In a start-up with limited resources, detailed specs for your developers are a luxury. At the same time, without proper specs, developers may not build what’s actually useful for our customers. To solve this problem, we decided to try something out, and luckily for us, it worked handsomely.

Learning from a British pub

Living in the UK, where we do not have tipping culture, I noticed that when someone tips at a pub, the bartender rings a bell. The hope is that by celebrating a big tip and letting everyone know: 1) drinkers may leave bigger tips, and 2) the staff gets a remind that they can get tips if they do a good job.  

Our marketing goal

At CityFALCON, we have been happy with monthly unique visitors which today stand at 4.5K per month. Working through the funnel, we wanted to convert these into registered and then active users. My target for the team was to reach 1000 registered users (this may not sound like a lot for others in the consumer space, but we believe it to be a good start for a fintech product).  

So we bought this $25 bell for the team in July.

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The idea was simple. Every time we have a new registration, someone in the team would ring a bell for others in the room to know. On a day when you didn’t hear the bell a few times a day, the team knew they had to do something. Also, you didn’t want to be in that ringing room when we got featured on Product Hunt.

Did it actually work? 1,000 registrations baby! 🙂

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How did the bell really help?

It’s much easier when you have a camera app and everyone can understand the product, but when it’s a financial product, developers may struggle to understand. After starting to use the bell, we had our developers spending more time on the site as users and trying to see if there are ways we can convert traffic into registrations. The team started thinking like users, came up with on-boarding and conversion ideas, and the development team worked closer with the marketing team than ever before.

If I was in a corporate job, I would have struggled to experiment with such ideas. But thank God we are a start-up, we are eager to experiment and ready to fail if required. This time we celebrate! 🙂