SME’s now have a clear understanding of their cashflow
Credimi Assist is Credimi's first SaaS product. I lead the full Zero to One process: from initial market validation, MVP development, untill present continuous product discovery efforts.
Credimi Assist is Credimi's first SaaS product. I lead the full Zero to One process: from initial market validation, MVP development, untill present continuous product discovery efforts.
A bit of context on Credimi
Credimi is a the biggest digital lender in Europe, with more than 2bn Euros lent to SME's accross Italy. Dispite its lending activity, Credimi's mission is much broader, aiming at "helping small business to grow to their maximum potential". I got the opportunity to build on that mission, creating its first non-lending product.
Everyday, small business owners are confronted with several Jobs-to-be-done that exceed they core business. Most of the times, these JTBD are far from the core set of competences and interest of the entrepreneur. In the financial space, there’s a huge gap between the jobs SMBs are trying to get done and the products that traditional banks are offering them. *
How might we help business owners or small accounting teams to better manage their finances?
Nearly 80% of SME's fail due to poor cash flow management and poor understanding of cash flow. This is surely a problem worth tackling.
Understanding the cashflow problem space and exploring product opportunities became my core focus throught 2022. I adopted a traditional business design framework, identifying key hipothesis that had to be true in order to build an impactful product.
Do customers care about this problem? Are we palnning to build the right thing? Finding an aswer to these desirability question was the most challenging Product Discovery process that I've ever managed.
Product Discovery moved through different phases: from understanding the problem space interviewing potential customers, till understanding granullarly how users interact with the live version of the product in order to identify pain-point and opportunities.
Note on discovery methodology
Planning your reseearch ahead is extremelly important. I used Airtable as a single source of truth for participants recruiting on different phases of the discovery process, as well as to gather structured data on interviews, and finally to visually represent and share research insights.
With Mixpanel we collect accurate users' analytics and track key proudct metrics.
Hotjar comes handy to watch real-session recordings and better grasp the quality of the interactions.
SME’s owners are taking key financial decisions based on partial and unstructured information, interacting with several excel files that require manual inputing and do not update automatically.
Their needs became evident:
Small and micro businesses try to satisfy these needs with no dedicated technological solution; or with multiple technological solutions which are fragmented, costly and require training and effort.
Our hypothesis was as simple as disruptive: by automating data gathering, we would be able to provide a reliable single source of truth for cashflow analysis and financial plannng.
We collaborated with an external company who was trying to solve the same problem for themselves in creating a Beta Version of the product. I played a key role in sourcing this solution and bringing it to the attention of the management team.
We took the available technology, knowing it was not by all means perfects, and built an initial acquisition strategy around it.
During this stage, I managed a team in charge of customer acquisition and client onboarding. This included designing an developing the necessary assets for acquisition (landing pages, campaigns, nurturing emails) as well as the onboarding strategy and scripting.
For 2 months, the beta version taught us some very valuable lessons:
Less that 5% of custumers were concerned about data aggregation and the use of PSD2.
Retrieving invoices from a centralized state repository proved to be harder than anticipated, leading to lots of user friction.
The initial UI was not fit for self-provisioning onboarding, we needed to re-think our first time user experience.
The first version of the product was released at the end of September 2022 and was the result of 3 key initiatives, 2 of which I lead first hand:
This first version helps business owners to solve some of their most pressing JTBD when dealing with financial planning. This is an overview of the key features designed for the product.
Assist is a central piece on the strategic plan of growth and internationalisation in Credimi.
Assist will have a premium verion with a recurring revenue monetization strategy.
Assist will be the strategic asset behind Credimi's expansion abroad.
Assist medium-term roadmap includes short-term financing solutions, generating an indirect-monetization souce.
Initial results after the initial release are extremelly encouraging.
Notes
* During my desk research on the main JTBD by SME's owners, I consulted diffrent sources including an 11:FS report on the transition of banks towards digital service platforms.
