Poachit Savings Hub

Find the best deals online

From 2012 to 2015, Poachit was a seed-stage startup and leading competitor to Honey (acquired by Paypal for 💰$4B). Poachit's "exit" was not sweet like Honey's, but I savored the learning experience.

Summary

My role: Principal Designer

• Define end-to-end system
• Shopping experience (onsite and offsite)
• Vendor coupon ingestion and validation
• Tracking and notifications
• Generate deliverables across multiple tools (native mobile, responsive web, browser add-ons, dynamic emails)

Target: discount shoppers and vendors offering coupon codes

Team: CEO, CTO, 1 marketer, 1 local developer, 3 off-shore developers, 1 off-shore manager, part-time freelance support, and me

Value proposition: save time and money with automatic coupon code validation and price tracking

Media coverage: The Today Show, Wired

The Idea

When I joined this seed-stage startup as employee #1, the idea was to piggy-back on Pinterest's success. Build a similar product with integrated discounts to compete with companies like RetailMeNot, giving shoppers the specific deals that they want.

Foundation

In an accelerated "just get it done" way, I designed the MVP and executed the first build with a lean team of developers in India, who were already working on the backend databases and web crawlers. Over time, I helped recruit the on-shore team, and establish processes for the continued design and development of the product.

Challenge

Stakeholders prioritized "going mobile" above all else (including a clear business model) in hopes of increasing user growth. What does that mean, and how will we do it? It became my job to answer this.

Process

1) Discover

The goal here was to understand the audience and needs. I requested data comparing mobile visitors vs mobile users and tried to dig out insights around members coming from ads vs email referrals. Unfortunately, there wasn't much of a story. Around 30% of activity was happening on mobile, and we knew the existing experience on mobile web was due for enhancements. We knew it would be beneficial to take advantage of features only available in native apps, like GPS and camera (for scanning barcodes). I analyzed relevant mobile shopping apps as well as unconventional ones to think outside the box.

2) Scope

With a small team and competing priorities, I nudged us to go after the lowest hanging fruit first. There is a fair amount of detail in the PDF's below, but the TL;DR is that we started with mobile web, then created phases for native app development, beginning with iOS, then Android. We shipped multiple versions of these builds, and I designed an iPad app, which did not reach the build step.

In terms of feature prioritization, I desconstructed these by user behaviors (i.e. browse and search public content, authenticate, browse and search my content, track a product, access coupon codes, use camera, etc.) then mapped that to the technical components by collaborating with my CTO and engineer. We used a matrix that weighed this level of effort to user value, which we determined using simple surveys.

3) Design

Generate flows, mockups, prototypes, specs...

The mobile artifacts below are all in the medium fidelity range.

• iOS v1 UX PDF (9 pages, 2 mb)
• iOS v2 UX PDF (14 pages, 4 mb)
• iOS v2 Visuals PDF (19 pages, 4 mb)
• Mobile Web PDF (26 pages, 8 mb)

4) Build & Ship

Our processes were less efficient and stable than ideal, but we still managed to get things done, with testing and iteration as a constant.

Outcome

Individually, I grew a ton by being in the driver's seat at a startup. Although I had significant prior experience with mobile design projects, this was the first time I lacked managers and design partners to collaborate with. I flexed all kinds of muscles: solving cross-functional problems, designing ux with visuals, managing stakeholders, developing healthy remote culture, keeping myself and teammates accountable, performing user and competitive research, marketing, testing, submitting to app stores, and more.

Ultimately, we came to the end of our runway without the traction we needed, but we learned a lot and have a unique story to tell.