Turned out that more then 80% of them (in Belgium) found eachother through common friends. This made sense. The artificial dating applications, like Tinder, are good for superficial relations in big cities. Everybody is anonymous there, and long lasting relations are scarce. But in more ‘rural’ areas, the social connection is still very important in finding a potential partner.

Cleverest decided then to focus on the social connection. Next challenge was our expertise, Marketing. How will we get people on the app? It quickly became clear that whitout a clear revenu model to support our advertising need our only way was to go viral. Going viral is one of the worst marketing strategies we could imagine, because it is very very hard, mainly because of it’s unpredictability.

But then it hit us. What if we let people couple other people? That way each new user would invite 2 other users! Even more, by introducing a third person in an otherwise 2 way communication we had the social connection. Wing was born. After this product breakthrough we quickly assembled

a team of 3 to develop the iOs and Android application. To incentize the invite growth we chose a game like aproach and design. Wing had to be ‘breezy’. Being single is often frowned upon and seen as a problem. We made it fun and social.

By conducting more research and preparing our go to market strategy we quickly realized the extra potential of Wing.

• > The first dating application that includes people in a relation. You can just download it to help other people
• > The first dating application with a closed loop. Once you find a relation through Wing you can start helping other people

The only thing missing was a good revenu model. We mapped out our options and concluded that the best option was to get traction and active users and then sell. Normaly we frown on this kind of business model. But with the original goal in mind to learn the mobile market we decided to invest in our own learning.

Publicity: We send love letters to the major press agencies announcing WING. Normaly we wouldn’t advise this kind of stunts with the press if you’re a serious company, but with WING we could play all we want. We got picked up by more then 6 different press companies.

Early adopters: We created 3 beta testing evenings to get early adopters and ambassadors. Afterwards we threw a Wing prelaunch party to spread the word.

Pre Launchday: Due to our limited funds we could not afford a big scale test. We decided to launch in Ghent to get a market validation and act accordingly. We targeted students during college with flyers and banners. Our KPI’s we’re simple. 500 users was a succes, 1000 users amazing.

The results we’re exceptional. We got over 1400 users on the first day, with only 5 houres of flyering. The concept was market proof. Unfortunalty a lot of development bugs rose up.

Our team worked 24/7 to debug and fix the application.

We decided to postpone the big launch with 3 weeks, to make sure the app was ready to scale to the full Belgium market.