Voutyque

An exploratory e-Commerce marketplace for independent brands. Independent brands can build brand identity and communicate brand spirit through immersive experiences such as full-screen videos and virtual showrooms. Consumers can explore, get to know, and buy from unique and high-quality independent brands to demonstrate their lifestyles.

My Role

I worked as the Product Manager and Project Manager for the Voutyque app and website in 2021, partnered with a lead designer (CEO), a frontend engineer (CTO), and 2 backend engineers.

I managed the product as it passed through the various stages of competitor research, design, content curation, initial MVP, and operations. My responsibilities include translating evolving company strategies into executable product goals, defining a complex e-Commerce system architecture from the ground up, and coordinating a remote team.

Even though the project ended as a result of cash burnout, the marketplace has made it from idea to beta launch and achieved 7-figure NTD revenue.

Problem & Goal

When the CEO first discussed his thoughts on the product, the focus was on building the most entertaining and authentic online shopping experience through videos.

Whether it’s about unboxing, product testing, or farm-to-table, videos provide more context of the product than pure texts and photos and thus have a more significant impact on the conversion rate. However, customers may encounter many frictions in the current user journey from watching videos on social media like Instagram and TikTok to placing an order on the brand’s website, resulting in a high bounce rate and lost orders.

Our solution is a video-first C2C social marketplace where passionate individual sellers can tell stories of their products in creative ways and customers can buy as they see in one tap. The concept had positive feedback during initial user interviews on the merchant side.

Product design in phase 1 – Watch video and swipe to buy.

Insights

On our path to an initial MVP, we gained market insights and gathered feedback from angel investors and friends. Here’s what we found:

Content

  1. Customers are confused when they enter the platform and watch product videos without knowing anything about the brand and the product.
  2. Some sellers are good at using videos to promote their products, but the overall content quality and the number of videos are lower than expected.
  3. Sellers willing to put a lot of effort into high-quality content are mostly independent brand owners.

Fundraising

  1. As potential investors want to build enough conviction that we’ll be able to survive in this competitive space, we need to speed up time to market and demonstrate the actual number.
  2. Not every brand has enough creative materials. We need to lower the entry barrier and switching costs for sellers to increase their willingness to move in and thus the number of sellers.

Iteration

Next, we spent an entire week talking about the goals, constraints, and resources to align everyone on the same page and decided to make the following adjustments:

  • Changed our featured media format from videos to photos. Videos will be “nice to have”.
  • Targeted independent brand owners on the supply side. Put more focus on “brands” rather than “products”.
  • Changed our business model from C2C to B2B2C. We will manage all the products and orders for the sellers to reduce the operational burden.
  • Created a website MVP for quicker market validation before the release of a mobile app.

Reframe the MVP

After a few rounds of discussions, we reframed the problem and reconstructed the product as the following:

Independent brands have difficulty excelling on price-first and search-driven traditional e-Commerce platforms and usually don’t have a big advertising budget to market aggressively and reach new-new customers.

Voutyque is an exploratory e-Commerce marketplace built for independent brands, offering tools such as video feeds and virtual showrooms for storytelling, interaction, and building brand identity.

On Voutyque, independent brands can focus on maximizing their return on creativity (ROC) to deliver unique brand values while people can discover and buy from brands they love all at one stop.

Product design in phase 2 – Discover, know, and buy from independent brands.

Measure

As the saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This is especially true in the highly competitive e-Commerce industry. To validate our business model, optimize content curation, and improve operations, we decided to set key product metrics and build up a tracking system to monitor them.

I’ve created a PRD that samples how I develop product metrics and instrument a tracking system:

View PRD

Note: currently only available in Traditional Chinese.

Learning & Takeaway

This was my first 0-to-1 product development experience! I’m immensely grateful to have been through a startup journey from day 1, so I can see what it’s actually like. On that note, a few things I’ve learned:

  • MVP is getting bigger and bigger. Consumers nowadays are accustomed to high-quality software provided by big tech companies. They are no longer satisfied with (and will not easily return to) a simple MVP. How to find the balance among resources, time, user experience, and goal is really important to a startup team.
  • Iterate as much as you can. Second-system effect hurts. Although we have a full picture in mind, we should do a lot less a lot quicker by defining the right scope of the product or utilizing existing development resources.
  • Solve the real problems. We might have a lot of assumptions and designs that we want to build accordingly, but we should always focus on what’s the real needs and user values and validate our ideas as soon as possible.