Product Manager and Team Lead for StackUp Learn-and-Earn
Background
Company
In 2021, Tribe Pte Ltd was a service-based company specialising in providing learning courses and hackathons for learning institutions and technology companies - and was looking to embark on a digital/software play that would allow the company to deliver value at a larger scale.
The Target Market
- The Web3 market was facing severe growing pains.
- Too many protocols, too much money, but too few developers to actually build apps and provide value to users.
- There was a critical need for solutions that could educate and onboard developers at scale for these blockchain protocols.
Our End Users
The developers and learners that were being targeted by the web3 market faced key challenges when trying to enter the space:
- Too much noise and false advertising in the space - who to trust?
- Technical documents were too complex for the inexperienced - how to learn? How to stay committed to finish the courses?
- No end users in the ecosystem - how to earn money from building apps?
The Solution
An online global gamified learning platform for developers, where we:
- Provide an Optimised Learning Experience: Providing curated and optimised learning materials in the form of learning “quests”
- Incentivise Learners to stay the course: Reward learners with real money when they successfully complete the learning tasks.
(Our Clients) Technology companies pay us to run learning campaigns to acquire and onboard developers into their ecosystem.
(Our End-users) Developers get to pick up new skills and knowledge to make them more employable, and earn real money along the way (instead of having to pay for courses and certifications).
Live Product Link: https://stackup.dev/ - Please note that the current link displays an overhauled version of the product (this original version has been deprecated/retired). - Development and launch of this current revamped version is covered in another project
Project Involvement and Outcomes
In-a-nutshell
Functioning as a product manager, then subsequently including the responsibilities of a team lead, the first 12 months of the project involved the following:
In 3 Months
Developed, launched a MVP-version of StackUp - an online gamified learning platform for developers, within 3 months, alongside an online Discord community for our userbase.
In 6 Months
Iteratively developed the product and improved the experience, growing the platform to >20,000 users, with us successfully conducting our first client projects, yielding 6-figure revenues. Our community similarly grew in scale and activity.
In 12 Months
Built and led a cross-functional team that covered all critical post-sales functions, with the platform growing to over 100,000 users, and 100% client satisfaction and engagement success rates.
Key Outcomes/Achievements
MVP Launch
Together with a designer and developer, developed and launch an MVP using no-code tools in 3 months.
Go to Market
Handled all operational work (operations, content development, client pitching and fulfilment) until I managed to hire/onboard new team members.
Post-MVP PM
Continued development post-MVP to deliver key capabilities that drove user growth and client success.
Product Success
Managed to provide a product experience that was capable of drawing in >100,000 users within a year (together with the marketing team)
Client Fulfilment
Led client project fulfillment - ensuring 100% success rate across >5 projects within a year.
Team Building
Grew the team from 3 pax to 14 pax, personally onboarding all of them to successfully fill out critical business functions
Community Building and Management
We built out and grew a large, active community on Discord where we could directly interact with our userbase, providing them real-time support and guidance, as well as allowing us to conduct rapid micro-experiments and collect user feedback within days instead of weeks.
Highlights
Some key challenges that we tackled through the course of the project:
The highlights of this project frequently revolved around similar themes of challenging and overturning existing perceptions/mis-conceptions in the market, where clients and end-users alike has certain expectations as to what a learn-and-earn platform experience should be like.
Through a mix of data-driven testing/experimentation, and first-principles thinking, we identified that some expectations were actually detrimental to the product/business, and approaching said expectations differently could in fact yield us an advantage over the market instead.
Some examples/topics where this came into play:
Automated Submissions Reviewing:
- The “Ask”: Stakeholders were convinced that there should be an automated grading/review function to provide users with instant results/feedback - matching the product experience found in other leading online education platforms
- The “But”: Given the pitfalls encountered by previous learn-and-earn ventures in the market - we had strong evidence that such functionality would actually invite many issues to the platform and business model, some being critical/existential problems.
Automated Reward Payments:
- The “Ask”: Stakeholders alike thought that we should support automated payouts of rewards, and that it would be more operationally efficient
- The “But”: However, our team had strong reasons to suggest that such an arrangement was actually more costly resource-wise and less-scalable in the short-run
Supported Forms/Currencies for Rewards:
- The “Ask”: Some clients requested that we only pay out learning rewards in the form of their native cryptocurrency.
- The “But”: Whilst this sounded like a positive arrangement for the clients, it actually harmed their overall objective of maximising learner participation amongst developers new to Web3 and their technology.
Find out more! Keen to find out more details about the highlights, how we overcame the challenges, and the project in general?
Please reach out to me and we can chat about it!
Email: nicholashongyk@gmail.com