Catpro

The problem

Promotions in Cambodia are scattered. A discount lives on one shop's Facebook page, another gets announced in a Telegram group, a third exists only as a printed flyer in a window. Shoppers cannot answer the question they actually have — what is discounted, near me, right now — and merchants running a real offer have no reliable way to reach the people who would act on it.

Both halves of that are the same problem, which is why the product had to serve both sides or neither.

The constraints

Location has to be worth the permission. A promotions app that asks for location access on first launch and then shows a generic national list has spent the user's trust and given nothing back. The nearby result had to be good enough on day one to justify the prompt.

The merchant side pays for the consumer side. Shoppers will not pay to find discounts. So the revenue model sits with merchants — subscription tiers plus placement products — and that shapes the build: merchants need self-service listing management, promotion scheduling, and enough reporting to see whether a listing did anything.

Cold-start on both sides at once. An empty catalogue is useless to shoppers, and no merchant pays to reach nobody. The launch had to seed enough real promotions in a small enough geography to be genuinely useful before it was broadly useful.

What we built

Three features carry the consumer experience:

• Promotional showcase — browse current offers by category rather than by shop, because shoppers think in "what am I buying", not "whose page is this"
• Location-based discovery — surface the closest offers first, so the location permission pays for itself immediately
• Store following — follow a shop and hear about its next offer, which turns a one-time visit into a reason to come back

Behind them sits the merchant side: listing management, promotion slots at several tiers, and placement products such as banner and splash-screen advertising.

Catpro shipped on the App Store in January 2023 and reached version 1.4.0 that October. An Android build shipped to Google Play under the same package; that listing is currently down while the Android app is being brought back.

How the engagement worked

Catpro is a joint venture. NpKs Digital builds and publishes the apps; the Catpro business runs the service, the merchant relationships, and the day-to-day operation. The apps ship under the NpKs Apple developer account, which is also why the store-facing privacy policy, terms and account deletion pages live here — and why that policy names both parties and says which is responsible for what.

That structure is worth being explicit about, because it is a common shape for a small market: a team with the commercial relationships partnering with a team that can actually ship and maintain mobile software, rather than one side trying to buy the other capability outright.

Status

The iOS app is live. Android is in development for its return to Google Play, so no Play link is shown here yet — the registry carries the package with the listing marked not-live, and the link appears automatically when it resolves.

TODO(owner): still needed before this page goes public (CLAUDE.md §14 Q2, and §1 forbids inventing a metric to fill the gap):

• Screenshots that can be published.
• One outcome worth citing — merchants onboarded, promotions listed, downloads — if a real number exists. If it does not, this section gets cut rather than padded.
• A target for the Android return, if it can be stated publicly.