Acquire users on mobile → Show product value → Move them to desktop for richer value

Give sufficient value to users to motivate them to transition to desktop.

Purpose

• Open a mobile channel to acquire new customers and lower our Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

• Complement the desktop app by helping users onboard and activate seamlessly.

• Act as a bridge to guide users toward deeper engagement with the web app.

Features Included

• Base structure: Profile, Company set-up and team member invitations.

• Get aware of all the web app features through exhaustive videos.

• Entry point to the web app.

• Inventory Overview

• Ability to manually edit the stock quantities and Unit of Measurement addition.

Background Thought

• Mobile app would compliment the web and did not intend to replace desktop functionality.

• This project was launched as an MVP, focused on validating a mobile-led acquisition strategy.

• Inventory management emerged as a key pain point through previous marketing insights, guiding the feature focus.

• The mobile app served both as an acquisition tool and a problem-solver for SMEs struggling with inventory management.

• Initiated with an experimental mindset; after promising early signals, the roadmap aimed to expand mobile capabilities with additional web-linked features.

Fate of the app

• On tracking the performance of the app through some weeks, a lot of leads flowed in. Many of these leads were not very helpful.

• The success metric of PE20/signup didn’t show an strong positive movement, just offsetting the web marketing channel saturation.

PE20 is the quantified scoring system that provides various weightage to the different user actions aimed at self exploration of the product.

• The app was shelved to be revisited later. No active work continued on the app apart from the general maintenance.

My Role

• Led the UX of the mobile app from scratch: building conceptual framework such that it can be scaled easily.

• Coordinated with a design agency for a quick TAT to build the UI.

• Collaborated with marketing, product and engineering to get a quick and dirty version out to test hypothesis.

Key Learnings

• Rapid experimentation enables faster validations, which is critical in a lean startup environment to reach informed conclusions quickly.

• Validated that using a mobile app as an acquisition strategy for driving self-exploration and education was ineffective for SME manufacturers, where users are more accustomed to in-person demos and guided onboarding.

• While mobile channels helped in initial acquisition, it did not proportionally contribute to user activation and deeper product engagement without proactive intervention.