Everyone’s juice bar.
In your pocket.
Shakti found the local, organic juice bars near you, showed you what they were pouring, and let you order ahead. I advised on the product and designed and piloted its first iOS versions.
Two sides, one teal thread.
A bright side for the people ordering, and a plain, fast side for the shop making it. Same app, two moods.
Find the green thing. Order it. Skip the line.
Open the app and a map filled up with juice bars near you, each one showing how many juices it poured, whether it was organic, and how far the walk was. Find the green thing you wanted, order it, skip the line.
A two-sided marketplace for cold-pressed juice, built in 2013.
We took it to real shops.
We piloted it for real in Orange County, with actual juiceries. Real shops, real menus, real orders. Enough to see the idea was good, and to learn that a good idea and enough runway are two different things.
→
The app didn’t win. The juice did.
Shakti was ahead of its money, and it did not last. But the founder, Ryne O’Donnell, kept the part that mattered, a belief that fresh, organic, cold-pressed juice deserved to be done right, and built it into a physical product instead of an app. That became Sol-ti: UV-filtered, glass-bottled, organic living beverages, with a tasting room in San Diego.
The marketplace was the sketch. The bottle was the business.
“…a learning experience to turn into something greater.”
my part.
I was an advisor and the product designer for Shakti’s first iOS versions, for a short and busy stretch in 2013. I helped shape what the app was and got the earliest builds into real hands. I moved on before the pivot; the credit for Sol-ti is Ryne’s. But this is one of my favorite kinds of projects: the one that does not work, and matters anyway, because the next thing could not have existed without it.
Not every good idea ships as the thing you started building. Some of them ship as juice.