At the end of March 2015, Alex Zimmermann, co-founder of BLINQ, a mobile dating application based in Zürich, was reflecting on the recent meeting he had with his two business partners. At the centre of the team's reflection was a new technology that BLINQ had introduced recently to differentiate its offering from the competition. The innovation was to connect BLINQ's users in real-time in nightclubs, bars and cafés using small, battery-powered Bluetooth devices called beacons. BLINQ was the first dating platform that used this technology for dating purposes. After testing the technology in Zürich, Alex and his co-founders had to make a crucial decision for the future of the company. They could either expand the dating application in markets abroad, or they could pursue a new opportunity that had just emerged while deploying the beacons. The participating bars, nightclubs and the largest digital advertising network in Switzerland had approached the BLINQ team with the idea to build a beacon network for hyper-local mobile advertising throughout Switzerland.
This case illustrates various strategies for user acquisition in the application business and the typical dilemma faced by many entrepreneurs shortly after setting up their business. Among these dilemma entrepreneurs must invariably decide to what extent they should stick to their initial business idea or adapt their customer-problem-solution hypothesis or business model, based on learning.
