Party Round
Invest with friends.
Overview
Party Round (acquired 2023) was a fundraising tool for startups, enabling founders to raise money on SAFE agreements, executed on-platform and with automatically reconciled funds flow over ACH, wire, or USDC. Backed by Gradient Ventures (Google) and Andreessen Horowitz.
As a founding member, I owned and managed the UX research and product operations of our white-labeled MVP fundraising tool and the discovery process while our own core product was being built.
Once we launched the core product, I also led customer experience functions, collaborating across all teams to scale the most founder-friendly solutions.
Highlights
Employee #1, launched and oversaw UX Research and managed operations and user reporting for the MVP
Launched customer feedback interviews, designed core product usability tests, Customer Voice Reports, and ideated onboarding transitions from live demo to self-serve sign up
Proposed, scoped and supported implementation of onboarding solutions with Product and Design to reduce full activation from 9 days to <1 day
Initiated and scaled UX research operations, including customer tiering, feedback research methods, product flows and user journey mapping, user session metrics
Designed and implemented onboarding pipeline and customer success functions for 1,000+ onboarded users
Building and running UX research and product operations
Party Round first serviced customers with a white-labeled web product as a means of entering the market earlier, informing customer and roadmap discovery, and finding product market fit while our team built the mobile app.
I was responsible for building UX research and product operations from a clean slate: collecting and reporting user insights to Product and Engineering, setting up research protocols, founder interview guides, usability testing processes, collaborating with Product and Engineering to optimize the onboarding experience, and building out both quantitative and qualitative user metrics through Metabase and SQL to monitor our company health and inform our roadmap.
I engaged with dozens of both investor and founders daily, not only serving as their primary touchpoint throughout the user life cycle, but their internal contact for sharing fundraising feedback and feature requests.
I also worked with our initial vendors and partners to spin up Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), created the onboarding and support content, and supported the design and launch of our Help Center with the Product team.
July — November 2021
Leveraging MVP UX research to drive our core product
Party Round was a founder-first platform that serviced both founders and investors. We needed to figure out how to position Party Round and understand the fundraising needs to drive our core launch.
Note: Due to NDAs, this study includes adapted content. Methods and processes reflect original work but user groups, certain feedback, and user data have been adapted.
Team
UX Researcher, Product Operations
Sarah Bai
Executive Stakeholders
Developers
Brian Armstrong, Head of Engineering
Clayton Brand, Senior Software Engineer
Angela Xu, Software Engineer
Spencer Schoeben, Senior iOS Engineer
Product & Design
Brandon Jacoby, Head of Product & Design
Evan Coutre, Lead Designer
Opportunity
The MVP helped us measure the largest initial bottlenecks, drop-offs and manual interventions for our foundational fundraising platform. We were able to take advantage of deep top-tier founder relationships to understand their motives for fundraising and build our ICP around successful closed rounds.
Successful user experience was defined by onboarding rates, initiated rounds, and overall social sentiment as an NPS proxy for product market fit.
Goals
Reduce friction in onboarding and the full fundraising cycle while transitioning to self-serve
Protect the integrity of every fundraise while proactively catering to each founder’s unique set of needs
Discover and prioritize product improvements with user-centric intention while transitioning from web to a mobile app
Value
Identity and Control — owning and launching our own core product gave us flexibility to cater to our target user after this discovery process and build more features on top of the infrastructure
Scalability — we could now meet the market demand when we initially released hundreds off the waitlist by catering to the ICP
Conversion — we proactively mitigated onboarding friction due to user feedback and testing in our MVP
Process
Set intentions with internal collaborators — Since this task was our largest and most impactful business objective to date, it was critical to establish my understanding of our primary Engineering, Product, Design, Marketing, and Business goals for transitioning to our core product.
I led kick-offs with each of our team leads, planned initial research roadmapping, and regularly participated in product development meetings, which also later enabled me to deliver real time user knowledge and context.
Establish a baseline of user knowledge and research — Although the MVP was intended to be a baseline for our own internal product knowledge, I conducted market research and thoroughly interviewed our co-founders because of their user expertise. This pre- research was important for me to build a foundational approach for designing the MVP research roadmap.
Design research roadmap and implementation — My research philosophy is based on intentional and measurable procedures rather than standard blanket processes. Therefore, I generally establish research principles to design a research roadmap.
My three-pronged approach for optimizing research methods:
The user — User engagement such as feedback sessions, NPS surveys, beta test groups and other methods need to be intentionally delivered as a customer experience as much as it benefits for research purposes.
The team — Constant iteration of processes that work for the team. Notion didn't work, Linear did. Observing and tackling internal bottlenecks in real time streamlined our launch operations.
The goal — I made sure our teams were aligned on the framework approach for measurable controlled inputs. For example: how many people in beta testing, how many tickets until we escalate the issue.
A segmented group of semi-structured feedback interviews focused on recently completed onboarding sentiment. This group was particularly targeted at higher tiered users who had the intention and/or likelihood of raising a certain undisclosed amount on platform.
MVP Research Methods
In-depth remote and in-person feedback sessions focused on onboarding improvements (N > 20)
Usability test sessions pre-rollout (N > 15)
Initial pipeline metrics via Airtable then migrating to Metabase once we could sync our mobile data
Competitor testing and market landscape analysis for cyclical fundraising and investing trends
Various user persona examples and deep dives into customer tier differentiators
At least 3 iterations of user journey maps as we shipped different versions of the core product for testing
An early mapping of the MVP user onboarding journey, outlined with internal process bottlenecks and summarized user insights in every stage.
UX Infrastructure
Set up and integrated all customer experience functions to be seamlessly integrated with user feedback collection.
This includes Zendesk setup and integration with Linear (our user technical incident reporting tool) and collaborating with Engineering for building our internal admin dashboard
Launched feedback reporting processes in Slack
Initiated and led weekly Customer Voice Reports with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Executive Stakeholders
Consulted external Product and CX leads from OnDeck, Ramp, Unit Finance, and other startups with exceptional attention to customer needs
Outcome
Launching our core fundraising product at Party Round was one of the most delightful and rewarding experiences of my career to date. Upon core product launch, my UX research success included:
Enabling easy control and prioritization in granting access from a waitlist of 8000+ users due to a deeper understanding of target users
Managing our MVP, gaining full user journey insights from over 30 initial deals valued over $8M
Conducting over 80 hours of in-depth user interviews focused on various new feature developments, product incidents and improvements, onboarding support issues, and general feedback sessions
Segmented and conducted multiple usability test groups with robust feedback mechanisms and learned priceless insights about building a team and mobile app from scratch
Established lasting relationships with founders and investors that viewed Party Round as a household name and must-have in their founder tech stack
I was uniquely positioned at Party Round with user experience research and customer success. I oversaw the entire user lifecycle and engaged with users daily while also designing research methods to gain insights for the core product.
Given this position, I intuitively understood the behaviors of the founder and investor as I built relationships, observed their sessions, planned test groups, and served as one of their fundraising operations advisors.
Challenges and Learnings
Tackling unknown transaction user painpoints was one of the largest obstacles for building out the UX research and product operations.
In-app transactions was a new feature native to the core product but not in the MVP, which pushed us in more reactive states when we launched. For example, there were more KYB requirements and an entirely new product partner we worked with and designed around with their API docs.
To list a few payments challenges and resolutions:
Designing a new KYB experience and streamlining a review process that is inherently very manual and tedious for the user. I worked with our banking vendor over the following months after launch to create a hybrid KYB process where we initiated some internal KYB procedures before handing off to our vendor.
Reiterating the financial security of the brand through the app. Transactional features , we did more research into financial security via mobile such as Face ID requirements and role-based restrictions to prioritize features that build more trust.
Data parity improvements since we needed a source of truth for some UX metrics and our data was scattered internally and within the payment partner database. We built our own internal pipeline and synced many webhooks.