InvestAI — Founding designer at a Fintech
My role: Founding Product Designer — Market fit discovery leading to breakeven within 2 years.
Overview
- Breakeven in 2 years
- From zero design infrastructure to a profitable product.
- 3 products shipped
- 3 B2B and 1 B2C, as the sole designer from seed stage.
- Word of mouth as primary growth channel
- Result of an onboarding designed around trust, not just usability.
I was part of the founding team at InvestAI in seed stage. InvestAI is a fintech which helps users find higher yielding bonds on secondary market and instantly buying them through our bot.
The first challenge was finding the right product market fit. At the time their MVP worked through our dev team terminal only and our users had to send us their broker account everyday they wanted to invest just before the market opened at 10 am.
We had a small, albeit loyal user base comprised of mainly friends and family. My 1st goal was to make this user journey trustworthy and easy enough so that users felt safe to login into our platform using their brokerage firm’s account.
The big question was: How can we convince users to log into an unproven start-up app giving us full access to their brokerage account? Building trust.
Our services make your assets more profitable
Define exactly what our bot can purchase.
Get a personalized call from our agents
We guide our users through their first days, allowing them to put their trust in real humans.
The solution was multi layered. We led with the benefits of using our platform and letting them program buy orders even if the market was already closed for the day and if that was the case, instructing them to login before 10am the next morning. Then, we ask if they want to receive a reminder and if it is a 1st time user, we appointed a customer service agent to guide him through the platform first automated orders.
At first glance this may seem costly but with a high average lifetime value and our most successful marketing venue being word of mouth it quickly proved to be the right call.
With all the knowledge acquired from our main product and relationships we built with partnering broker firms we built 2 more products focused on B2B operations. Building those tools was only possible through all the know-how that we gathered from working with brokerage firms, interviewing their agents and our knowledge about our user (investors) needs. We used this knowledge to build prototypes that were pitched to firms and then built after a deal was closed reducing our operating risk to a minimum.
Through all the improvement made to our main app and income from other tools that we built for partnering brokerage firms we managed to achieve a steady income leading to breakeven in only 2 years.