Hello! We are starting to publish reports with QIWI Kitchen, and the first will be Absamat's report on his subscription art service. Speaker's word.
My name is Absamat, I'm a partner at the Useful service design agency, and I'm also doing the DaiDa service, which allows people to rent art objects, namely, paintings by different artists.
In this post, I will share our experience with you: from the idea to the start of creating the product, about our jambs and in general about how it was.
There is such a thing as PMF, product/market fit. There are many definitions for this, in short - this is the compliance of your product with the expectations of the market and audience. The extent to which it is generally needed and whether it will be in demand. Understanding whether you have achieved PMF or not is easy - if you see a multiple and constant increase in users and understand why it happens - you have PMF, it's hard to make a mistake.
We, as a startup, have not found PMF, we are still in the process. As for the idea, we had everything like this.
A year ago, as part of our agency, we conducted a large study of the contemporary art market and identified a number of trends. First, we noted the democratization of this market as a whole. Secondly, we discovered a niche of accessible art and realized that we need to dig this topic further. According to all the canons of service design, we talked with all market players - gallery owners, consumers, artists. The result was three main questions that we tried to find answers to at the prototyping stage.
The first question is how to transform a classical gallery into a contemporary art style, that is, to create some kind of alternative to Zara in this market.
Question two: how to solve the problem of free and already occupied walls. People usually have a rather limited number of walls in apartments, in principle, and there is even less free space on these walls where you can hang something to make it beautiful. People may already have shelves, calendars, photographs, TVs and LCD panels hanging on the walls. Or even other pictures that are here once and for all. That is, people did not need new paintings, because they either simply have nowhere to hang them, or they do not know how to match the work to the existing empty wall.
And the third question: how to strengthen the position and add some interactivity to the audience, because this market needs pushing. And quite active.
Solution
We found a solution in the format of providing art objects on a renewable subscription basis. Yes, this is not something completely new that no one has done before us, we have synthesized the best practices from existing industries here. This is a marketplace, these are sharing economy companies (Uber, Airbnb), this is the Netflix business model, when you just pay once a month for using content.
This is how it works today. The user enters the site, selects an object of art that he likes, and we bring and hang it. For a month, this painting hangs at his house, and after that, you can either renew the subscription for the same amount and keep the piece of art for another month, or go to the site and choose something else as part of the subscription. Then, within 3 days, the previous picture will be taken away, and a new one will be delivered instead.
Idea
In order to choose the idea with which you will start creating a product and go to market, it is useful to start with this.
- Explore innovative business models. Sounds obvious, but it's important.
- Research users. This is generally a must have, these are the people who will ensure the viability of your service. Or they won't.
- Dive into the industry. Usually successful startups are successful because their co-founders worked in those industries that are somehow related to the topic of the startup. That is, they have the necessary background and are well immersed in the market.
The importance of research should not be neglected either, this is the case when it is better to spend an extra month, but conduct a series of studies, than to save this month in pursuit of the first sales.
It's been a year since we came up with this. For a whole year I did nothing with this idea. And as practice shows, time is a good filter of ideas. If you have some idea, you continue to live as before, then after some time you return to this idea and understand that it is still relevant, and the idea is cool, which means that it is definitely worth spending on it time and resources.
How to decide
Here I can give my own example. The first thing I did was find like-minded people. This also looks obvious, but without the right people who share your ideas and want to bring it to life in the same way, everything will be much more difficult. If it works at all.
In our team, Maxim is responsible for the content, this is a person who has his own Sense art association. At the same time, he has useful experience in product design - he is also the owner of the product in our parallel project. There is an IT specialist, Vadim, whom we met at a service design jam. De facto, our entire team lives in the design format, so all participants are close to the idea in its current form.
We started to collect MVP (where would we be without it), and decided to do it right. In general, when you are at the very beginning of your journey, you want to do everything as correctly as possible, so that later you can spend time only on improvements and improvements, and not on correcting what you did wrong. We formulated the main hypotheses and went to test them.
The first hypothesis was that Hedonist (one of the portraits of our target audience) would be willing to pay 3 rubles a month for using the service. From this, the metrics were also considered - let's say we will have 000 purchases during the first 7 weeks. So, then you can castdevit users, identify different contexts, and so on. At the same time, we used the simplest channels, landings and facebook, just to assess whether someone needs it at all or not.
By the way, we had a pretty good backlog, our product designer ran UX/UI tests, and I was in charge of testing the product itself. Such is the CJM and blueprint service we have formed. This is one of the steps that I advise everyone to take so that you can keep the team well in sync. You will immediately note the strengths and weaknesses, understand where you can sag, what things you thought badly, and so on. And blueprint will help you adjust the company's internal processes to the user's journey.
Product launch
After all this, we decided to launch. The product owner's golden rule is, "If you launched your product and you're not ashamed of it, then you launched late." Therefore, we tried to start early. To be ashamed, but not very much.
We got a lot of positive feedback, and he did exactly what he usually does - turned our heads. We were praised by everyone who learned about the service, even already established entrepreneurs. a wave of reposts began, they started writing about us, and these were not paid publications, but letters to us like βGuys, you are cool, can we write about you?β.
This went on for three weeks, and then we looked at the outcome of it all.
It worked quite soberingly and brought us back down to earth. Of course, when everyone says that the service is cool, it's good. But if at the same time no one buys anything, something must be done.
Errors
In my opinion, the first mistake was that we set the goal of metrics instead of feedback. That is, if 7 people buy a subscription, then the hypothesis put forward by us will be true, and we went from this. And it was necessary to understand how to act at this moment in time in order to refine the hypothesis itself. This is how the service should work.
The second joint is related to the site. Here we took direct competitors in the art market as references for the site. Moreover, the sites are not the most advanced. We decided to fix this by taking the most innovative sites on the topic as references. This helped us actually increase the conversion.
We tried to understand why, with all this, the number of sales fit into a round number (0). We had little data, and we tried to test everything that was possible. And advertising on facebook, and asking for feedback from friends, even if they are not the target audience at all, they will still receive useful feedback. The main thing is the maximum feedback, there is never a lot of it. More feedback - more new hypotheses to test - better service.
A separate milestone was the collection of information with the help of bloggers. When we started advertising with them, they offered to do something else for us. Therefore, we asked them to post questionnaires, they say, users, why did you visit the site, but did not buy anything? And in almost all the feedback, regardless of the sources, the main problem was visible - there was not enough content.
Therefore, keep in mind that if you are dealing with any content within your project, then content is the first thing you should pay attention to.
Second iteration
By focusing on content, we took a step back. We remembered what makes a platform a platform - this is when you simply connect the target audience with each other. That is, artists simply upload their work to the site, and users choose what they want to buy. We do not participate in the production of this content at all. And the principle of the platform allowed what exactly we sell, what unit of value we have (a work of art).
After that, we were able to tweak a few things with lean canvas, especially the ones that were left unfinished within the channels. Now we have formed a few more hypotheses, we allow the consumer to vote for the works they like on the site, we check all this within the framework of the custom dev. On the platform, work is now completely in the hands of the user. We made it so that people themselves choose what they are interested in, what they like, and this now forms their feed of impressions. But at the same time, we do not enter into this process at all and do not supervise it.
Curatorship itself as an entity is now used precisely as an input moderation of works - the curator looks at the incoming flow of applications and allows (or does not allow) this or that work to the site. And if he doubts, then we run a test - we post the work on Instagram and let users vote whether this work is needed on the site or not. Gaining 50 likes - gets on the platform.
In the current prototype, we are testing a couple more themes. When there are enough entries to analyze them, with the help of Google technology, we can recommend to users other works that they may like and most closely match their choice.
Not only online
A service of this kind is also an offline interaction with the user. For us, this experience is no less significant than interface design and so on. Here we deliver to our clients the work.
Why am I all this. It is important to understand where your product starts and where it ends. Designers today are very often focused only on digital, ignoring the user experience in the physical space. In my opinion, this is the approach. Therefore, I would like to encourage designers to push the boundaries by designing platform business models and digital experiences. You will see how your perception of the product will change.
And you will see happy users.
What now:
- Developed , where a month of subscription costs 990 rubles, 3 months - 2490 and 6 months - 4900 rubles.
- As part of custdeva, we realized that our service is very relevant to those who have recently moved to a new location or made repairs.
- Started work with office space.
- Added content and in the catalog to make it easier for users to discover.
Thank you!
Source: habr.com