NG Cash

It started as Neagle Bank with the initial goal of being a bank with exclusive content for fans of Neagle, a popular Youtube channel in Brazil with millions of subscribers , these being mostly young people who belong to Generation Z.

It was created in 2019 by our small team at Trampolin, the startup that originally owned the project and had the responsibility to maintain it, but only temporarily, until it proved that the solution was mature enough to become independent.

Objective

The goal was to create a digital wallet application using React Native along with a monolithic Ruby on Rails REST API that would provide the banking and financial services and we decided to use rails-admin as a solution for the backoffice system.

A few months later we had an initial version of the app with its core features, and after lots of testing on development environment, we decided to launch it to the public.

However, before stepping into production, we wanted to have full control over the growth of the user base, so we decided to start with an invite-only beta and started inviting people from the Neagle community.

Challenges

The first hundred users were invited one by one, and they all were very excited for being chosen to be part of the beta, but we had to be very careful to meet their expectations and make sure that the app was working as expected.

While supporting users, we were constantly collecting feedback and updating the app with the most wanted features and bug fixes using CodePush, a free and must-have service for React Native apps provided by Microsoft that allowed us to run a single command to update iOS and Android apps instantly without requiring any user action.

When the app proved to be stable with few support tickets being opened and hundreds of active users depositing and withdrawing money and using the available financial services, we decided it was time to release the app to the public.

Results

The app was released to the public in late 2020 and the Neagles posted a video announcing the official release of the app. The next day we had thousands of new users and the first thing we did was immediately pull the handbrake and disable the creation of new accounts.

As a result, the number of support tickets increased exponentially, and suddenly we found ourselves having to deal with issues coming from all directions, from bad reviews on the App Store and Play Store to posts on social media complaining that the app was not working properly.

The next months were very challenging, and we had to keep the hype going while fixing bugs and improving the app, but we managed to keep the number of support tickets under control while enabling the creation of new accounts and growing the user base in a sustainable way.

Success

Eventually, we were able to stabilize the app and the number of support tickets dropped significantly, and we proved that the app was mature enough to be actively used by thousands of people.

Then, NG Cash was born, a new brand that would be the new owner of the app and responsible for the UI/UX and marketing, using Trampolin only as a provider of banking and financial services.

Currently (September 2022 as I write this article) the app is a hit with over 1 million users and recently the company managed to secure 10 million reais (about 2 million dollars) in funding to expand the business and grow it even further the user base.