Learnings from launching a freemium product
Overview
To improve Buildxact's lead generation capabilities, we decided to partner with suppliers to build a freemium product offering that sat within the suppliers ecosystem. While the business case was sound, the initial offering failed to resonate with the user base. Sustained effort eventually turned it around to a moderate success.
My Role
Lead Designer
Duration
Nov 2023 - Present
Team
1 Product Manger
4 Engineers
1 Copywriter
The Opportunity
Build a low cost customer acquisition channel with a potential to disrupt the industry
Measuring plans via pen and paper is a long drawn out process, but many builders prefer this approach. In many cases they rely on the supplier account managers to do the measurements for them, increasing a suppliers cost to serve such customers.
Our ICP's were either not aware of the existence of a digital takeoff tool or simply didn't trust a digital takeoff equivalent.
Analogy of how ATM's replaced banks at the start of this century
Our approach was to offer part of our products core feature, the takeoffs as a limited free offering that sat within the supplier ecosystem. Buildxact would benefit not only from the rich plans and jobs data that our target ICP uploads, but we could also offer them with upgrade pathways thus serving as a low cost customer acquisition channel. Suppliers would benefit from the reduced servicing cost while builders are now able to self serve at no cost. Most importantly, the free tool would also trigger problem and solution awareness, which we believed was worth pursuing.
The basic UX flow
Resistance to digital adoption was a key problem that we were trying to address, and we knew that user friendly interface was the key. The workflow was a simple 4 step process:
Upload a Plan
Scale the Plan
Add Measurements
Send or Save
Sprinkling a bit of love
To make the prospect of upgrading to the premium tool a bit more appealing, we added a few niceties such as setting measurement colours, adding notes per measurements and improving the overall look and feel of the designs keeping it modern.
User Testing: We had all the signals we needed
From over the 12 customer interview sessions that we conducted, It was clear that the customers were sold with the idea of a free tool. Many interview participants having seen such a tool for the first time, even indicated that they'd be keen to sign up then and there. This gave us the confidence to undertake a 6 sprint development process early in 2024. The tool was eventually launched early June.
Feedback from various users during testing
Reception
For the first phase of the release, we partnered with 4 Mitre10 stores across Australia to a rather slow reception. We managed to get just under 300 users to try the product, with just the one sending out an RFQ. We attributed the poor responses to the lack of technical acumen within these cohort of users. As a result we decided to bake more in-app guides to improve the onboarding experience.
One our key achievement with this project was that we were able to demo the tool to Mitre10 and have them setup and running in under 2.5 months, that I believe is mere micro seconds in construction standard time for anything to be executed.
Funnel post the first month of release
Optimisations with guides
Apart from optimising the marketing effort, we also optimised the in-app guides experience to improve comms around scaling, adding measurements and tool selection.
Introduction of in-app guides
Round 2 Reception
There was a slight reduction in drop-offs post the guides implementation and the overall in-app engagement also saw a slight improvement. This will have to be monitored in future months for a measure of sustained engagement across stores.
Funnel post in-app guides implementation
Conclusion and Key learnings
Breakthrough signs, but true adoption will take time
We often come across this idea, that residential builders are more often than not, stuck in their ways. Pushing for digital adoption will take effort and time.
Competitive supplier landscape, permits only a delicate balance of partnerships
While we only partnered with Mitre10 on this initiative, for true adoption across a wider customer base will require partnerships with multiple suppliers. This is easier said than done, due to the competitive nature of agreements. Supporting multiple suppliers is also resource and time intensive due to varying needs of suppliers.
For a new product, there's a large difference between what potential customers say vs do.
Its hard to validate a new product through user research alone. Building lean and testing in the market for signals is perhaps the best validation there is ever.
