Development and Growth Strategy: International Remittance Feature
Starting Phase (Plan)
After OY! Indonesia successfully created the ecosystem for the local bank transfer, we decide to span it on the other part of the money movement, one of the biggest ideas is International Remittance. The initiative comes to align with our goal to become a comprehensive financial service that focuses on money movement and also the potency for giving better value to the user, especially for their cost of sending money to others, our local bank transfer feature already serve no admin fee for every user that wants to send money and we want also giving the same value for our international remittance feature that focuses on reduce cost when user want to send money abroad.
This also not only aligns with the part of our goal but also comes from our customer needs, every month we constantly do monthly research and survey to our existing users to get to know what is their obstacles, feedback, and needs from our product. One of the majority feedback is to us being able to provide the international remittance feature to help users need to send money aboard for family, donation, investment, medical, and other purposes.
The journey from some of our users when they want to send money abroad is still conventional, they come to visit the nearest agent of international remittance services and are charged with an expensive service fee, they expect we can solve this kind of journey to be more seamless and more reasonable to them.
Before starting on the development phase, we do a lot of research first, especially on how other players serve their products, we found out there are some variants of service fee schemes for international remittance products:
- Flat Service Fee
- Dynamic Service Fee (regards the total amount)
- No Service Fee (percentage of rates is increased)
After analyzing how many competitors serve the type of service fee scheme, the price of the service fee, and the cost of how much we spend internally for every transaction that we proceed. We decide to serve a Flat Service Fee with the value of the cheapest service fee for international remittance in Indonesia. You can try to compare the price of our service fee with another international remittance player in Indonesia 😉.
Development Phase (Execute)
To make sure the development of this feature can be released quicker to achieve our business metrics and also attract early-adopter customers, in the first phase we develop the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version of this feature.
Eric Ries, who introduced the concept of the minimum viable product as part of his Lean Startup methodology, describes the purpose of an MVP this way: It is the version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least amount of effort.
There is a lot list of recipient countries that can be included in this feature, but it will take a lot of development time to include all of the recipient countries, to make sure the list of countries that we want to include in this phase it’s effective to our users, we synthesize based on these 3 points:
- User needs
What list of recipient countries that our existing users already pick for international remittance transactions previously.
- International remittance transactions report
The transactions report history from Indonesia to other countries, benchmark to list of top countries with the high total transaction & amount.
- International remittance enabler capabilities
The existing list of recipient countries from our international remittance enabler can be integrated with our product.
From synthesizing these 3 points we conclude with 10 lists of countries and the currency for the first phase:
- 🇸🇬 Singapore (SGD)
- 🇲🇾 Malaysia (MYR)
- 🇹🇭 Thailand (THB)
- 🇨🇳 China (CNY)
- 🇵🇭 Philippines (PHP)
- 🇦🇺 Australia (AUD)
- 🇮🇳 India (INR)
- 🇰🇷 South Korea (KRW)
- 🇳🇱 Netherland (EUR)
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom (GBP)
After the list of recipient countries has already been decided, now it needs to be detailed in Product Requirements Document (PRD) with the other required user stories, to make sure the development can be more proper and tracked effectively for every user stories can be cut up into small chunk of a user story, there is no absolute format for the detailing the list of user stories the main purpose is to be able to communicate to the engineers to proceed the requirements.
Based on this list of user stories it will become reflected on backlog ticket on our internal project management tools, another detailed impact from creating every small chunk of user stories the progress of the development can be overview more precise and it purposely for not stuck on progress status for only specific user story because of huge requirements.
One of the user stories that detailed on PRD is how to make sure users are aware of the cheapest service fee information and be more engaged to use our service. we put overlay information of price comparison on the service fee section so users can check the comparison between OY!, banks, and other products.
Another most important part regarding the development of this feature is also to build a remote config, since there is a lot of dynamic changes for specific countries regarding the disturbance, delay payment speed, or increment internal charge fee from enabler, it’s necessary to build this remote config that can be operated internally as real-time without request to engineer for every change. List of configurations that we build:
- Enable/disable specific recipient country to be selected
- Change amount of service fee for a specific country
- Change the detail of payment speed for a specific country
After the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) session by testing to send money to all the list countries until success then makes sure the remote config properly worked and also all release checklist already passed we then confident to release this feature to the public.
After Release (Monitor)
The traction of transacting users in our international remittance for the first time release is increased month by month, but the problem comes up when it’s become stagnant a couple of months after.
We realize we need to do some growth hack approach to make sure the traction of new transacting our international remittance is increasing.
Growth hacking is an umbrella term for strategies focused solely on growth. It is usually used in relation to early-stage startups who need massive growth in a short time on small budgets.
The goal of growth hacking strategies is generally to acquire as many users or customers as possible while spending as little as possible. The term “growth hacking” was coined by Sean Ellis, founder and CEO of GrowthHackers, in 2010.
To initiate the best growth hack approach, we went to our analytic tools to check the insight from the quantitative side using Amplitude, and then we want to validate more the problem we had by conducting internal and external parts of the research, for the internal part we blast the Product /Market Fit Survey to our international remittance user.
Entrepreneur and startup advisor Sean Ellis discovered a leading indicator of product/market fit: Just ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.”
After benchmarking nearly a hundred startups, Sean Ellis found that the magic number for product/market fit was 40%. Companies that struggled to find growth almost always had less than 40% of users respond “very disappointed” in the survey, whereas companies with strong traction almost always exceeded that threshold.
This Product/Market Fit Survey's purpose is not only to make sure the international remittance we serve is already fit or not to the user but also to know more about the behavior of our current users and gather feedback for our improvements.
The result was above 40% that our users respond “very disappointed” if they can not use our international remittance feature again.
Now we are aware this feature is already a product/market fit to our existing user, so in the next step, we focus on the external part of the research to get know more about our current problem from the non-user perspective point of view.
To get an insight, we conduct some interviews with users that ever done send money abroad, and we found that the journey of users when they want to initiate send money to abroad they will search first on google with the specific keywords of the recipient countries and then will land on the particular landing page of a product that provides information to check available countries, rates, service fee. Also, the user can initiate sending money on the current landing page which is can be served via desktop or mobile browser.
This kind of fact is the answer to why our transacting users become stagnant in a couple of months since we only serve on mobile platforms, so the pool of the massive user that we can acquire over time is limited only for a mobile user.
Growth Strategy (Improve/Iterate)
Up to the level we also create an international remittance feature on the browser platform it’s hard for us since we need to develop fast and get the result as soon as possible to be able to achieve our target metrics, that’s why we need a growth hack strategy to solve this kind of problem.
As we brainstorm internally between product managers, marketing, and engineers to craft the idea of what should we create, we decide to experiments to create a single page of a landing page with a simulator that can be used by users to check available countries, rates, and service fees and also additional information about “why user need to use OY! to send money abroad”.
The tactic is when the user wants to proceed with the transaction it will be instructed to download OY! their Appstore or Google Play, we are aware it will create an extra effort for the user who visits the landing page via desktop to open their phone and download our mobile app but with the detail unique selling point content we deliver on this landing page and also provide a live chat via WhatsApp to talk to our customer service to discuss anything about our international remittance product, we confident the user will become not hassle to download OY! and initiate the transactions via our mobile app. Using chat via WhatsApp it’s considered by how the user feels the experience when creating a conversation with us and also by how easy it is to implement it.
Not just deliver the landing page, we also boost it with Google Ads to make sure every target market user that tries to search sends money abroad with the cheapest service fees will visit the landing page.
Curious about what our international remittance landing page looks like? You can visit it on international.oyindonesia.com and also I’m happy to receive if there’s any feedback from you, just reach out 😉.
Result
As the landing page is already released, it gives us an instant positive result, the traction by the new transacting user who comes from the Google search is impacted to increased total transactions that achieve beyond our target metrics for the current month.
Not stop right there, we also expand our available countries to become recipients for users sending their money, now OY! is serving 22 countries for C2C purposes and 4 countries that are also available for C2B purposes.
And soon will be more available countries is coming, and after this initiative of growth hacking, we are passionate to do more experiments like A/B testing discounted service fees, promo code for first transacting users, and many more.
Feel the experience of our international remittance product, OY! is available on Google Play and Appstore.
