From first commit to the App Store in about ten weeks, and handed back clean
A Fortune 500 agribusiness’s digital venture studio had a thesis to test: consumers are drowning in choice and can’t find great new snacks and drinks, while brands are starved for real consumer insight, and they had to test it fast, inside their own venture stage-gate. Monkeyjump Labs built the app that did it: first code commit to a live App Store release in roughly ten weeks.
The challenge
A venture stage-gate rewards speed and honesty in equal measure: you have to stand up something real enough to put in front of actual users, quickly, without cutting the corners that would make it fall over. That meant a genuine two-sided product: a consumer app people would enjoy and an insight engine the brand side could learn from, plus the unglamorous operations to make it all actually happen.
The approach
We built a product with a clear job on each side. For consumers: a simple, one-thing-at-a-time swipe experience to discover new snacks and drinks, where daily activity unlocked a free themed sample box, and rating what showed up fed the loop. For the brand: those in-app choices and ratings became real consumer-insight data.
To ship fast and run lean, we paired a cross-platform mobile app with a modern cloud backend, stood up a machine-learning recommendation engine driven off users’ own choices, and wired an in-app feedback funnel straight into the team’s chat, so every single day started with fresh customer signal feeding the next sprint.
One deliberately unglamorous piece: the sample boxes. Early on, the team packed and shipped them by hand. As it grew, we integrated a logistics partner and automated the daily reports and shipping confirmations, because for us, building a product means building the little world around it, right down to the box that shows up at someone’s door.
The result
A real, ML-backed consumer product (mobile, backend, recommendations, and operations) stood up fast and, crucially, built to be handed off clean. Because we’d kept the infrastructure independent from day one, the entire product transferred to the client without friction, ready to run on their own team. That’s the tell of a build that was genuinely handoff-ready, not one held together by the people who wrote it.
Who this is for
If you’re a corporate innovation group or venture studio racing a thesis through a stage-gate, this is the shape of the work: get something real into users’ hands fast, and own a build you can bring in-house the moment you’re ready. Speed to first ship, and a product that doesn’t depend on us to keep running.
Have a thesis that only counts once it’s in real users’ hands? That’s the kind of build we love to start.