Yesterday Rentle was co-hosting Kiuas Accelerator's BBQ party. Thank you all who came and visited our booth, it was a pleasure to meet and chat with you all. We had super fun evening and based on our observations (and statistics) so did you. Wonder if the 300 drinks had anything to do with it.
What party?
A little background for those who were not present or don't know what party we are talking about:
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Kiuas Accelerator is the most recognized startup accelerator program in Finland.
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Rentle is a member of the ongoing program.
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In addition to the coaching sessions, workshops, and other official programs, Kiuas throws open BBQ parties every other Wednesday at Startup Sauna.
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Yesterday it was our turn to take part in the arranging committee.
Keeping the guests hydrated
Like proper hosts, we thought that the guests must be thirsty. So we hired Son of a Punch cocktail artist to make drinks for our guests. The kind people from Beverage Partners Finland sponsored us with quality drinks to be used for the cocktails. We estimated that 300 drinks would keep the guests happy in addition to the beverages provided by Kiuas. Well, it took a bit over three hours for the guests to drink 300 cocktails until we ran out.
The bartender on the right is having Rentle's software open on a tablet, where she receives the orders. The guests in the middle are making orders with their smartphones. Smooth! 🍹
The catch
Of course, we had a catch in offering people free drinks. We wanted them to order the drinks using our software that's normally used for renting equipment such as skis, bicycles, tools, and so on. The funny part is that the software fits more than well to this kind of usage. Or how otherwise would it be possible to serve 300 drinks in approximately three hours without causing major chaos? That's approximately 1,67 drinks served per minute, and 1 drink served every 35 seconds. And all this with software that's meant for renting out equipment.
How did everything happen?
Well, of course, a big thanks go to the skillful bartenders. Without them, this stunt wouldn't have been possible. But we'd like to keep some honor ourselves as well.
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In less than 5 minutes, we educated the bartenders on how to use Rentle. They had never heard about us before, and they managed to handle all the orders without any help from our side.
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We posted QR codes around the event that instructed the guests to order drinks. The guests hadn't used our service before, so this was also a great usability test for Rentle's self-check-in solution.
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First, we followed that everything ran smoothly but soon were able to relax as we realized that our help wasn't needed.
With the stunt, we were able to demo our service for 190 people.
The evening in numbers
The bartenders from Son of a Punch had designed a drink menu with three drinks (we came up with the names 😅):
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Surfing grandma - Aperol, rhubarb, strawberry, lemon
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Investor's Aprés Ski - Hendrick's gin, cucumber, apple, basil, lemon
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Tour de France Wake-up - Cointreau, cold brew coffee, vanilla, orange
How the orders of the drinks are distributed. Interesting 🤔
Either there were a lot of investors in the guests, or the guests just had a taste for more sour drinks. But what else did we learn from the numbers?
7 cocktails. Someone had a nice evening! 🥳
Based on the data, we know that 1,5-2 cocktails per visitor is an optimal amount if there are additional beverages in the party. We also learned that most people prefer drinks with fruits and berries instead of coffee.
The point of this blog is not to encourage using our service for ordering drinks but to clarify how much one can learn about people with data. We will definitely use all this information when we next time throw a party. But imagine how much a rental shop could learn about their business and customers if they collected and analyzed all the data they could.
