Recap and Reflection

Bundl

Bundl is another attempt at “innovating” loyalty programs. We turned towards another form of loyalty programs – paid loyalty programs, a realm dominated by amazon prime. This pivot focused on drastically reducing competition within a coalition (ha) of businesses, while retaining the benefits of such an amalgamation. The result? Bundl, a platform where we would coalesce different restaurant perks and events into one subscription plan. Paid memberships hinged on creating experiences and delivering benefits to help consumers maximise their benefits, and we sought to do the same with small restaurants to help drive greater traffic and, for the first time, loyalty.

The more you eat, the more you save!

Bundl offers memberships for each locale, where each membership comprises of perks and events at a number of restaurants in that locale. Perks can include benefits like priority booking, line-skipping, and flat discounts. In addition, Bundle aims to offer more of a special-event type of experience . By participating in the membership, members get access to experiences like pop-up food bazaars, build-your-own stations, grab-and-go meals, and happy hours. For a certain price, members get to experience the restaurants in their location like never before. Wait, who’s gonna pay for these events?

A new revenue stream for merchants

As a restaurant, you earn from being part of the membership depending on the type of event you want to hold. If you hold a happy hour, you get a certain percentage of the current membership revenue in pure profit, which you can use to cover the thin margins of your happy hour. If you hold any type of food or drink event, you will receive a larger percentage of the current membership revenue to cover for the event cost, which will translate in guaranteed sales. If members decide to take advantage of the perks more, wonderful – more sales! If not, you still earn from holding an event for the memberships. A much more convincing win for the merchants here.

The Willingness to Pay

You have to be able to make money

Restaurants – nay, the entire food industry – operates on razor thin margins. Bundl would most likely share the same fate. The price must be really exact – too high, and no one will buy it; too low, and you can't cover the costs for the events. We struggled a lot with our pricing models because it is hard to estimate the number of new subscribers each event will bring in, and each restaurant requires different amounts of capital for their events as different foods have – and get this – different prices. Not to mention that there restaurants must prepare enough “free” food in the events to feed a sufficient percentage of members. Furthermore, with the decline of in-house dining and the growing popularity of delivery services especially in the younger generations, perks and events like these might not have the same traction as anticipated, even within starved college students. All-in-all, even if we had done thorough validation among people, the pricing model and financial viability of Bundl seemed to be tepid at best.