This is the second of two posts about how Bounty came to exist. The first one is here.
In the six weeks between mid-February and now: an app that reads grocery price tags, stores them with where and when they were scanned, and handles five Calgary chains — Lucky Supermarket, Calgary Co-op, Save-On Foods, Safeway, and T&T. A closed beta with real Calgary testers. A points system to make scanning a little more fun, and a public website with a name and a logo.
It's not finished. But it exists, which is more than it did in February, and it's running in real Calgary stores right now.
That should be the end of the hard part. It isn't.
The part I've been avoiding
For the first six weeks I didn't write about Bounty in public at all. I told myself I was waiting until the product was good enough to show people. I told myself the testers would tell their friends, and the thing would grow on its own.
That's not what happened.
Getting the product to a state where I feel comfortable showing it is a moving target. Every time I cross one threshold I find another one. Meanwhile the testers I have are doing exactly what I asked — scanning prices, giving feedback — but not telling their friends, because I never asked them to.
The honest truth is that I am very good at building and very bad at telling people what I built. There's always one more bug to fix, one more feature to ship. The blog post can wait until tomorrow — every tomorrow, forever.
So this is the post that comes before that. The next stage of Bounty needs something I cannot build by myself: people knowing it exists. The only way to get there is to start telling them.
What this is
I'm going to write about Bounty — the decisions, the Calgary context, what I've learned from testers, what surprised me, what I got wrong. Honestly dated, at whatever cadence I can sustain.
The ask
If you're a Calgary shopper and any of this resonates — if you've had the moment of standing in front of a yellow sticker not knowing whether to trust it — Bounty is in beta and there's a waitlist. I'd love your help making this work.
The thing I cannot build alone is a community of people who care enough about grocery prices to scan them. I can build the app. I cannot build the people. That's where I need help.
Thanks for reading this far.
— Elmer