24hourlondon's recent developments

So here at 24hourlondon we just added our third free drink offer to the app, at The Long Acre in Covent Garden. This has happened shortly after our first free-drink venue - House of Tippler in East Dulwich - gave us a recommendation for our services, which is now sitting prettily on the website. The way it works is that House of Tippler offers a free drink to our users and we work hard to increase House of Tippler's footfall though means both digital and analogue. As a user, you redeem the offer by showing the venue page with the voucher on it to the bartender, allowing them to hit the green "redeem" button and availing yourself of a free drink. Then stay for another and maybe some food? The second offer was at Jerusalem Bar and Kitchen in Fitzrovia and the pic attached to this blogpost is their voucher screenshot.

Our main mission is still providing information about what's open after 11pm in London - but the point of the free drinks is to offer something extra for our users and our venues. Plus we're building the kind of good relationships with venues that we hope will be fruitful when we've got enough users to begin to monetise: maybe they will trust us enough to test our software for us? For eventually we want to help venues market themselves online in a disruptive way. If there's anyone out there who'd like to help us fund that, we'd love to talk.

We're in negotiation with a much larger company about licensing some of our data: apparently this data stuff is valuable... although since this is a negotiation they're also trying to convince us it's not as valuable as all that. We're hoping that any money from the data will provide a modest marketing budget.

I've continued collecting data about which late-opening London venues serve food, as this will soon be useful for a new screen on the app, showing a map of after-hours places where you can sit down and eat.

We're exploring the possibility of doing some affiliate marketing, possibly by putting booking software on 24hourlondon.

And I have been told by a potential investor that my approach to product development and business planning is too "loose" for him. Since he won't explain what he means by this, this too is pretty frustrating (frustration is the theme for this month). We have a full business plan, we have a couple of pitch decks: one for email and one for presenting in person. When he asked for additional costings we were able to supply them. What does "too loose" mean? All thoughts gratefully received :-)