Turning a venue profile into a promotion tool—and retaining 87% of partners
How we transformed a static venue page into a promotion and analytics tool that helps partners attract guests, tell their story, and measure the value of their listing.
Product overview
Bumpin is a social discovery app for dating, socializing, networking, and new connections. It helps people find others who are not just nearby, but at the same place. Users can see who is around, start chatting, or arrange to meet.
The product's core idea is to turn everyday places into hubs for real-world social interaction.
Context
Following the map-first redesign covered in the previous case, partner venues became more prominent throughout the product. Users could find them on the map, open their profiles, see who was there, and interact with other users.
For Bumpin, partner venues were more than content on the map—they underpinned the partner monetization model. To renew their listings, venues needed to see tangible value: how Bumpin helped them attract guests, sustain interest, and measure performance.
The venue profile therefore needed to evolve from a simple map marker into a practical marketing tool for partners.
Outcome
Problem
1. Partners lacked promotion tools
Venues wanted to share offers, news, events, and special promotions, but the app did not provide a convenient format for doing so.
Communication happened outside the product or through manual requests, while the venue profile remained largely static.
2. Venue profiles failed to communicate value
Users could see a venue and the people inside, but they did not always understand why they should go there.
When a venue had no visible people or activity, it felt empty and less appealing, which could make users less likely to visit.
Venues lacked a complete storefront with menus, services, up-to-date news, photos, and events. As a result, the profile was less effective at supporting visit decisions and failed to communicate the venue's value beyond current user activity.
3. Partners could not measure listing performance
Venues had no clear way to evaluate the value of their Bumpin listing.
Partners lacked even basic analytics. They wanted to know whether their venue was generating interest, whether the app helped attract guests, and whether renewing the listing was worthwhile.
Research
To understand which tools partners actually needed, we drew on two sources: feedback submitted through Bumpin's official account and interviews with venue representatives.
Partner feedback analysis
We analyzed more than 60 partner messages submitted through Bumpin's official account over the previous 6 months.
Partners regularly reached out with questions, suggestions, and feature requests. The most common themes were promotion, announcements, keeping information current, and measuring performance.
The key takeaway was that partners needed more than a profile in the app. They needed a channel for communicating regularly about their venue and driving visits.
Partner interviews
We conducted 5 interviews with key partners across three categories: restaurants, cafes, and fitness venues.
Format: 30–40-minute remote interviews with venue representatives.
We discussed their current experience with Bumpin listings, expectations of the product, venue promotion practices, and how they measured listing performance.
Key interview topics:
- The goals partners wanted to accomplish with Bumpin;
- The content they wanted to show users;
- How they promoted events, offers, and news;
- The metrics that indicated whether a listing was working;
- The data they wanted to receive regularly.
Key insights
- Partners want to actively shape interest in their venue. Simply appearing on the map was not enough. Venues wanted to influence how users perceived them by highlighting their atmosphere, news, offers, events, and current promotions.
- Users lack the context they need to decide whether to visit. When a venue profile contains only basic information, it is harder to understand why the venue is worth visiting. Menus, photos, Stories, and events help build interest more quickly.
- Events create a strong connection between venues and users. For venues, they are a clear way to attract guests. For users, they provide a reason to visit and potentially meet new people.
- Analytics helps build partner trust in the product. Partners want evidence that their listing delivers value. Even basic data on views, visits, audience, and activity makes Bumpin's value more measurable.
Hypotheses
- Stories for venues would increase partner engagement and loyalty by giving them a simple way to promote news, offers, and updates.
- An events section would increase the platform's value to partners by helping them attract guests to scheduled events.
- Menus and services would make venue profiles more informative by showing users what each venue has to offer before visiting.
- Analytics would improve partner satisfaction by enabling them to evaluate listing performance and make informed decisions.
- Richer venue profiles would increase user interest by giving people more reasons to open a venue, explore it, and plan a visit.
Solution
We redesigned the partner venue profile and turned it into a complete in-app storefront. A single page of basic information became a structured experience with People, Overview, Menu, Events, and Analytics sections. This preserved Bumpin's social core while giving partners tools for promotion and performance measurement.
Stories for venues
Stories became a fast communication channel between venues and users.
Venues can highlight new offerings, promotions, atmosphere, team members, schedules, and special offers. For users, Stories are a familiar interaction pattern that requires no additional learning.
Stories are surfaced through the venue avatar, making it easy to see what is new.
People tab
People remained the first tab in the venue profile.
This mattered because Bumpin is built around social interaction. Partner content could not displace the product's core value: seeing who is at a venue now, who plans to go, and who visited recently.
We kept the following sections:
- Here now;
- Going here;
- Visited in the past 24 hours;
- Quick actions for interacting with people.
Overview tab
This tab brings together recent Stories, photos, a description, contact details, and social links.
Users can quickly understand the atmosphere, browse visual content, and access essential information without switching to external channels.
The goal is to help users answer one question faster: “Am I interested in this venue?”
Menu / Services tab
We added menus for cafes and restaurants, with an equivalent services format for other venue categories.
The section supports categories, item names, descriptions, serving sizes, calories, and pricing. Fitness and service venues can use the same pattern for services, memberships, or programs.
This makes the profile more informative and helps users understand what a venue offers before they visit.
Events tab
Events became a dedicated section of the venue profile. Partners can promote trivia nights, concerts, meetups, tastings, workouts, parties, lectures, and other events.
For free events, we kept the familiar “I'm going” action. Users can signal their interest, giving venues an indication of potential attendance.
Paid events include a link to purchase tickets or view more details.
The section also shows who plans to attend. This reinforces Bumpin's social mechanics and turns an event from a simple listing into an opportunity for users to connect.
Analytics for venue moderators
One of the key goals was to give partners a clear way to measure listing performance.
We added an Analytics tab available only to venue moderators. Users without management permissions do not see it.
Analytics is organized into several categories:
- Views and engagement;
- Visits;
- Events;
- Audience;
- Activity over time.
Partners can select a month and review key metrics: profile views, Story views, menu opens, saves, venue visits, “I'm going” clicks, interest-to-visit conversion, audience data, and activity peaks.
Moderators can also receive a monthly analytics report by email. This keeps partners informed about performance even when they do not open the app every day.
The analytics screen is shown as an example and does not represent a screenshot of the actual dashboard.
Testing
After designing the new profile, we tested the solution with partners to understand how well the new structure addressed their day-to-day needs.
The study included 5 venue representatives we had interviewed earlier. Each participated in a 30–40-minute remote session that combined an interactive prototype walkthrough with a discussion of key scenarios.
Rather than measuring task completion speed, we focused on whether partners understood the value of the solution and could apply it in their work.
The study confirmed that partners saw the redesigned profile not as a static page, but as a practical promotion tool.
The new sections, their purpose, and the management model were clear: partners understood where to share news, how to promote events, how to update venue information, and where to review listing performance.
Post-launch results
After launch, the venue profile evolved from an informational page into an in-app promotion tool.
Bumpin listings became more valuable to partners: venues gained more control over promotion, users had more reasons to engage with venues, and the product gained a stronger foundation for renewals and partner acquisition.
Key results
Additional: Content management for venue moderators
Once the profile had been expanded, partners needed a convenient way to manage the new content and features.
We introduced a dedicated venue moderator role for the person responsible for keeping the profile current without repeatedly contacting support.
Moderator capabilities
Moderators gained access to the key actions required to keep venue profiles active and up to date:
- Add and edit Stories;
- Manage Story Highlights;
- Upload venue photos;
- Update menus, categories, and items;
- Edit the venue description;
- Create and edit events;
- View venue analytics.
In-app guidance
To reduce the burden on support and make content management easier to understand, we added a dedicated Help section.
It contains short, Story-style guides to core tasks: adding a Story, updating a menu, uploading photos, creating an event, and interpreting analytics.
This approach helps partners adopt the new tools faster and reduces the risk of features remaining unclear or unused.
The moderator role became a natural extension of the redesigned profile: partners gained new capabilities and a simple way to keep their content up to date.