Working at Hamsa was like hanging onto a rocket-ship with one hand with a laptop in the other. I was there right from helping make the deck to get the seed funding, through multiple rounds of funding, and made some serious pivots along the way. The initial offering was to be as a payment solution for medium to large size businesses doing business between the US, Europe and China.
The Project
This goal was to understand the motivations and pain points of business owners in Europe and the US, and also the corresponding wholesale businesses in China. This would provide the basis for both product and marketing positioning and targeting of a the payment product we would build.
The Process
We would conduct a series of interviews with the various stakeholders. We would then translate and organize this data to be able to identify patterns. We would then turn these into personas, and ultimately find a target persona for both the buyer and seller sides from which to position a product strategy. During the process
The Challenge
This was during Covid, and so, not only did we have to really that the business landscape was literally shifting beneath our feet, the whole process was conducted online and in multiple languages.
Organizing the Data Remotely
We ended up using 30 interviews for our data. non-English interviews were translated. Normally, with a non-remote process, notes would be organized on a wall with post-it notes. I designed a method using Figma to create post-it like cards that could be moved around by team members, and organized into patterns.
First each interview was split up into note cards.
Then we organized those same notes into patterns.
Then turned these into a set of personas: invented personalities that captured a number of types that we’d identified.
We then identified a target persona from which to build our new payment product.
And so this was the basis from which we built a pilot product with one seller in China, Bizbee, and started the process of refining the product. But this was all just the rocket was taking off, because as it would turn out, we would completely pivot away from payment systems to asset tokenization. But we wouldn’t have gotten there without first going through this process and launching our first product.