Winning app turns visits into a game — and takes customers to retailers

What if your next visit to the mall or a park was a game?

“That’s what we want to do,” said Krystal Kunyue Zheng, co-founder and CEO of SAVR. “We want to use digital platforms to connect people wherever they are and make their experience more interesting, engaging and fun.”

SAVR is developing a mobile platform that shopping districts, tourist destinations and parks can use to make their locations come alive through gamification. Judges voted SAVR the winner in the tourism and hospitality category of the 2020 Miami Herald Pitch Competition.

Zheng and her team started building a platform for gamified consumer engagement in 2018. In early 2019, SAVR partnered with about 25 businesses in and around Wynwood for its first pilot test, which allowed consumers who walked the neighborhood to win incentives from local businesses by playing a game via SAVR’s app.

With little marketing, SAVR drew about 500 daily active users — proof that the team was on to something, Zheng said. “From there we learned people who interacted with the platform also went into the businesses.”

Last fall, the SAVR team activated holiday-themed events for the City of Doral and West Kendall Baptist Hospital. SAVR logged an average 17,000 engagements and 1,300 advertising impressions per event; users then navigated to stores, increasing foot traffic, Zheng said. “People really liked the experiences … We learned there is a use case.”

This year the team is focused on activating destinations, like shopping districts and tourist destinations, where visitors — with the help of their smartphones — could be challenged to explore and seek out more experiences to earn rewards they can use at the theme park or the stores.

SAVR is also in conversations with a South Florida county to activate parks in a pilot study. For parks, SAVR can become a virtual guide, serving up park content at different interaction points.

The COVID-19 crisis put a pause on pilot studies for now. But it has also helped the team realize that adding a virtual reality experience onto the platform would be a good addition, and SAVR now is building one for a popular Miami tourist shopping plaza. “Coronavirus made us realize people should have the same experience even if they are sitting at home.” Zheng said.

Zheng has a degree in public relations from Florida International University and worked at Synkt Games for a year. When she decided to take the entrepreneurial leap, she partnered with an FIU team that built SAVR’s initial product, and went through the Startup FIU and Babson WIN Lab accelerator programs. She won an Envolve USA entrepreneurship award in 2019 and was chosen for the eMerge Americas Startup Showcase in 2019 and 2020.

Zheng has a full-time team that includes an experienced CTO in California, Jeff Wang, and Eric Gavin, a local designer passionate about data visualization. “We’re going full force.”

SAVR started out as a consumer app but pivoted to a B2B-focused web-based solution. “People today do not want to download another app,” she said. And SAVR offers more than fun and games.

“We are the only platform that can provide that all-in-one experience where we have gamification that can be that engagement path and channel for people who want to connect with your experience. We provide data and reports based on consumer behavior, including how they walk around, how they consume, how they interact with your content and a system to manage that data. We are the only platform that provides all the pieces that they need in one platform.”

SAVR can be a revenue generator for clients, because shopping centers or parks could have sponsored engagement on the platform, she said. “We incentivize their traffic. We are a white-label solution now. If a shopping center pushes a lot of loyalty programs, we can do that. If they want gamified experiences, we can do that too.”

SAVR is still in the pilot phase for 2020 but plans to charge clients — such as shopping districts, tourist attractions and parks — in 2021 with a setup fee and monthly subscription fee based on size of the shopping center or attraction. Projections show SAVR could book seven-figure revenue starting in 2021. To date, Zheng has financed startup costs through family and friends.

During the COVID-19 quarantine, SAVR is enhancing the automation capabilities, revamping its onboarding system, and enhancing and updating features on the platform. “Going forward, we will add more experiences with trophies and different kinds of content to make physical experiences more fun to connect with,” Zheng said.

This story was originally published May 18, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Winning app turns visits into a game — and takes customers to retailers."