Case Study: Cloudy Day

Cloudy Day was created by a group of friends who are passionate about finance and financial responsibility.

They wanted to build an alternative to the credit-based financial apps that encourage people to spend money they didn’t have. Their hope is to provide financially-responsible tools that enhance the lives of casual staff and self-employed workforce that miss out on important entitlements (like annual leave and sick leave) that others take for granted!

Cloudy Day reached out to Enee to help them through the process of developing a strategy, idea validation, planning and design, development and launch, and marketing their product to their target audience.

They relied on our expertise and knowledge of cutting-edge technologies to advise and assist them through each of these phases, all the way to a fully functional product.

Defining a strategy to validate their idea

To validate the idea, we helped Cloudy Day in a number of ways. First, we defined a strategy that is best tailored to the industry we were targeting. To test whether this idea was worth pursuing, we agreed to develop a website landing page which allowed users to view what the app could look like, what features the application offered and the costs involved.

We paired this landing page with Facebook advertising, which targeted the ideal customer of the application, in order to test and gauge interest in the product and the general idea.

Various “call to action” elements were placed throughout the site, asking potential customers to register their interest and get notified when the mobile app was available.

We then compared the number of people that registered their interest and the cost of reaching this customer base, against the pre-set goals we all agreed would indicate that the idea was validated.

At the end of the idea validation experiment, the pre-set goals were met, giving all parties more confidence that the idea resonated with the target audience, and there was potential for this product to succeed in the market.

Development of the MVP

With this confidence, the founders were comfortable dedicating further capital to the next stage; development of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

For startups and new products, there is always a high risk (even with idea validation) that the venture is not successful. To limit risk and ensure a tight “product - market” fit, we always recommend spending the least amount of money and time, building the most minimal features of the idea that provide value to the end user - and then launching as quickly as possible, to get as much feedback from your users as quickly as possible.

We helped Cloudy Day with this strategy, by helping them define the minimum viable feature set, and helping design, develop and release the app to market.

At the time of writing, we are launching the first version of the application to the first set of fans and early adopters, and are measuring usage and feedback for the next stages of development and iteration.

Two of the main challenges we faced were in relation to the security and budget requirements of the mobile app. This was due to the careful construction of the startups business model, the interest to keep ongoing financial transaction costs low, and the importance of keeping overall security high.

Security requirements

Since the app required access to the user’s bank account to automatically direct debit money, security was a high priority. We needed to ensure that the payment provider that we selected met (or exceeded) the industry standard for security and could scale with the growth of the app, as well as meet the cost requirements for the business.

To deliver a solution to this significant challenge, we were able to think outside the box and use our unique skill set to deliver. After a wide market-scan for available payment provider options, we ended up selecting a payment provider that exceeded all requirements, but did not have the “turn-key” integration pre-made for our purposes. The solution required a unique, custom integration - that our team was able to deliver on-time and on-budget.