layout builder, with 6 different blocks
- Manual push notifications
- Simple app settings like app icon, app name and brand color.
- Instagram integration so you can share your latest Instagram posts in the app
- And finally: The app can be published in the App Store and on Google Play under the brand's own name
We have kept the scope tight to ensure a relatively quick launch. We will add more features every week based on customer feedback. And before you know it, you will be able to do all kinds of cool things.
I would know, since I'm writing this a year in the future 😉