ListMinut increases product development speed by 90%
Summary
About
The challenge
“Thanks to Belighted and their excellence in development, I improved the quality and the maintainability of ListMinut’s code and learned a lot of best practices. It was a real pleasure to work with their team.”
The solution
The results
About
ListMinut
ListMinut is a marketplace created in February 2013 and based in Belgium. It allows users to outsource small tasks and jobs (such as gardening or house cleaning) to reliable individuals in their neighborhood.
The focus of the platform is to bring a human dimension by providing trust between people who live near each other but have never met before.
Context
The Problem
The company wanted to motivate a new round of funding by increasing activity in Belgium and expanding to France. They faced two challenges: low conversion rates and seasonal demand, as gardening gigs made up 30% of the services in the marketplace.
An external conversion/UX specialist made a long list of recommendations for ListMinut. But where to start? And how to accomplish it quickly?
The company had to act fast because of limited funding and growing competition, and it would take 2 years to address every potential improvement. Time is of the essence for any startup.
The team consisted of 3 founders and 3 employees, including a CTO who was ListMinut’s sole technical staff member. ListMinut preferred to call on external experts rather than hiring internally.
The Goals
- Accelerate Product Roadmap
- Improve Conversions Rates
- Drive Funding
Don't just take our word for it
“Thanks to Belighted and their excellence in development, I improved the quality and the maintainability of ListMinut’s code and learned a lot of best practices. It was a real pleasure to work with their team.”
The Challenges
Lesson #1: Set Priorities
ListMinut came to us because of our reputation for helping startups, approaching us after being referred by another startup we worked with. We helped ListMinut set priorities.
That long list of possible improvements needed to be whittled to the items that would yield the desired outcome the fastest. This is a common challenge and critical step for startups. We do this through a Strategy Workshop, which guides prioritization and produces a development roadmap.
Lesson #2: Don’t Hire Too Soon
ListMinut had already realised that their junior developer hire was not the solution.
For one thing, the short term horizon was not compatible with the learning curve of a junior hire: they would have to spend too much time and money training him before they could see a return on their investment. Secondly, there was not yet a need for regular work (first they were developing features/improvements then testing them on the market) so the developer had been sometimes busy and other times unoccupied.
Lesson #3: Get it Done, Share Knowledge
Once we determined together what improvements needed to be tackled, Belighted led the way with our senior developers and designers delivering value almost immediately.
The flexibility and knowledge provided by the agency relationship impressed ListMinut. The CTO felt his capabilities improved with exposure to best practices during our collaboration, allowing him to deliver better code, faster.
Lesson #4: Outsource product development
The founders admitted they are usually very demanding on their external collaborators. They felt we built a much stronger relationship than just that of a client-supplier, noticing that Belighters were happily getting involved in ListMinut’s social activities and always willing to go the extra mile even outside of office hours. They considered us as really being part of the ListMinut team.
Helping them set priorities for development and then implementing changes, we saw great results:
- Product roadmap speed increased by 90%
- Payment page conversions increased by 22%
We completed the development for expansion into France ahead of schedule. The CTO also improved his abilities with our best practices knowledge transfer, and the company has successfully closed its next round of funding.
The Results
The improvements made a big impact:
Payment page conversions increased by 22%, thanks to an improved user experience and a faster, more robust implementation.
The product roadmap accelerated by 90% thanks to our experience helping startups with setting priorities, executing development needs, and designing user interfaces.
ListMinut’s internationalization project was completed before the deadline, positioning them 100% ready for operation in France.
Thanks to reduced technical risk and optimized time-to-market, Listminut saw increased growth and potential for their next round of funding, which they closed in June 2017.