MyCurrency — loyalty points exchange platform

"MyCurrency seeks to let every single individual on Earth make money, literally. Each person can issue their own currency and use it in commercial exchanges. No longer will lack of cash be a limit on someone's ability to procure what they need. Now they can directly barter a representation of their goods/services, in the form of a personal currency, for what others provide."

Our client

Amin Khadempour is an individual entrepreneur from Canada, Vancouver. Based on multiple scientific research studies of the economics sector, he decided to launch an ambitious startup in order to create an international commercial exchange community.

Since 2018, Brocoders has built fruitful and trusted business relationships with Amin K. We have managed to combine our skills and knowledge to develop a revolutionary first-of-its-kind universal Loyalty Points exchange platform for businesses and their end-customers.

The situation

It's quite a challenge for the small-sized business to expand its sales channels. It's also not always possible for the growing companies to attract new partners or run customer loyalty points programs on a regular basis as of limited resources.

A bunch of small businesses who want to provide their clients with a loyalty points program, tend to use old-hat methods like stamp cards. Companies have to stamp a new card each time a customer makes a purchase, and then award their customer with a free product or service once the stamp card has all of its 'slots' stamped. Unfortunately, it might take thousands or even millions of dollars to end up with such a system.

Driven by his great passion to reshape the business world and help fast-growing companies boost their sales, Amin K. decided to develop a robust solution that could make that dream come true. To analyze the first steps and investigate the market, Amin opted for scientific-based research approaches that helped him to acquire a bigger picture of what must be done.

Amin managed to create the backend with Ruby on Rails, so he needed a frontend dedicated team to take care of the rest. He was looking for self-motivated experts that would embrace the technical deep dive practices to cover all the bases and pitfalls.

After a long search, Amin reached out to the Brocoders team to check if our expertise can fit his project and idea. Later on, it turned out that we share the same business mindset, so we came up with a burning desire to carry out the project to its full extent.

Working process

It was vital to carefully go through all the details and estimate the project's potential risks, so we began with conference calls in the first place. The client shared his vision of the final product and demonstrated the API that he had written before so we could align our further development stages.

Amin had a basic understanding of the concept, but he lacked expertise in the MPV field. That said, Brocoders leveraged its multi-year MVP development experience to propose the optimal strategy, test the project's viability and highlight the key features while taking into account the client's feedback.

After requirements elaboration, the Brocoders team opted for the Scrum model to ensure the client could keep track of every activity and change. The choice of the Scrum model along with the iterative development methodology allowed for data transparency, as well as made it possible for us to seamlessly introduce functionality changes along the way.

To determine how data can be shown, stored, created or changed, we wrote a business logic, on the basis of which the designs in Figma were created. We worked shoulder to shoulder with our partner and managed to combine our forces to enable the flexibility of the entire development process.

Needless to say, the client needed a digital business partner capable of designing a 100% reliable and user-centric infrastructure while sticking to the established budget. Last but not least, the product had to be built under tight timeframes, since Amin needed a fully-functioning solution within the shortest possible period.

In light of this, we utilized React Native to create a cross-platform product, thus significantly reducing the development time and costs. Moreover, such an open-source mobile application framework allowed for fast and smooth features implementing and updating for both Android and iOS at the same time.

Our team

Brocoders embraced the best possible development practices based on weekly communications and reports, along with a clear assignment of responsibilities, in order to ensure our specialists could effectively tackle all the challenging tasks.

We assembled a team of the following in-house seasoned experts:

Our Services

• Product development
• Mobile app development

Technology

Business Challenges

From the very beginning of the project, we managed to establish a dynamic working environment with Amin Khadempour. Despite the different time zones, we had been resolving all emerging issues on a hassle-free basis during the entire development process. Nevertheless, handling all parts of such unique and large-scale projects always comes along with multiple formidable tasks.

That said, to strengthen the final product’s market power, as well as to cover a wider audience, we decided to integrate the Craigslist’s API into our solution. Early on, the API’s architecture posed an additional challenge for the Brocoders team when it came to the integration phase.

Thankfully, our experts had set up a transparent development process that let them adequately collaborate with other specialists and find a workaround within a tight schedule.

Given the Craigslist traction in the US and Canada, it was an excellent service to opt for. As a result, when a user posts his goods in the MyCurrency app, the announcements will automatically appear on the www.craigslist.org website.

Delivered Solution

Backed by a well-knit collaboration with the client, the Brocoders team delivered an innovative multi-functioning MVP ready to be tested by end-users.

The client-oriented platform enables users to create their own micro-currencies and participate in various loyalty points programs, as well as trade with other users using their smartphones. Meanwhile, businesses can profit from expanding their distribution channels, thus attracting new potential customers.

With MyCurrency on board, there is a superior advantage over the traditional loyalty points programs for small businesses: a mobile-based solution lets companies immediately launch their own loyalty points program for free with just a click of a button.

As a business owner, all you have to do is notify your customers about your discounts on the app and provide them with your shop's loyalty points. You can then scan the QR Code from the users' smartphones to redeem their loyalty points and award customers with your services or goods right after.

In fact, such a system completely avoids the expenses of printing or buying stamps. Besides, you no longer have to ask customers to fill out forms. Customers also don't need to worry about losing their cards. As long as they keep their smartphones close at hand with the MyCurrency app installed, their loyalty points are always with them as well.

On top of that, here are the key features that all users can benefit from when using the MyCurrency app:

• You can create your own currency and issue as many units as you wish. Each currency type is related to the particular goods or services that you provide.
• You can create stores for your currencies, add your products or services to the store and set prices so that other users could buy your products or services, or accept your direct offers as well.
• You can add any type of goods or services that you can theoretically provide, whether that be apples, oranges, auto service, watch repair service, to name just a few.
• Any user that acquired your currency can spend it to purchase the goods or services at the stores related to that particular currency.
• You can make a trading request to other users in order to exchange your currencies for theirs. For example, you can offer a user to exchange his Python training courses for your sushi. When you both come to an agreement, the exchange occurs automatically.
• You can also use the currencies that you might receive from other users. So even if a store doesn't provide any goods or services that you require at the moment, you can still find further use for it. You can utilize it as an item of trade that allows you to acquire other currencies from other stores that you do require.
• You can offer to sell, swap or buy loyalty points on Craigslist, share the link to the Craigslist post on the MyCurrency app so that the Craigslist post will automatically be shown to all MyCurrency users.