Odomo

Odomo is a web app designed to help businesses build a loyal community with their customers.

The Challenge

I spoke with community leaders and entrepreneurs trying to engage and retain their community through events. They often felt that they struggled with retention and brand awareness from one event to the next.

The Solution

I designed a consumer app centered around events to deliver this value and provide a viral growth strategy. I built a proof of concept and ran user testing which was well received and indicated a viable product strategy. Using my results, I attracted valuable teammates and collaborators.

Results after an MVP trial period:

User Research

My first priority was to identify a core value proposition through competitor research. I conducted a UX audit on 13 competitors whose products target various aspects of community-building. This research identified their core value propositions, opportunities for improved experience, market position and strategy, etc.

My next step for understanding the needs of my target audience was to conduct systematic surveys of small business owners. I shared a qualitative and quantitative survey with compensation in the online group "Small Business Networking and Referrals - Chicago". The survey received 44 responses from business decision-makers and owners. Takeaways from the survey included:

• 68% had hosted public events for their business in the past year, suggesting a significant use case for Odomo.
• 73% of these used Facebook to market their events, with Instagram coming in second place.
• 59% of them are somewhat or very unsatisfied with their marketing tools.
• 48% struggle with building brand awareness, indicating a need for wider reach.
• 36% find increasing customer loyalty a challenge, suggesting retention strategies are crucial.

Design Process

I used an iterative three-stage process to design the features of Odomo:

1. Cast a broad net of competitor analysis, analyzing existing pain points and solutions to problems identified from customer research.
2. Consolidate findings to find generalized insights and develop a new design iteration.
3. Conduct usability research to identify flaws and opportunities of the designed feature. This step generates insights to guide a new round of competitor analysis.

Product Strategy

Events are the central way that our target users were already building communities around their businesses, while social media built brand awareness and consistent engagement with their community.

To supplement existing solutions, I designed a key feature called Memories. Once an event passed, attendees would be prompted to share their photos from it in order to see the ones posted by everyone else. A day later, the event would be automatically be shared again on the Odomo, this time emphasizing the photos from the event. This unique feature provided a new location for the event organizer to share advertisements for their merch, future events, etc.

Memories solved the problem of scalability by providing a clear value at the scale of a single event organizer. Business owners now had an incentive to encourage their attendees to interact with the product. The product now had a path to monetization and a positive feedback loop for growth.

Usability Testing

To conduct user testing, I build a static site for a single event. Most attendees would be discovering the event from other platforms like Facebook. I included an embedded widget for selling tickets so they had a clear reason for visiting my site. I also included a push notification tool which attendees could opt into upon visiting the site.

My friends were hosting a DJ event at a local club. With their support, I approached the club and pitched the idea of linking to my site to sell their tickets for the event, giving them an opportunity to advertise their other events in the Memory for free. They could only benefit, so they agreed.

When the event ended, I manually updated the site to show user-uploaded photos, gated behind a prompt to share a photo from the event first. I sent out a notification at 8am the next day to prompt the attendees. The results were:

• 60 people attended the event.
• 46 bought tickets through the POC.
• 34 granted permission to send notifications.
• 21 reopened the website from the next-day push notification.
• 14 uploaded photos to the site.
• 2 purchased tickets to the venue's other events from the ads on my site.

The venue was very satisfied. They agreed to continue testing the product in the future and pay a standard rate for ads.

Conclusion

This product was designed within the constraints of a single founder building a product from scratch. Working with the resources I had, I implemented a robust end-to-end product design process using industry best practices.

My user testing yielded the intended results and satisfied users, proving that the MVP can be monetized. I used my results to acquire multiple collaborators. In this respect, the product has been an overwhelming success.