Q&A With Majemu Olowodla

Majemu Olowodola at UXDX Community: Africa. Video: https://youtu.be/drlUQZH0c4o

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Welcome, and the no-code MVP

[00:00:00] Host: Welcome Majemu, and thank you very much for your video. I found it really insightful, and I thought it was a great example of how you do an MVP in practice. Everybody talks about it, but I loved your no-code solution to doing an MVP. The purpose of this now is to ask questions, so if anybody out there who's watched the video has any questions, please send them in and I'll ask them to Majemu. But to get the ball rolling, I'm going to kick off with a few of my own questions. So welcome first of all, and thank you for joining us.

[00:00:35] Majemu: Thank you, glad to be here.

[00:00:39] Host: One of the things that I loved about your story was the way you approached it with no code, and as you said, it was just a very simple survey and then a form, and then it was kind of behind the scenes. One of the things that I always hear people push back with is, there's too much work. Like, if we did that we wouldn't be able to keep up with the volume of work. So how did you deal with that?

[00:01:04] Majemu: Okay, so the way we were able to deal with that is, like I described during the talk, for us it was quite straightforward. All we just needed users to do was to fill in the surveys, then for each of the answers you already attached a weight. So it was somewhat a bit automated, so we didn't have to manually go through all of the users' responses. And also it was already automated, immediately they fill the survey their responses are gotten, and we can immediately, based on our calculations, just assign a portfolio to them. So it wasn't really so much.

[00:01:51] Majemu: What that did for us was, it gave us room to be able to work on our actual product. So while we're already testing the market, while we're already seeing how users would interact, getting feedback from users, on the side our development team were already working on the actual product. So instead of just waiting so we have a full-fledged product, it just gave us room to be able to quickly go to the market first, test, and from the feedback we're getting, channel those learnings into the process of building the actual product.

Promoting the launch: the waitlist and the community

[00:02:31] Host: Excellent, now that's a great example of doing it while you're building it, in parallel. I loved it, thank you. And as the talk title was, it's kind of "you launched, now what." So you highlighted promotion. Can you give people some ideas of what were some of the techniques or ways that you promoted your product to try and get it out there, because as you said, once you build it nobody knows about it yet.

[00:03:00] Majemu: Yeah, so the first thing we did was, even before launch, we had a waitlist. So we were able to, before launch, just put out the value proposition. And because we are like an existing company, we already have an existing user base, we have communities that we interact with and all. So what we just did was put out word about what we were planning to build, the value proposition, get people to sign up to join the waitlist. And from there, we kept on interacting with them. So even while we were building, we didn't just acquire users, sign up for the waitlist and just go MIA until when we were ready. We kept on maintaining that line of communication.

[00:03:47] Majemu: So by the time we were ready to launch the MVP, we already had people that signed up for the waitlist. Since they were already anticipating and waiting for that, it was just to go back and say, oh yeah, the product is ready, this is how you can use it and all. And then also, of course, our existing customers. We have a Telegram community where we engage with investors or people that are interested in investing, and that was pretty much the channel we used to promote the MVP. The numbers were quite encouraging, and that was what gave us the assurance that we were quite on the right track.

Did you lose people between the waitlist and the launch?

[00:04:33] Host: Excellent, great to hear it went well. One of the things, and I've promoted this approach of let's just test it out like a fake door and just try to get a waiting list and people to sign up, and the pushback that I've gotten from people is, we're spending all this marketing effort and we don't have it yet. So how many people do you think you lost from the people who signed up for the waiting list, but then by the time you actually communicated again you had lost those people? And do you think that's an issue?

[00:05:06] Majemu: Oh yes, so it was actually an issue, and even after we actually launched the no-code version. From the feedback we're getting from users that were already using it, already putting their funds into it, and of course, you know, there was no actual app where they can monitor their portfolio performance and all, it was almost like, okay, so when are you guys launching the actual product, when can I start seeing my money growing? So there was a bit of, should I say, issues there.

[00:05:42] Majemu: But it all boils down to communication, and giving them an actual timeline that we're working with, and also by what time we were expected to have launched the product and all. And because we're sending weekly reports on their portfolio performance, just to kind of put their mind at ease that your money has not disappeared. So yeah, that was one of the ways we were able to maintain it: proper communication to customers, giving them timelines. It was kind of like we were building together, so they knew when they were expected to be able to use the actual app.

[00:06:23] Majemu: And then in terms of numbers of people that signed up with the waitlist, we already set, should I say metrics or benchmarks. We wanted this number of people to sign up for the waitlist, and we were able to exceed that number. We had a target, because we know that it's definitely not everybody that joins the waitlist that would actually sign up with the product. So we already had that in mind, and all we just did was set numbers that we thought were feasible, and that we thought hitting those numbers would help validate our idea. So it wasn't over ambitious. It was just always looking at, okay, once we hit this number we know we've been able to validate our idea and we're on the right track.

The metrics: profiling, funding, repeat funding

[00:07:17] Host: Great, so that actually was a perfect segue into my next question, about metrics, because you said it was kind of promotion and then metrics. Can you explain to people... I know you've covered at a high level what your metrics were, but maybe go into a bit more detail. What were your metrics, and how did you decide on those metrics, that they were the things that you needed to track?

[00:07:41] Majemu: Okay, so our major metrics were, first, users that get to fill the profiling questionnaire. That's where we know we've been able to attract them, being able to bring them on board. The next was those that funded. So that's kind of like our activation metric, for you to actually fund. We were tracking that number. And not just those that funded, but those that were repeat funders, so you didn't just fund once, probably on a weekly basis you kept funding, or on a monthly basis. And that was kind of like how we were able to track retention in our own way.

[00:08:26] Majemu: So those are our major metrics that we were tracking: guys that we were able to sign up, that just filled the profiling questionnaire, then funding, that was our activation metric, then repeat funding, that was kind of like our retention metric. So those were the metrics we used.

Drop-off in the funnel

[00:08:48] Host: Excellent. And did you ever find... I love the story in Amazon where they had a team that were responsible for growing the products that were available on Amazon, and they found after a while, because their metric was just grow the number of products, that they were filling it with crap products. So it's a problem where sometimes chasing a metric can have negative consequences. So did you find that maybe, for example, you were pushing too much to profile, to get people to fill the profiling, but they weren't then making the step to funding? And did you have a drop off in that funnel that you needed to go back to and then start figuring out what to do?

[00:09:29] Majemu: Yeah, I think to some extent we did. But what we just did was, for those that fill the profiling questionnaire, we just expected, I think, 60 percent to move on to being funders. But I think we're trending around 60 to 55 percent, so even though we're not quite there[?]...

[00:09:54] Host: Yeah, that's pretty good.

[00:09:57] Majemu: Yeah, so we were like 50, 55. Then for translating them from just funding once to repeat funders, which actually is like our major, because transaction volume is like the major thing that we track, that's like our North Star metric. So we don't just want you to just fund once, we want you to keep using the product and all. So of course there was drop off at some point, which I don't think it's ever like 100 percent that they're able to get them to the next level. So yeah, definitely there were drop-offs at some point.

[00:10:41] Majemu: So it was just... sorry, just to get in mind with him[?]. From the data, because tracking the data and all, it just helps us look at ways we can actually improve the numbers by channeling our marketing efforts to those, so we know how to personalize our message to users that we see dropping off along the user journey.

[00:11:06] Host: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for your time today. It's a very rapid fire Q&A, but I really enjoyed your talk, so thank you very much for sharing it.