Rippel
May-Aug 2021
Background
Rippel was a civic tech app that was still in development when I joined its team. The app aimed to become the new Facebook, but exclusively for Canadian politics.
In essence, it would be a platform where it would avoid the chatter found on other social media platforms and become a symposium where citizens could voice their concerns and lawmakers could hear their concerns.
The startup was at an extremely stage, consisting of a Product Manager (the founder), a Software Developer, and myself
I was tasked with completing the final step prior to entering the market, which was to validate the product with stakeholders (such as MPs, student trustees, advocates, etc.) and recommend necessary improvements to the team.
My Solution
Persona Creation: Classified two kinds of personas (lawmakers & citizens) who would be the app's target audience, and hence worth interviewing for validation
Validation: Conducted 61 validation interviews across both personas, narrowing down the pain points, value proposition and USPs
Pre-Launch Marketing: Built campus ambassadorships, obtained MP endorsements & launched a beta-user waitlist
Persona Creation
The first step as part of my validation process was to list all the relevant stakeholders who would be the app's target audience. There would be 2 kinds of personas:
Citizens & Civic Actors
Members of Paliamenet
Members of Legislative Assembly (MLA/MPP)
Councillors
more . . .
Law & Policy-makers
Student trustees & councils
Researchers
Advocates/Activists
Social Entrepreneurs
Philanthropists & Donors
more . . .
The next step was to discover ways to connect and then conduct interviews with each stakeholder using a validation questionnaire to determine their exact needs and pin point what were the flaws in the current feature set of the app.
Persona Creation
Pain Discovery
Target Audience Validation
Market Validation
The validation interviews brought fascinating insights from both kinds of stakeholders — lawmakers & citizens.
From lawmakers, the following discoveries were made:
They want to reduce the degrees of separation between citizens and lawmakers since it discourages them from engaging their representatives and participating in elections
They want voter turnout to increase (which ha fallen from 80% to 60% in the last 5 decades)
There was a contention that the app would create an impression that there is a stronger accountability to act and respond, which would become difficult as the volume increases
For citizens, the following discoveries were made:
2 out of 5 are actively looking for information on political issues, but the current methods are too complex and time-consuming (TV, news apps, scouring the web)
38% of people do not vote because they either are not informed or thought their vote does not matter
The process for raising a voice on an issue is too lengthy (protests, collective calls & emails to MPs, posting on social media with all its chatter & noise)
After 61 validation interviews, I forwarded these insights to the team.
Validation interviews
61
Positioning
Messaging
Unique Selling Proposition
Pre-Launch Marketing
Since I had spent the first half of my work term validating the app, I could now use the existing connections I had built in the next stage to build suspense and publicity around its launch.
This would mean establishing various channels that would drive converging traffic to a single unified point; this would be our website, where they would then convert by joining the waitlist.
This was achieved using the following 3 methods:
Public Endorsements
Secured open endorsements from lawmakers, such as MPs & MLAs. These helped secure general publicity as well as referrals for more endorsements
Beta Phase Usage
For local citizens & advocacy organizations who declared intent to establish official presence on the app (this would drive local adoption within municipalities)
Campus Ambassadors
Established student representatives at certain universities — this would drive adoption within highly concentrated centers with student populations
Landing Pages
Lead Gen Forms
Email Marketing Automation
Funnel Creation
Customer Journey Mapping
Campus ambassadorships
5
MP Endorsements
6
Outcome
Persona Creation: Classified two kinds of personas (lawmakers & citizens) who would be the app's target audience, and hence worth interviewing for validation
Validation: Conducted 61 validation interviews across both personas, narrowing down the pain points, value proposition and USPs
Beta Phase Adoption: Built 5 campus ambassadorships, obtained 6 MP endorsements & onboarded 8 organizations to become beta-phase users
These collective efforts resulted in 4000+ waitlist signups, establishing our pre-launch presence firmly in key metropolitan centers. This would go on to benefit the official public launch of the app later on.
Waitlist signups
4000+
Learnings
A product is not what YOU think it should be. Rather, it is what the CUSTOMER wants it to be. This can only be determined after thoroughly examining their pains and desires.
This would benefit me greatly in my later startup endeavors where I avoided falling into guesswork and founder "stubbornness"
