The Product Story of My Community

When I worked in an e-commerce company focusing on B2B mobile payment solutions, we had two customers, all which are famous real estate developers and property management companies in China. At the very beginning, we just tried to customize mobile payment solution for them to collect property management fee from their residents more easily. It was very potential alternative to traditional face-to-face payment.

However, after talking with the customers and learning more about this market, I found that we could do more beyond mobile payment and start a new business with great potentials. According to my research, I suggested to develop a new mobile app product named “My Community”, which could provide most needed community services to the residents living in typical gated residential communities in China.

Most Chinese in cities live in gated residential communities with many apartment buildings and thousands even ten thousands of residents. A property management company is always in charge of providing services including security guard, cleaning, garbage collecting, and maintenance. However, in different communities, the demographic characteristics could be totally different. For example, some communities locating near downtown could be always used for rental, and the residents have very big mobility. So it is difficult to build the base of loyal users in these communities. In some communities locating in rural area or small towns, many residents are lower educated elderly and middle-aged who are too unfamiliar with high tech to become your users.

Fortunately, the communities, which our customers of real estate developers built and managed, are all high-end mature ones. Most of their residents, between the ages of 30 and 60, have higher education, stable income and families, and are familiar with popular high-tech gadgets. They are ideal target users.

I was not in a hurry to develop a fully functional product but built an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to test the market's response and obtain valuable first-hand data about the actual users demands.

The MVP was a simple landing page with contents incuding introduction of the prospective functions, sign up and a simple survey for collecting the information of market demands. The MVP had mobile and PC versions, and targeted about 3000 residential users living in two communities of those two real estate developers.

In order to encourage the users to sign up, we provided a reward, CNY10 top up to user’s cell phone account, as our first marketing expenses.

At that moment, there were already some competitors in the market focusing on different aspects of community services. In order to differentiate ourselves from competitors and stand out from the future competition, I conducted more market research and competitive analysis, and properly positioned this new product in the market.

We categorize all possible functions into four parts: Management Services, Neighbor Social, Local Businesses Info and e-Commerce (Payment). Compared with some competitors, we positioned our product in all four areas, but had more advantages in payment and management services.

We built an agile development team and began the scrum process ...

The first formal version of My Community had only two functions: Pay management fee (with discount) and coupons from some local businesses, all of which were related with the most concerned issue: saving money and convenience. It was released only in two communities where we did the market research. In order to attract the users, we persuaded the management companies to provide discount if the user pay management fee via this product, as this could reduce their cost of human resource. This version helped us to build the first loyal user base, which became the ideal user groups for hypothesis test.

In the meantime, we had been iterating to upgrade the product to make it more cater to market demands.