Increased User Retention through a quiz competition on Kirana Club App

Kirana Club is built for the people who run India's neighbourhood shops. More than 70% of our users told us their days felt repetitive, and the app needed a reason for them to come back every day.

Kirana Club is an Indian community and digital B2B commerce platform that connects neighbourhood mom and pop grocery stores (kiranas) directly with FMCG brands and suppliers.

You can imagine it as LinkedIn for kiranas, with more than 4M users, where they get to know about profit, and the margin of products and commodities.

More than 70% of our users told us their days felt the same and boring. Community engagement had steadily declined over time. Fewer retailers were creating posts and comments, which told us users lacked the motivation to take part.

Before this we tried many things: funny content, content about their shops (like how to deal with rats in the store), and more awareness of the rewards they could get from the app. None of them worked.

We wanted something that gave them a break from their schedule, used the knowledge they already had, and came with a huge incentive.

We met as a team and brainstormed for almost an hour. Everyone had different ideas around rewards, and then we came up with a quiz called the Indian Kirana League.

Before committing engineering time to a full league with a one lakh rupee prize, we tested the core idea in the feed. Kirana Cup was a daily quiz of four questions, with the day's winners announced each evening and rewarded with ₹1,000.

Retailers responded well, and the pilot supported our hypothesis. Mahesh, a retailer who had not been a daily user, began playing every day and went on to win ₹1,000.

We explored four directions for the brand: the game show stage, the glow of Diwali, the kirana itself, and the thrill of winning a league. Kaun Banega Crorepati, India's best known quiz show, was the anchor reference. Alongside these we gathered imagery from each team's home region, then narrowed hundreds of references to the few that shaped the identity.

The league badge combines six references from a retailer's world: a kite gives it its diamond shape, stage lights its indigo and gold, a firework its rays, gold jewellery its edge, a shop signboard its stacked type, and a coin the ₹. Together they make the badge read as a prize while still feeling familiar. The colour palette and typography were then derived from the badge.

We grouped players into four regional teams, so every retailer competed on behalf of their home region. This turned a solo quiz into a shared rivalry, with each team given its own identity.

A competition only works if people know it exists. We planned the build up around channels Kirana Club already owned: content and live sessions in the community, influential retailers, push notifications, placements in the news feed, a bottom tab entry and a dedicated league section.

Banners in the feed introduced the league, assigned teams and counted down to launch.

A retailer opens the league, reads the rules and answers each question against the clock. Whether they know the answer or guess, every question resolves as right or wrong. A correct answer earns 10 Punji, the league's points, and every round ends on a score screen that leads to the leaderboard or to sharing.

The interface went through several rounds and 56 screens. The first quiz flow was blue; a moodboard of reference apps moved it towards purple, and a lavender system followed, where we compared question cards, result screens and four versions of the home page. It ends on the three screens we shipped: home, quiz and leaderboard.

Beyond the main flow, we designed for the moments that interrupt it: leaving mid quiz, sharing a score, losing the connection, and coming back after the day's quiz has already been played.

The fifteen highest scoring retailers from each team, sixty in all, qualified for a second round. It was played live over Zoom on the AD की बात stage and released as episodes in the app.