Lenme - App to lend and borrow with confidence.
Summary
In 2017, after analyzing the market conditions and the strengths and weakness of blockchain technology, we set about determining which real-world use-case provided best opportunity to build a startup around. Ultimately, we were pointed towards the underdeveloped debt-related service market, specifically peer to peer lending and borrowing, and sold the business to lenme.com in 2019.
When we started this venture, blockchain technology had high energy/gas fees for transactions, long wait times for settlements, and decentralized smart contract consensus capabilities which lead us to focus our attention on potential real world use-cases that matched those requirements. Further market/consumer research helped us identify peer to peer lending and borrowing as the most promising opportunity to pursue.
- Product/market fit is the foundation of growth.
- Retention rate is a fundamental metric for any kind of product that has a regular usage pattern.
- A product’s retention curve defines to a large extent the product’s growth potential and determines whether it has product/market fit or not.
- A product’s retention curve and influx of new users defines the product’s growth. Based on these metrics you can build an accurate forecast with a small amount of data.
- Retention is the output. If you want to improve retention, you must understand what it depends on.
- Retention powers acquisition and monetization. Teams often focus their energy on growing the wrong metrics, such as downloads or signups. To have sustainable growth, you must continue to deliver value to customers over time, which is indicated by the plateau in long-term retention.
- There are several ways to calculate the retention rate, and you should definitely understand which one is being used, and what stands behind the numbers.
My Role
I led our organization's marketing strategy and product management. Coordinated engineering, market research, customer research, UX improvement initiatives, marketing, and legal requirements.
Notes
No matter where you are on your product management journey, I would advise you to focus on delivering results. Taking a page out of Amazon's Leadership Principles: To deliver results you have to be right a lot. To be right a lot, you have to be customer obsessed and insist on the highest standards, which in turn requires you to dive deep and invent and simplify.
I would say the most difficult part is from a timing perspective to build a strong rapport and trust with my stakeholders across Engineering, Analytics, Marketing, Program, etc. teams. It does require a lot of time as PM to build these relationships as you work on product discovery to ideation to shipping and iterating your products. But once you build that momentum with your teams, you naturally will become the single threaded owner of your products/features, gain the support of your team, and expand your ownership/scope to get to the lead/senior level.
There are many things to focus on when you first start. This can't be done in the first day (maybe over the course of a couple months) but focus on building relationships with your team and stakeholders so you can influence without authority.