Milestones
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2 Nov 2020
M2: Validation 1
Check out our initial solution and our potential customers' opinion.
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Check out our initial solution and our potential customers' opinion.
There are souls in this world who have the gift of finding joy everywhere, and leaving it behind them when they go. It's a shame though we can't actually wrap and offer joy.
So when you find yourself in need of something a bit more physical,
will come up with the best ideas!
Maybe you got a last-minute invitation to a party. Or forgot one of your friends have their birthday this week. You get constrained by time to find a gift fast, and some flowers or money won't do the trick - you need something more thoughtful than that.
Or maybe you're simply bad at coming up with gift ideas, no matter how well you know a person.
Gifter is a platform for gift recommendations, based on the personality traits, hobbies and interests of the receiver. The user will provide details about their friend/coworker/family member, then choose from the list of suggestions generated. The items will not be sold on the platform, so the user will be redirected to the appropriate site.
People in need of inspiration,
that will definitely buy a gift in the near future
Romanian shop owners with interesting products
By signing partnerships with small romanian shops
Customized results based on more parameters, rather than "gifts for moms"
Thoughtful gifts will never go out of style
Is the percentage of visitors that complete a desired goal out of the total number of visitors.
Represents the money we invest in attracting a new customer, including advertising, marketing, special offers and so on.
Represents the approximate revenue obtained from a loyal customer.
Free hosting usually comes with limitations
Social media payed ads, stickers, posters etc
Hotjar, Formspree, SEO enhancement etc
15% comission for every product sold through our platform
Small ads displayed throughout the platform
We stumbled upon our problem around Christmas, when almost everyone was running around trying to juggle with a never ending list of presents for family, friends and colleagues. When you have to find only one gift for one person, you might pull it off easily. But multiply that by 10 or more, and you’re suddenly on a budget and running out of time. So you resort to socks, vouchers or some chocolate - and it would be fine if you wouldn’t receive that as well. And although you were in the same situation, you can’t help but feel that those people don’t know you well enough to find something more personal or original, or even worse, they simply don’t care.
But the truth is, most of us don’t have enough resources - time, money, ideas, to come up with cool gifts for every occasion.
It would be nice to have a platform for gift suggestions. But there are a lot of online shops with categories based on gender and relationship. How could we make a better version?
While “gifts for moms” may be pretty straigthforward, it’s safe to say that every mom is characterized by more than that. Our initial solution was based on a form used to describe the person that will receive the gift. Going further than gender and relationship, the form would ask for their interests and personality traits. On top of that, the results would take into account the occasion, gift type (classical, funny, romantic etc) and price range. In the end, the user would receive a list of presents that match those requirements.
To make sure the above solution proves sufficiently worthwhile for its potential users, we had to address our two customer segments: the gift buyers and the partners. On one hand, we wanted to validate the customers' problem - the hassle of gift searching, by contacting people from different age groups and asking them to complete a short form (without being aware of our solution, to avoid bias). On the other hand, we wanted to test the market for possible partners. So we made a list of sites that could offer products for our gift suggestions and contacted them in order to verify their interest in our project.
We started with the potential buyer segment. Through our form, we tried to obtain:
📌 the average frequency of events that lead to gift searching (to determine if the problem occurs often enough)
📌 the average time spent on gift searching (to determine if it is a time-consuming task)
📌 the types of gifts that are frequently given (to determine favorite categories and a potential lack of originality)
📌 the customer’s priorities when choosing a gift
📌 the customer’s opinion on gift searching (like/dislike and reasons)
📌 the customer’s possible solutions for facilitating gift searching
The link to this form can be found here and the raw answers can be found here.
We collected 102 answers to our survey by sharing the form on Whatsapp groups, personal LinkedIn accounts or by sending direct messages to our friends and asking them to also spread our form among their acquaintances, hoping to reach people from all age groups (as you can see in the screenshots below).
We managed to get responses from every age group (a lot more from the 18-24 segment because we know more people of our age) in order to obtain a more relevant result.
For the frequency of events question, the scale went from 1 (never) to 5 (at least once a month). For the gift types, people could add their own option if they wanted. For the enjoyment level, 1 was "I hate it" and 5 was "I love it".
The reasons for finding gift searching unpleasant were pretty straigthforward. The question also allowed user input.
The last question was open and has received 42 responses. After summarizing them, we were left with:
| Solution | Occurences |
|---|---|
| App with filtered suggestions based on the receiver's interests | 16 |
| Keep track of the receiver's interests | 5 |
| App with gift recommendations (no filter mentioned) | 4 |
| Asking the receiver what they want | 4 |
| Asking close friends | 2 |
| Etsy/charity shops/Pinterest | 2 |
| Preparations in advance | 2 |
| Creativity/patience | 2 |
| App with the receiver's wishlist | 1 |
| Reading people's minds | 1 |
| Amazon | 1 |
| Wider online disponibility | 1 |
Moving on to the partners segment, we followed a similar approach. Through our form, we tried to obtain:
📌 an idea about their promotional methods (to determine if they might be interested in our offer)
📌 their most popular products (for future gift recommendations on our platform)
📌 the response to a future partnership
The link to this form can be found here and the raw answers can be found here.
We contacted 25 stores via mail. Although we collected only 4 answers, the Wineful CEO replied, offering us feedback from a similar startup they worked with sometime ago. Unfortunately, we couldn't schedule a call for this milestone, but will definitely use the knowledge for future ones.
From analyzing the customer survey data, we found out that the frequency of events that would require gift giving is high enough for our problem to appear constantly. The gift type range, as expected, inclines to the classical options, but a pleasant surprise is the popularity of original gifts compared to cash/vouchers - those being one of our main assets. When it comes to the amount of time spent gift hunting, only 3.9% of people responded with less than an hour. The top categories are a few hours and a few days, which is great, taking into account our purpose of reducing the period of gift searching. As for the top priorities in gift choosing, 95.1% of people think that the person's likes and interests is the way to go - what a coincidence, we're thinking the same thing! If the enjoyment levels are distributed between haters and lovers, when it comes to difficulties, they agree that the main factors are the lack of time and ideas - exactly what we are trying to solve. Also, the open question at the end of the form had 16 people suggesting an application similar to ours, so that should count for something.
From analyzing the partners data, we were glad to receive such positive feedback. Even if the number of responses was rather low - as to be expected for a survey from some random students, the interest level was more than satisfying. Also, we can’t wait to chat some more with Elena from Wineful and ask her for feedback on our future work.
After processing the forms’ results, we concluded that our solution is ready to go to the next step. The customers’ problem is the same as the one we encountered, and our solution satisfies their needs. Also, companies showed interest in our app in its current form, and knowing the potential presented by a similar startup can only determine us to go further.
We conducted 4 interviews with our potential clients, trying to reach different groups and get a better picture of the problem.
Septimiu, 17
Silviu, 20
Alex, 25
Maria, 48
For potential partners, we talked to a shop owner from Slanic, Prahova.
Elena, 52
We built a user profile for our customers (Felix) and one for our potential partners (Otilia).
After the interviews, we realized that we haven't considered the possibility of reccurent events: family birthdays, a couple's anniversary, etc. So we updated the wireframes accordingly: we introduced the option of creating an account. The login button will appear on every screen, as in the example below.
Through the account we introduced the ability to save the user's search patterns as profiles for future use. Also we added a new tab in the menu, called History, that can be accessed after login. There, the user will find all their saved profiles, with the possibility to edit them or get gift suggestions.
Before sharing our landing page with the world, we tried to make it a bit more appealing. We removed unnecessary sections, changed the design, added a gif with instructions to deliver the information in a catchier way. Also, for monitoring user activity, we added Google Analytics, Hotjar and Formspree.
The link to our landing page can be found here, if you want to check it out.
We tried various methods and platforms to reach as many people as we could. In the picture below you can view some examples of our posts on Linkedin, Reddit and Facebook. On Linkedin we received a nice response on the last post related to our form (M2), so it was natural to post something about our landing page, to keep people updated. On Reddit, we chose three of the most suitable subreddits for our project: /r/Gifts, /r/GiftIdeas and the november contest section for new startup ideas on /r/startups. We received some page views from these actions, but no subscribers (we're not very popular on Reddit). On Facebook we posted on our personal pages, as well as some gift ideas groups. Also, we shared the link on Whatsapp groups, Instagram stories and through DMs to friends.
We started sharing the landing page on the 21st of November and analyzed the results on the 30th. Below you can see the number of visitors and the average engagement time. Considering the amount of information displayed on our page, that period of time is enough to go through all of it, a few more seconds to subscribe as well.
There is a visible spike on the 23rd, because we posted on Facebook the day prior to that. We noticed that the biggest amount of visitors came from there, rather than other social platforms.
When it comes to user retention, we had 16 people coming back, maybe to check if the form was available.
It was a good thing we made sure our landing page was mobile friendly, because 3 quarters of our users used their mobile devices to visit it.
The origin of our visits are shown below. We can notice that the traffic came from 9 countries, due to having LinkedIn connections outside of Romania, as well as posting on Reddit and international Facebook groups. We can see the engagement rate is pretty good in most of them.
Through Hotjar we could see if our landing page was intuitive and efficient. As it can be observed in the heatmaps below (desktop version on the left, mobile on the right), our call-to-action button was catchy enough to attract the visitors. The minimalist navigation bar was also a good decision, as every tab was clicked multiple times. Furthermore, the newsletter form received a lot of hits, and we'll get into that later. A few visitors even clicked on our social platform links. An unexpected event was the heat level over the informative gif, in the mobile version, probably because of the redirecting from our call-to-action (visitors expected the form to be there).
We also analyzed the scroll maps: as expected, because the landing page was short and the information was structured to be read fast, a lot of visitors reached the bottom. The mobile version got slightly better results.
| Section | Desktop % | Mobile % |
|---|---|---|
| Problem & call-to-action | 100 | 100 |
| Advantages | 87 | 90 |
| Informational gif & quiz coming soon | 85.2 | 88.7 |
| Newsletter form | 79.6 | 84 |
| Footer with social platform links | 64.8 | 75 |
From the available user recordings, we saw that visitors tend to click on the call-to-action button in the first seconds and get redirected to the gif, then read the information presented there, sometimes while clicking on the gif to check if there is a form. Others navigate using the top menu instead, moving from tab to tab and reading everything. As stated before, a lot of people reach the newsletter form, and about a quarter of them fill it.
From Google Analytics we know our landing page had 175 visitors in about 10 days, out of which 16 were recurrent visitors. Through Formspree we managed to obtain 44 subscribers to our newsletter, so 44 visitors that turned into leads and were successfully converted. They filled in the subscription form, consenting they want to receive further information via email, and keep in touch with the progress of our product. Due to the GDPR privacy policy, we are not posting their personal data here, but we can provide it on request. In conclusion the conversion rate was 25,14.
We shared the landing page between 21-30 November 2020, using different platforms and we succeded to reach 175 people internationally, with more than three quarters of them from Romania. The social platforms used in our campaign where Facebook, Linkedin, Whatsapp, Reddit, Instagram and Messenger. From our previous analysis, we concluded that Facebook was the best option, determining ~60% from our total views, followed by Linkedin and good old DMs (Messenger/Whatsapp). This may be due to the nature of our project, more suitable for entertainment, rather than business.
Our target market is split between customers, basically people searching for gift ideas, and partners - shop owners in need of efficient promotional methods and looking for new marketplaces. In the beginning we will focus only on Romania, targeting people between 16 and 55 years old, from anywhere in the country. In 2018, there were 11,7 million people between 16-74 y/o with access to the Internet. 58,6% of them used it to search for various products and services. So taking all of that data into account, we will target up to 5 million customers. As for partners, it's difficult to approximate the total number of romanian e-commerce businesses. On eMAG Marketplace there where 20.119 active merchants at the end of 2019, but a lot of merchants are not present there. Because we would like to help small businesses, we will target around 5.000 merchants. In the future, if everything goes well, we might enter the european, even global, market.
After thorough research, we found 5 competitors that lead the market at the moment:
| Business | Description |
|---|---|
| MindBlower | An online store dedicated to original gifts and state-of-the-art gadgets for all ages. It offers special, crazy, bizarre, surprising gifts and implements a process that allows you to easily buy a gift. It also shows the steps to follow to find an original gift and offers tips for it. |
| Smuff | An online gift platform, with fast delivery services in Bucharest. The main objective is to offer unique gifts for a multitude of occasions and categories of people. |
| UncommonGoods | Offers a collection of gifts and enjoys a large team of employees who bring happiness to the homes of as many people as possible through the most beautiful gifts. It pursues a long-term sustainable business in the sale of long-term, environmentally friendly gifts and brings a range of products that are not found on other platforms. |
| OnioGift | Makes it easy to give original gifts. The products are organized into categories, which facilitates a quick search. |
| Firebox | Offers a wide variety of gifts (a lot of crazy ones), with the possibility of filtering by gender and interests (a simplified GIFTER quiz). |
Next we will present the functionalities provided by each solution mentioned above:
| Functionality | MindBlower | Smuff | UncommonGoods | OnioGift | Firebox |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast delivery | no | yes | no | yes | no |
| Organized by profuct category | yes | no | yes | yes | yes |
| Wide range of gifts | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Delivery to Romania | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Guide for buying a suitable gift | yes | no | no | no | yes |
| Quiz to determine preferences | no | no | no | no | yes |
| Custom search | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Promotions & discounts | no | yes | no | yes | yes |
| Order history | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
And for a visual representation, we made the chart below.
After we went through the market searching for similar ideas to ours, we found out there are no such romanian platforms (at least not popular enough to show up on the first or second page of search results). But we found something in the US (Firebox, Gifts.com, ExpertlyChosen). Because most of them had almost exclusively american clients and our current target is Romania, we didn't take them all into account in our study. As for the romanian ones, we chose the most popular gift sites, even though their customization level was lower.
So, we might say we bring foreign ideas locally, using a fresh concept and romanian producers.
We should finish our first year with around 50 partners. Taking into account the number of visitors and the average product price, a partner should receive around 15000 RON per year. To determine a correct commission value for our platform, we studied the prices on eMAG Marketplace. There, commissions vary between 20 and 30%, with a lot of shop owners complaining not only about this, but also about the low visibility = high commissions and few sellings. So we decided to take a 15% commission for the products on our website, to attract the shop owners. In the following table we described the 5-year evolution, with a 15% raise in partnership numbers each year.
| Year | Market share | No. of partners | Revenue (RON) | Market value (RON) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | 3.79% | 50 | 112.5k | 112.5k |
| 2nd | 4.55% | 60 | 135k | 247.5k |
| 3rd | 5.92% | 72 | 162k | 409.5k |
| 4th | 8.29% | 86 | 193.5k | 603k |
| 5th | 12.02% | 103 | 231.75k | 834.75k |
The field of online commerce is a profitable source with a huge development potential. Thus, the value of our market share for the first 5 years benefits from a favorable context of growth and spread. We're counting on the gift personalization mechanism to be the main pillar in our evolution, helping us differentiate from our competition.
Our initial solution was a personalized quiz that would take into account many aspects of one's pesonality in order to find the best gift ideas. Next, the surveys we took assured us it was a good idea: people want a fast way to find an original gift [1], preferably based on the person's likes and interests [2] and our initial solution satisfies their needs.
Next, we took some interviews that helped us establish user personas, user stories, use cases and a user flow. Through those we determined that users want centralized products from various shops/websites [3] and a personalized and easy to use search mechanism [4], where they can control the level of customization (so it doesn't get boring). Also, we realized that someone could buy gifts multiple times in a year for the same person (on their birthday/christmas/easter etc). The person's traits and interests may slightly vary after a few months, but their profile could be saved and reused [5].
Based on all this info, we extracted the features for our MVP and presented them in the table below, along with the needs targeted by each one of them. As for our partners, they won't have a dedicated platform (for now) because there is not much to do on their side - we will be in charge of adding their products to our database.
| Must-have features | Nice-to-have features |
|---|---|
| Interactive quiz [1, 2, 4] | Login flow [4, 5] |
| Gifts sorted by match percentage [2, 3] | Quiz answers saved as profiles [5] |
| Editable filters [4] | Editable profiles [4] |
Taking into account that the profiles' absence doesn't stop the user from getting their gift recommendations, we focused on implementing a prototype solution to our problem. The profiles will be developed later on, and used as differentiators between GIFTER and the other competitors on the market.
Because our main focus is the romanian market, the MVP is in romanian. The homepage is similar to the one our landing page. We kept the call-to-action button, as its position has proved to be well chosen (M5). More information about GIFTER can be found in the About us tab.
As for our quiz, it consists of 8 questions: the progress is present at the top, the left section displays the current question with possible answers, the right section shows all the selected options, and the center image represents the person receiving the gift, changing its details according to the user's input.
Once the quiz is finished, the user will receive the list of gift recommendations. Every item will have a percentage showing the match level with the current filter selection. The information obtained from the quiz will appear as tags at the top of the page, with the possibility of removing any tag if desired. By clicking on an item, the user will be redirected to the seller's website. The listed products were selected by our team after sharing a form with people of all ages, asking for their gift preferences (to get a glimpse of suitable gift ideas based on gender, age, interest etc) - no company present in those lists is currently our partner, we will work on that if we decide to continue this project as a startup. Our suggestions could be improved in the future based on user feedback, as well as by increasing the complexity of our matching algorithm (maybe even throwing some ML in there).
You can take the quiz yourself, our MVP can be found here.
After implementing our first MVP, we wanted to get as much feedback as we could on GIFTER's core functionalities. Using Hotjar, we added a feedback input field on the right side of every page.
Then we shared the link to the MVP on different social media platforms (Facebook, Linkedin) and through DMs to our friends and family.
We received praising for our interface and quiz implementation, as well as UI enhancement ideas and future development steps. Everyone's identity will remain anonymous due to privacy reasons. If it is necessary, we can provide their identity and data privately.
Our final score was pretty good (there weren't that many voters, but we're still pleased with the outcome).
We also asked Elena Oglinda from Wineful to share her opinions, given her experience with a similar project and her position as a potential partner.
We summarized all the feedback in the table below:
| Category | Feedback |
|---|---|
| Likes | - the overall design - the quiz experience - the gift ideas - showing match percentage |
| Dislikes | - small number of gift ideas received after quiz* |
| UI improvements | - fix menu animation on mobile - multiple radio buttons instead of dropdown in quiz |
| New features | - AI driven matching mechanism - gift accuracy input field for users |
*initially, our database had around 40 items, so it's understandable
Taking into consideration all the feedback, we consider that GIFTER is on the right track. Our MVP is easy to use and implements all the core functionalities we targeted. People seem to enjoy our take on the interface and the gift ideas they received. Of course there is room for improvement, but we believe we did a good job this far.
Everything you read until now was an updated version of the fiki. In the table below you can see the changes we made to every milestone by implementing the feedback from class:
| Milestone | Title | Changes |
|---|---|---|
| M1 | Project Description | Updated competition, key metrics and revenue stream |
| M2 | Validation 1 | Fixed some typos |
| M3 | Wireframes & landing page |
- |
| M4 | UX | Improved interviews Remade use case diagram |
| M5 | Validation 2 | Fixed some typos |
| M6 | Market Research | - |
| M7 | MVP | Fixed some typos |
| M8 | First Sale | - |
| M9 | Final Presentation | Added link to midterm presentation as well |
