Vishvesh Kaushik
Product Management
Overview
I founded my own fintech startup where people could trade real estate like the stock-market. While leading a team of four, we developed the product. We did everything from market research, UX design to development.
Results
I got the company into the iVenture accelerator and raised capacity funding. It was a successful startup experience, giving me more insight into product management.
Role
Founder of Tulip
Duration
Jan 2024 - June 2024
Team
Jonathan Bernard (Developer),
Muskaan Khanna (UX Designer),
Utkarsh Prasad (Developer),
Katie Zhou (UX Designer)
My process
Business case
Tulip is a fintech platform enabling people to invest in real estate with no minimum amount. Over 99% of all Americans cannot afford real estate investment due to its high capital requirement. We wanted to make sure that every American can invest as little as $1 towards real estate. We did exactly that by bringing in a stock-market like perspective.
Market research
Understanding the market and its requirements is key to identifying our target customers. While we had a problem statement in mind, it was essential to validate that we were addressing the right issue. After exploring various research methods, we decided on a survey to gather direct insights into the pain points people face.
When designing the survey, we prioritized clarity and brevity. A lengthy or complicated survey discourages responses, so we focused on keeping the questions simple and easy to understand. Our goal was to ensure that nothing would deter participants from completing it. We specifically crafted the questions to address the challenges people encounter and their experiences, while avoiding any mention of our proposed solution until the end. This approach helped minimize bias and ensured more objective feedback.
Here are the questions we developed:
With the questions perfectly crafted, we used marketing techniques to gain as many responses as possible. Our methods worked and in the end we were able to get 1000+ responses:
The survey confirmed all our beliefs. We understood that a lot of people are interested in investing in real estate, but simply do not have the means to pursue it. Alternatives such as REIT and Fundrise are not good enough and don't solve the main problems faced by our customers. With this survey we knew exactly what product to build and also understood our idea customer profile:
Design & Development
While designing the app, the following are things I deemed necessary:
Familiar app interface
Fintech apps such as Robinhood are already wildly popular. If we wanted to create a stock-market like app for real estate, we should do our best to keep it familiar. This will provide a more user-friendly experience.
Transparency
Finance and fintech apps have a bad reputation about transparency. We wanted to be the first to change that. We want to provide clear information about prices and transactions for all users to see.
Clear navigation
Investing in real estate like the stock-market has not been done before. We want to make the experience as intuitive as possible. We decided to provide a map where people can just select the location.
Ease of use
Customers should be able to come back and see how their investments are performing easily. Over 90% of the times, fintech apps are used to check the performance and this experience must be seamless.
Design & Development
Keeping the above things in mind we prototyped the portfolio, map, location and news page.
As you might notice, we kept the interface similar to other fintech apps such as Robinhood, WeBull etc. This ensures that new customers on our platform have a familiar face.
We also provided a newsroom for people to read up on real estate news before investing. This gives more confidence to the user, making them more likely to invest on tulip.
On the map page, we provide cards which are intuitive. The user can click on the card and invest any amount: as little as $1.
Result
I founded this startup with the intention of making real estate investment accessible to every American. Over the course of my journey:
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I raised pre-seed capital
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Got into the prestigious iVenture accelerator
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Built a product
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Built a waitlist of 10,000+ excited users
My takeaways
Designing concise UX while conveying a message
Designing an app that is intuitive to the fintech user was of utmost important. Learning to empathize with the user and building a great user-friendly product was a big learning
Collaboration
During my time as CEO/Founder, I led a team of 2 designers, 2 developers and a marketing head. I learned to work with different cross-functional teams and collaborate while building.
Research
Using surveys and other research methodologies to understand our ideal customer profile is important. We discovered that our target market is over 9 million and growing. We tailored the experience to their needs.
2024 by Vishvesh Kaushik
