Alcove

Alcove sought to build an app that brought profit-starved coffee shop owners and time-deprived freelancers together to mutually benefit one another. By reserving tables in their coffee shops, Alcove hosts would earn $7 per hour from freelancers who required workspace, electricity and Wi-Fi in one convenient place. My role would be to spearhead all branding and tech iteration while developing the product roadmap to bring us to market.

The Challenge

Coffee shops are amazing places to get work done… if you can ever find a table & chair, electricity, and Wi-Fi access together in one place. But, would people be willing to pay a premium to reserve such ideal work conditions at a coffee shop? After surveying over 100 freelancers across the U.S., they most certainly would be willing to pay for that. That’s when we sought to create a win-win-win scenario -- a revenue stream for Alcove and coffee shops, and a little slice of on-demand workspace heaven for the on-the-go worker.

Approach

In order for Alcove to succeed, we quickly learned that coffee shop owners needed to make “the price of two lattes” per hour for reserved tables to make sense. We knew that the Alcove service offering would have a broad appeal to not only freelancers, but also sales reps, college students, and more. We would find a handful of shops to participate in a 6-week beta testing period so we could implement a minimum viable product, charge $10 per hour for a table and see how the lives of coffee shop goers would improve.

We signed up 5 shops out of 100 visited for our 6-week beta test. Hosts received a 70/30 split of revenue, automated booking and exposure to new clients through our customer network. Alcove filled empty seats, increased food & beverage revenues and had the potential to add an additional $1000 per month to the average coffee shop’s bottom line.

User Testing

Customers loved the Alcove service from the outset of our testing. Like we planned, neither the user nor the host had to verbally communicate with one another to fulfill a booking. Simple table signage indicated Alcove reserved tables versus regular tables. Hosts could verify customer booking through the app., while customers could just sit down and work. We blitzed the local marketplace with targeted Facebook ads to draw appeal to our five Alcove beta shops. Test results seemed optimistic in the beginning, but then employees overlooked things, weren’t trained properly on Alcove processes by managers, or found themselves in semi-hostile situations with regular customers who didn’t understand the shop changes.

Post Launch

The beta test results overall showed that Alcove would be most appropriately placed in franchise coffee chains, like Starbucks, to streamline in-store processes and policies. “Ma & Pa” coffee shops had too many unknown variables, such as spotty employee training, sporadic busy periods, and minimal incentives for employees to take Alcove seriously as a job responsibility. The most difficult variable we dealt with was the lack of direct communication with shop owners to gauge in-store feedback during the beta period. We were operating in too much of a gray area to proceed with the post beta phase.