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HelloSoda

The Challenge

HelloSoda (www.hellosoda.com) are a social data analytics firm primarily focusing on their B2B product PROFILE. This product was an API with a Javascript component that once configured by the delivery team could be deployed onto corporate websites. The PROFILE Javascript component would load a social connect component that allowed businesses to capture customer social profiles and run their social data through the PROFILE engine to produce a social report on them. The results of which were delivered back to the client in the form of a JSON API response. The client, in turn, could utilise this data to make decisions about the prospective customer such as marketing strategy, products or services offered, or whether to allow them to become a customer at all.

 

During 2015/16 we were engaged to help HelloSoda on 3 main areas:

 

  1. Review and improve the product offering currently available

  2. Reduce the delivery and set up lead time - removing the route causes to the unnecessary delay of deploying a client

  3. Considering the API results set, design and deliver a compelling B2C product that could be ‘powered by’ the HelloSoda API

 

The Solution & Approach

 

B2B Product

 

PROFILE was primarily an API offered to clients by the sales team but it had an easily deployable Javascript wrapper that could be embedded within a customers website. When the page loads it would automatically load the Javascript which would, in turn, do 2 things:

 

  1. Create a JobID within the PROFILE DB that would then be used by the API 

  2. Load the social connection buttons that would be used by end consumers visiting the B2B customer's website, encouraging the end consumer to socially connect their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram profiles during the checkout/sign up/form completion.

 

Initially, we identified which key business stakeholders could help answer the following questions:

 

  • How has the product been developed to date?

  • What features are included as standard to the client?

  • How has the product resulted in these features being included and no others?

  • What is the actual customer profile? including the key decision-makers?

  • What is the engagement in the product?

  • How are features identified and how do these reach the roadmap?

  • How is PROFILE being sold?

  • What are sales saying ‘yes’ to and why?

  • Who is actually managing roadmap? - how do things get on there? How are these then managed and delivered against?

  • What (if any) validation of value with the client takes place?

  • If yes, what form of validation takes place? 

 

We very quickly formed relationships with key stakeholders through workshops and trying to help them understand what and why we were working with the business to achieve, along with helping them understand that we could not achieve anything without their support.

 

The key stakeholders very quickly realized our intentions and genuine desire to help.

 

Due to our technical and product skills we was able to illustrate some of the areas we could add value and how we intended to help enhance the product which as a consequence would resolve some of their frustrations and pain points.

 

The immediate issues that required resolving where:

 

  1. Each client took to long to set up and get live

  2. Each client required a separate social platform app registering with the relevant social network which was problematic and until that point had unsuccessfully proven to the social networks why the app (and its access rights) were to allowed.

 

We very quickly identified that the ability to demonstrate the value of PROFILE apps to the different social network review process was paramount but of equal importance was the ability to create a new and repeatable approach for each client implementation.

 

We were very keen to produce an MVP approach and then iterate with the learnings from each review submission to the social networks to ultimately create an accurate but repeatable approach to demonstrate to the social networks why the apps should have the requested access right (permission to access end-consumer data objects).

 

At this point, the only thing clear from the social networks was the generic developer guidelines for approved apps and those were not entirely detailed in their descriptions.

 

To start with we teamed up with the Hello Soda software engineering team and collaborate to review the social network app review policies, and then proceeded to whiteboard our collective ideas as to how we could satisfy the policies within the context of what PROFILE delivers to its B2B customers.

 

From there we built an easily repeatable prototype that demonstrated value to the end consumer for allowing PROFILE to access the end consumers social data for each permission type.

 

Each submission process went through a review with each social network app review and required a thorough explanation for being allowed to have access to those permission types.

 

The initial versions did not successfully pass the app reviews and the reviewers at each social network would provide limited feedback on why each permission would not be permitted. 

 

Armed with this limited feedback from the social networks, we would return to the drawing board a number of times but importantly taking on board the learnings, whilst canvassing the perspectives of a wider team of technical and analytical thinkers.

 

Within 2 weeks we had successfully developed a prototype and iterated a number of times, such that we had a compelling but repeatable way of demonstrating to the social networks what PROFILE was doing and importantly why each app required the requested permissions/access rights.

 

The journey had not been easy and required both creativity but a systematic, iterative mindset. Staying focused on the objective of sustainability and repeatability.  

 

B2C Product

 

HelloSoda was a B2B business but as a fast growth business, they strategically needed to demonstrate that they could also develop and deliver a B2C product using their own B2B PROFILE product.

 

Having developed B2C products in the consumer credit space previously I knew that in order to deliver a compelling B2C product we needed to answer some key questions:

 

  1. Would the general public find any value in the results returned within the PROFILE API?

  2. Could we build a compelling user story around the way you interact with PROFILE?

 

To start with we fully under-explored the API results set, object types returned, and importantly what each object type was essentially saying about the individual that the PROFILE report had been produced for.

 

We reviewed how each of the successfully implemented B2B customers had deployed and utilised the PROFILE API in their own use cases.

 

With this information clearly understood, we again ran a number of ideas workshops with key stakeholders. The best ideas were shortlisted and we proceeded to try to answer the following questions for each of them:

 

  • How can we integrate the API into a B2C product?

  • How can we make those API results interesting or relevant for this use case?

  • Would consumers be willing to pay for this as a product?

  • What (if any) price point would work?

  • What knowledge and expertise does HelloSoda have to deliver and market this as a proposition?

  • How could customers use the product/service?

  • How can we take payments without huge technical work?

 

Furthermore, each idea was mapped against the Value Proposition Canvass to answer

What pains, gains, and activities would each idea solve? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After exploring each idea in detail we chose to shortlist ‘Digital Parenting’. It had struck a real cord about the risks that our own children were exposing themselves to in the new social media era. We felt that we could utilise the Braintree hosted merchant facility which would satisfy our need to set up recurring payment schedules but of equal importance was the easy to use interface that allowed finance support to manage chargebacks and refunds.

 

We felt that parents were busy enough and needed a little help to manage the risks associated with allowing their children to have a social media profile and engage in activity on there without losing their perceived independence.

 

The proposed solution was ‘OnlineThem’ - a digital parents solution. 

In summary, this would be a low-cost monthly subscription product that would provide parents with a daily report on their child's social media activity. To add extra value to digital parents we felt it was important to provide parents with some form of alerts should their be activity on their children account that PROFILE had detected as Parents don't always have the time to proactively go looking at their child's report each day.

 

The proposed product would utilise the existing results set delivered by the HelloSoda PROFILE API but it wasn’t without its issues, namely:

 

  • The Hello Soda PROFILE API was missing some functionality that was available in the demo UI of the API results

  • The Hello Soda PROFILE API did not provide ‘alerts’ which meant new functionality would need to be designed and developed in order to satisfy the key benefit of the product ‘watching’ out for high-risk activity e.g. bullying (others or themselves), swearing, amongst others. 

 

The above challenges needed to be overcome by the Hello Soda Engineering team so further planning was required to the Product roadmap in order to deliver these features which were in completion with B2B HelloSoda feature requests.

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However, the Hello Soda Board agreed that in order to deliver a compelling product the missing features should be prioritised as they would also add value to B2B clients utilising PROFILE, thus delivering multiple benefits.

 

Next, we explored routes to market and marketing channels as having developed and launched a number of successful B2C consumer credit products it was clear that marketing and promotion were going to be critical.

 

  • What sort of Partnerships or accredited partners could we have? 

  • What sort of Advertising can we do to test the product / market fit?

 

Eventually, we settled on an MVP budget that would be utilised to launch the OnlineThem B2C brand, and we also agreed on an MVP marketing budget that would allow the OnlineThem to test the various marketing channels considered such as partnerships with Anti Bullying charities, Paid advertising on social networks and Google Adwords, and corporate partnerships e.g. offering OnlineThem as a free add service to corporate clients purchasing HelloSoda B2B PROFILE product such as Banks and Insurance companies.

 

The OnlineThem (https://onlinethem.com/) MVP was successfully launched in February 2016 and iterated on the original design and routes to market to become a key component of the HelloSoda product portfolio. Furthermore, it underpinned their recent successful VC investment to support their ongoing multi-territory growth strategy.  

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