Building a marketplace for 5-minute voice calls with interesting people for one of Europe’s hottest startups.
Ideating, designing, and building a marketplace for five-minute conversations, enabling anyone to share their knowledge and experience. In just 6 months.
As much as we want AI and robots to solve all of our problems, sometimes it pays to speak to a real person. Anyone is a marketplace to access expertise and a second-income for those that can help others solve problems.
The app extends the reach of professional networks to those typically underserved, offers the option to donate call fees to charity, and gives people meaningful opportunities to connect and share their experiences. WIRED made them one of Europe’s hottest startups 2021
Anyone’s early strategy centred around topics. The theory being that people would use the app to discuss a specific topic and didn’t mind with who they spoke with.
But as the product became more and more about the advisers themselves, their strategy evolved, and the profile view needed an update to reflect this.
When we started, advisers were still onboarded manually by someone on the Anyone team. In preparation for a wider launch, we developed a way to automate this process to allow for an influx of new users.
Writing a bio, setting topics and pricing can now all be done in-app. But rather than putting these steps up front - and risk onboarding fatigue before giving people a chance to experience the product - we developed a progressive onboarding system, with well-timed nudges throughout the first few user journeys.
Advisers need a way to set their availability to receive calls ahead of time. The previous system only allowed for setting available time slots a week in advance. We noticed users would do this one week, but then forget about it the next.
So we scoped and designed a new, more flexible system.
Using a familiar pattern to tap into the mental model of setting a calendar event, we gave advisers the ability to set recurring time slots, which can go as far into the future as they want.
The startup world is crowded, as we know. Two key ways Anyone targeted engagement were through handles and invites.
There was a successful marketing push to get advisers to register unique handles pre-launch, so we designed a user flow to allow advisers to claim the handles they had registered.
This gives them a quick, personalised link to share with anyone they want.
Each user also gets 5 free invites, and accumulates more after having calls. We designed a countdown view to show users how many invites they have left. The bold, visual styling of the countdown page turns a typically mundane app feature into an event that builds excitement and exclusivity around Anyone.
The Lucky Duck team are one of the most valuable aspects to our business, and critical for our product development going forward.