Creating Impact at scale

At Gojek we generally like to do things at scale. Well, in an ecosystem spanning millions of daily users along with millions of drivers and merchants partners it's hard not to think of scale.

So being a product manager at Gojek when you are thinking about product innovations you always have a question in your mind- “Will my product hit the magic number of a million users”. 

Background

This is a story of a small team in the Gopay(Gojek's payments product) which set out to fix a problem and ended up building a multi-million dollar business vertical.

To set the context, payments in Indonesia is fragmented and is a first-class problem. There isn’t a central payment system (think UPI) which enables for fast, secure, cheap and reliable way of doing interbank payments. 

Back in late 2019, when we were brainstorming about how to drive usage of Gopay(e-money) there was a common thread which a lot of our users were echoing:

I think my money will get stuck in Gopay if I add more than I need

Now any open-loop e-money/store value/digital currency player has a way for users to get money into the system (top-up) and for the users to take out the money they had added (withdraw). A lot of players in the market generally don't invest a lot in the latter and sometimes, in fact, make it really tough for the users to withdraw their money. At Gojek with our user's first principle, we don't indulge in such shenanigans, although I do admit back then we did not provide the best money out experience.

Back to the story; so with that problem at hand, we thought as a product we needed to change the perception of Gopay not being liquid to Gopay being as liquid as cash. Out of the many ideas we tried to change this perception, one was to redesign, re-engineer and rebrand our product offering withdrawal to money transfer.

There were 2 hypotheses we wanted to prove-

1. Making it convenient and seamless for users to withdraw their money from Gopay will increase the perception of Gopay's liquidity.
2. Person to Person payments will increase as users realise they can use our payment rails to transfer money to anyone in the country more efficiently than using their banking apps.

Build=>Measure=>Learn

So we got down to the drawing board and immersed ourselves in building something we would be proud of and pass the scrutiny of our peers in the organisation(no pressure ?? )

We were ready in a couple of months and with fingers crossed we pressed the launch button. Then came the toughest part of the product development lifecycle- the wait.

We waited for adoption to the feature to increase and data to flow in for us to do an analysis and gather insights to plan the next steps. What we saw surprised us and went beyond what we wanted to validate in terms of product-market fit.

While we were thinking of promoting the use case of person to person(P2P) transfers our ingenious users had found many unique use-cases to use our product, like-

• Paying credit card bills
• Paying for shopping done at e-commerce sites
• Transferring money to other emoney like Ovo/Dana ??
• Transfering to their own account different than their main account for savings

We also got some puzzling insights like.

• Users doing >10 transactions a day
• Users topping up and then transferring out the same day

We figured it would be best to talk to some of these users to deep dive into their behaviour to understand what was happening. Some of the learnings we got from our research were-

1. There were social sellers who were getting their income/payments in the form of Gopay and in turn, they were using GoPay to make payments to their vendors in their bank accounts.
2. There were unbanked and underbanked users who were digitizing their cash /income in form of doing cash top-ups through our agent network and then using GoPay as a means to make transfers to the accounts of others(friends, debt payment, supplier payments). This explained why people were topping up and transferring the same day. 

The "Lightbulb Moment" ??

It felt like we are on to something and at the cusp of creating an ecosystem where people found it convenient to pay using Gopay and sellers starting to feel comfortable in accepting Gopay as they not only felt Gopay to be liquid but were also using it as a transfer hub.

We were creating social impacts in the lives of people by providing them with a convenient payments solution even though at a small scale and this came as a revelation to us, something we never thought about when we set out to with this initiative.

So why were people using our product-

• It was convenient especially for a large section of society whose most-used banking touchpoints i.e ATMs.
• It was Instant, fast and reliable
• Our product experience was superior to our peers/competitors
• And we were way cheaper than the traditional banks for doing interbank transfers

Furthermore, the existing payments/banking ecosystem wasn't able to solve the jobs and pains the users had. From one the users, we spoke to-

Saya ga mau buka rekening bank baru, karena prosesnya ribet.

translation - "I don't want to open a new bank account, because the process is complicated."

So..What do we do next?

With a strong validation of our hypothesis, we set out to scale our product offering in the months to follow with clear product goals.

1. Build enhancements to make the experience more delightful and support additional use cases.
2. Build tooling to have a more effective demand generation.
3. Integrate with banks directly to increase our reliability and drive down our costs.

But the most important job was with our product marketing team which was to drive AWARENESS. Being part of a Super-App what touches users life from when they go to the office in the morning to when they end their day with dinner it's sometimes easy to get lost in the myriad of every day solutions we provide. So it was important for us to stand out with our offering.

The "Hockeystick"

With months of effort, many lines of code, countless brainstorming sessions over litres of coffee, as we ended the fateful year of 2020 we had grown 4.3x in terms of transaction volume, 4x in terms of revenue, saved over million-dollars in terms of our operating cost and as luck would have it, had crossed a million users :).

While I wouldn't say our growth really represented the famed hockey-stick growth that is every product/growth manager's dream we were able to showcase that we had a sustainable and viable business model (a rare phenomenon in today's tech world ??) and were able to drive product-led growth.

Epilogue

In conclusion, I would like to summarise some of the key learning we experienced first hand while building this product.

• Product development is an interactive process, you need to constantly build and see what works.
• No one can really predict before your product hits the market what will work. There are just too many variables.
• The process of doing research and market analysis aids you to minimize the risk of failure but does not guarantee success.
• Don't just talk to your users, observe their behaviour and understand what is their ultimate goal
• Sometimes you might have the right product, but you have not positioned it in the correct manner to the users. So it's important to understand the user perception of your offering.

P.S: We are always looking to get exceptional people to join our team, so check out our career page and see if something interests you.