Making early stage investments easy, exciting and meaningful

When I met founders of LetsVenture over a year ago, I was excited about the possibilities, impact design can influence during 'early stage investment'. The founders wanted to make fundraising easy, hassle free, seamless, profitable and part of daily life of investors.

Background

In India, traditional early stage funding has been on smaller community driven initiatives, friends and family networks. LetsVenture aimed to disrupt this behaviour, in-turn opening this to Angels, Enthusiastic New Investors , Alumni Networks, Incubators. The experiment seemed viable as it creates newer demands due to new network creations, now enabling them to get a control on the supply. While the founders went ahead in building a web facility for this to operate, most of the key work that included — Sourcing of good Startups, Engaging with Marquee Investors, Keeping them happy, Standardising paperwork and so forth came heavily on the hands of Business operations. They primarily used emails to engage. When founders described the situation, we brainstormed on a set of current problems that LetsVenture as a business was facing and how to solve them.

1. It was getting more difficult to show and source high quality startups matching the interests of Investors resulting in lowering of interest

2. It was harder to engage Investors only through emails and website. Open rates on both were not healthy. Phone calls was not scalable.

3. Getting the “Commit” from investors was a broken experience

4. With the current operation style, it was difficult to keep track of all the communications, business process

5. We had very little understanding of Investor mindset and lesser datapoints to make meaningful decisions

6. Competitors were ahead in showcasing their commit rates, though none of them used any technology support to do so

Persuading an investor to invest in your idea is a hard thing to do. Imagine doing this in scale. The problem looked impossible. It was just a beginning.

LetsVenture today, has the largest network of Angels in India, recently closing its 100th deal. LetsVenture mobile alone is responsible for 40% of overall commits on Platform. It engages over 70% of active Investors daily and reduced the average time to closure of a deal to 24 days (previously from 3 months) clocking 4 deals a month. This acceleration is a result of daily learnings and improvements by Business, Design, Engineering and legal teams. How we did it and how design contributed ?

Ideation at LetsIgnite conference

Do not start with a product!

At the beginning it was a constant struggle to come up with ideas with very limited resources. We did not have large tech team to build us a mobile or a platform experience. We found ways to improvise experience by phone calls, emails and meeting investors and startups in person. It was almost like what I like to call “Situation Prototype”. There is no product!. Designer participates fully in the operations of business and actively completes key tasks required for a valid measurable transaction. I talked to Investors, meeting them and trying to sell the idea of why they have to invest in a particular startup. This activity helped me understand their needs and constraints.

I found that some investors plan quarterly, some based on founder’s background, some like to simply follow another investor and some are keen to move assets, some like to co-invest, some hate to follow up on paperwork, some like to keep staring at their portfolio, some like social recognition while investing and so forth.

We came back to drawing boards and discussed ideas on enabling these needs of investors with just a handful of resources. As days progressed and we were able to hire engineers to increase our capabilities to build systems that help same set of needs.

Build & See

LetsVenture is a two sided marketplace that helps Investors who like to invest, find the right startups who in-turn are looking to fundraise. After seeing flat engagement on Web and email, we started to sketch concepts on building a facility on Mobile phone to make it convenient for a “not so active investor” to participate in funding. We had no data to prove our idea, none of our competitors had tried it. We looked at it purely from a “solving a need” perspective. An investor is too busy to look into mails or open the web everyday. He does not like to spend a lot of time with loads of data that is not relevant to him or his interests. But he is keen to participate in funding if it is worth it. We hypothesised that “easy access” to mobile that gives “active” data to follow his interests will solve it better compared to web or email. A mobile concept was visualised to provoke a response that is better compared to the two existing mediums.

After mulling over the advantages of Mobile app vs mobile web app, responsive site and so forth, we decided to pursue app design on IOS and android simultaneously. Run the idea quickly and see if it’s filling the gaps as hypothesised.

Experiments provide a great way to make causal inference. It’s often surprisingly hard to tell the impact of something you do by simply doing it and seeing what happens

We brainstormed three concepts around over single goal : A mobile app that showcases startups in the form of cards that can be shortlisted by single tap to pursue your engagement, a search based concept in finding the right startups for you, a personalised account based experience only for investors.

Initial sketches of Home IA

I sketched and got feedback from in-house investors and founders. Though the second and third concept looked interesting (which we later incorporated in design), the first (card) concept enabled easy entry, making discovery possible. Importantly, LetsVenture was in the business of “handshake”. Better discovery would result in better conversions.

Challenge

Key challenge was to evolve deeper engagement with investors and startups using a mobile centric design that was currently not a behaviour with investors. LetsVenture would offer information on startup regarding their idea, funding ask, participating investors and hoped to create deeper relationships between the members of the system.

Good, fast, lean

I was involved in making of all the key interactions from scratch for the concept. A combination of ready to build wireframes, interaction details, helped the team to execute in stealth speed. Designs opened up new shapes to architecture of the product. Swiping cards saying “interested” to an idea or simply asking to “skip” the idea made it less taxing on the investors to commit on interactions. This early architectural decision had a major impact on the quality of the customer experience we could both create and reconcile.

Loop - Conceptual Model

View, Like, Get connected conceptual model was not familiar model with investors. Founders were willing to take this risk, seeing the behavioural benefits it hoped to create. Continuous conversational notifications showed the hope of engaging with contextual triggers, simplified action (one swipe), getting to know who is investing with a startup (a reward mechanism) and coming back to see “New Featured Startups” for the week.

Creating key flows to enable meaningful “handshake”

No investor liked to converse with a startup without a proper introduction. Both were shy to connect and share their ideas. This real life behaviour was getting worse and also reflected on our systems. There was hardly any attempt by LetsVenture to break this ice and focus from a funding service paradigm to connecting paradigm. This reflected on our website. Founders got low responses of their messages on platform. I decide to sketch key flows that would fix this problem. The solution was a platform enabled handshake as soon as an Investor liked the startup, it triggered a notification asking the founder to connect. If the investor wanted to connect, it opened a chat provision else he had the power to reject the connect request.

Card UI, an enabler of the matchmaking flow

Key UI challenge was to show loads of Startup related information in a tiny screen of Phone and getting a real time feedback from investors on what they think about the startups. Cards enabled quick, low on cognitive load interaction also followed by connection option as preferred by investors. The rest of the UI followed the UI guidelines of IOS and Android respectively.

Wire-framing on Sketch

Framework thinking

The biggest challenge I faced throughout this project was balancing moving forward with designs, whilst collaborating with the wider team. Since this project was a core piece of LetsVenture business, I needed to coordinate and get buy‐in from founders, builders and business teams that were both co‐located and distributed. This was hard.

Managing feedback was even more challenging because it felt like a swinging pendulum of viewpoints. The team spent a disproportionate amount of time debating design decisions — when there wasn’t data that could easily be gathered to help drive a decision.

I observed this pattern early enough in the project and invested time into creating documentation to help alleviate the data crutch and better articulate and distribute design rationale. Doing this upfront was quite time consuming, but saved a lot of back‐and‐forth as the project progressed.

Design principles and the content prioritisation framework helped to create visibility into my decision‐making process and galvanise the team to share in the vision.

Sketch files on Zeplin for development

Bringing “experiment” to life

While I sketched details, my idea was to create a culture that seeks to earn trust through accountability, diving deep into the details and inviting others to scrutinise work.

The sheer speed of this project and structured waterfall approach meant that I needed to have everything figured out before tech would commit to moving forward with the work.

For each feature phase, I went through cycles of requirements, consensus, approvals, specs and handoffs.

My process involved sketching and white‐boarding concepts and flows with my CTO partner and then translating these directly into flow design comps. Since I was not working with many existing design patterns, it was difficult to move straight into hi‐fidelity designs. I created screen designs on Sketch, exported the designs to Zeplin for development team to create pixel perfect UI. I focused on IOS. Android UI was replicated by another designer.

My next step involved slicing the comps and piecing them together with InVision into a prototype. In the early stages I focussed only on representing the highest risk areas of the design. Later phases allowed me to focus on micro‐interactions which detailed by discussions with coders.

Prototyping was the most effective way to gain meaningful feedback from the team, consensus from stakeholders and approval from senior leadership. I was able to easily distribute these as videos.

Qualitative feedback

Testing our assumptions

Once the team had a prototype ready for use, we knew we needed to put it in the hands of our customers. We noted the top risks in the product:

1. How easy is it to onboard?

2. What is happening with swiping of the cards interaction

3. What details are investors looking at ?

4. How many connections with founders are real?

5. Why and when do investors return ?

6. Are they ok to commit on mobile?

If these did not catch with our investors, we had to brace for the worst!

Closely watching the app analytics we noticed healthy numbers on Successful on-boarding numbers (78%), Swipes on the cards (Swipes increased 8% on every return count), taps on detail pages including the startup pitch decks, but low on connects. The happiest moment of experiment was when we got the first commit on the mobile. It had started making revenue. The commits started to repeat on every new featured deal increasing the number of commits on mobile. We quickly tweaked the commit flow to suit the legal requirements and speed up the process.

However there were pieces in the app that did not perform as we expected :

1. Navigation ( Users did not move around seamlessly to all parts of the app)

2. IOS notifications showed very low interest compared to android

3. Chats showed very slow adoption

I took the initiative to track the key mobile engagement metrics on a weekly basis. I am a big fan of Data informed design. Data helps us understand the key parts of the product that really needs attention

Quantitative feedback

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate — keep an eye on data

Over time, we were able to release the features that would form our service, piece by piece. By then, the gaps in our product experience were filled. What was once a manual process handled entirely by our ops team was now fully automated. People could sign up to become investors, and startups with ideas could find and contact investors to get help in fundraising.

It wasn’t until we had a complete funnel that we were able to really start iterating on it, and nothing validated our product faster than real people in our funnel. No matter how much research we did, the moment of truth came when we started to see the metrics trickle in. That’s when our momentum began to build. At first, we saw only a trickle of connects for with founders, but that trickle slowly increased.

These metrics helped us see where people were dropping out of our flow and whether requests for co-hosts occurred as we predicted them. They also helped us understand how investors would respond to these requests. At the same time, we ran frequent qualitative testing with users to understand why they were doing what they were doing. Using these learnings we were able to run experiments to optimize our funnel, such as redesigning our navigation, adjusting the content for fast tracking investments, and simplifying our flows. Improvements and adjustments that previously required months of development became weekly sprints, shipping iterative updates on the regular.

What next ?

LetsVenture mobile is still in its early days. While we are set to scale this behavior, time will tell if our hypotheses are up to the challenge. I’m confident in our approach and the momentum we’ve gained — and continue to build upon — with every iteration and refinement.

In the beginning, I thought of this project as a rare opportunity to apply product design methods to a tech company environment. In the end, it was far more than that: we were able to bridge “design thinking” with hacker culture, reconciling design vision with minimum viable product.