Project Overview
Frugl is an events discovery app that helps users on a budget find affordable things to do in London. It was launched mid-March 2014 and since then has garnered a host of 5* reviews and thousands of downloads. Users like its clean and simple design, easy to use interface and the range of events listed - all £10 or under and many free.
Organisation
Team
To create a new events discovery app for Londoners on a budget. User must be able to search by price/date/location. All events to be filtered at £10 or under.
CEO - Suzanne Noble
CTO - Tikiri Hulugalle
Design Team - Inktrap (Inktrap.co.uk)
Project Brief
Having had a web based app for a year, with the majority of users being on iPhone, the decision was taken to build a native iOS app in late 2014. During 2013 we had received a small grant from the Technology Strategy Board that enabled us to curate events from a number of different sources on the web into a dashboard. This would form the backbone of the content for Frugl. Now what we wanted was a beautifully designed, easy to use iPhone app that would meet the requirements of our discriminating users - mainly 18-35 years old with our core demographic being students.
After interviewing a number of agencies we eventually settled on Inktrap, three 23 year old Shoreditch based developers who had only recently graduated University. They had a number of suggestions to our creative brief and, as they were all of the age of our core user demographic, we decided to trust them!
We are extremely delighted with the results. The app is incredibly easy to use, functions well, and looks great. The entire user interface has been designed so the user does not have to use the keypad but merely clicks from one area to the next. The feedback so far has been fantastic both from users and other app designers.
Project Need
Frugl solves the problem for Londoners of having to wade through loads of data in order to find low cost and free events in the Capital. Being one of the most cultural cities in the world, there is no shortage of things to do that are inexpensive but finding them can be a challenge. Time Out has become uncuratable and, to date, there is not an app or website that simplifies the process of finding things to do on a budget... until Frugl. With our core demographic being the socially mobile London student, we wanted to build an easy to use app that would help them find things to do when they were out and about.
User Experience
Frugl requires no login or sign-up. The user merely downloads the App from the app store and is immediately presented with three choices.
'What's Hot' is Frugl's curated list of 5 events of interest per day
'Listings' displays the week's listings, sorted by Free and Cheap. The top listing is the one closest in time and then the events move on from there.
'Explore' Lets the User search by events closest to them or by London's most popular going out areas.
Our 'Shortlist' function lets users drop any events onto their iPhone calendar. A notification is sent to them the day before any event that appears on their calendar as a reminder.
Popular sharing and mapping functions have been integrated to allow users to share any event with their friends including What's App. Citymapper has been incorporated into the mapping functions so users know how much each journey will cost in addition to the cost of the event.
Project Marketing
The CEO has a background in PR & Marketing, having spent over 20 years as a PR Director so PR is the biggest part of the marketing mix. In a short space of time, Frugl has managed to achieve a half page feature in the UK's biggest free newspaper, The Metro. Additional coverage has been seen in Look magazine, Tech City News, Startups.co.uk, Made in Shoreditch and there is much more to come.
Marketing spend will be limited to word of mouth and PR, two of the biggest and most trusted means of engagement with the most direct results.
Project Privacy
The team is very small so privacy has not been an issue for us. And as our App does not require the user to hand over any personal data, we have not yet had to deal with privacy issues. For now, we want to make the user experience as friction free as possible. We envisage privacy and security issues to come later when we will require users to sign-up.
Best Mobile or App Startup
This category relates to Startups working on a Mobile project or an App. The project could be for smartphones, tablet, web, game console or api apps. Startup projects need to be newly emerging, less than 5 million users and less than 3 years old.
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