Prosper 1 Click Quote, Not Really 1 Click

Prosper P2P Lender

According to its website, "Prosper is is America's first peer-to-peer lending marketplace, with more than 2 million members and over $2BB in funded loans."

I've been a Prosper member for years, an early adopter since the first days before other competitors popped up.  I've also been a fan of Kiva.org (a similar, yet different kind of service where the loans are made interest-free to developing world individuals), where I have made over 100 loans.

1 Click Quote

I've only used Prosper as an investor, loaning out small micro-loans to various users - most of them consolidating debt, or paying off an auto loan, or borrowing money for home improvement.  I decided to see what it would look like to become a borrower.

I loved the simplicity of the trigger from the investor summary page, prompting me to consider borrowing a loan.

Figure 1

You are teased with a low APR, and big call to action "Get Rate" button.

Now, I'm already logged in as a user ... meaning my basic info is available.  Too bad, then, when I click on Get Rate, I'm routed to this page.

Figure 2

Prompting me to provide the purpose of loan and some other basic info.  It still like the clean UI, but my problem with this is, why make me repeat the same information?  (Figure 1 and Figure 2 essentially duplicate information).  Why make me do this?  

Further disappointment then, when I am routed to the next page, where I am told "Get a Custom Rate in 1 Click."  This is my 3rd click, so I feel this is bit mismatched from meeting expectations point of view.

Figure 3

Understandably.  Many of this has to do with the regulated nature of lending and borrowing industries.  Often, the business constraints are such, that the end goal is not the most streamlined user experience (UX).  Sometimes, it makes product sense to create some friction for the user.  That said, I think there's clearly a room for improvement in conversion and user experience here.

Anybody home?

As another example of UX issues I found with Prosper.  When I go to my investor profile page, I see something like this.  This is me (figure 4).

Figure 4

 What happens when I click on the "View" hyperlink?  I get a broken link.  Page Not found (Figure 5).  Which is not bad.  The page reroutes to the summary page shortly.

Figure 5

However, look at a different Page Not Found message by another product - StackExchange.  There, you see clearly more humor.  It is a way of empathizing with the user.

"You didn't find what you were looking for?"

"We are sorry, let's see if we can at least make you smile while we help you."  That seems to be StackExchange approach (Figure 6).

Figure 6

You Might Also Like ...

If you enjoyed this product teardown, you may also enjoy:

• Taking Assembly for a Test Drive
• Hotel Tonight Room price trigger
• Lending Club borrower teardown

And a product teardown is intended to help you become a more effective product manager by improving your acumen.  There's a whole lot more to this profession.  Check out this book:

Take Charge Product Management: Take Charge of Your Product Management Development

Keep on building!  Good luck!

Taking Assembly for a Test Drive

I have been taking the web product Assembly for a test drive.

Assembly is a platform for crowd-sourced web-based products.  A product for product development online.  Sounds like recursion!

It's got to be a dream for programmers and web geeks!

Product Description and Traction

Assembly is really interesting, just because you get to see what other people are thinking about, in a transparent way.  The product seems to have solid traction based on cosmetic review of the activity.  Here are some key observations about this product.

Coderwall Project bounties and contributors (from Assembly)

• Virtual - The projects are mostly virtual from around the world.  The landing page is filled with many approved and pending projects.  A large product like Coderwall has 100 contributors, although contribution follows a steep power law distribution (probably even more than 80/20 rule - meaning 5% do 95% of the work ... the nice thing is, they are paid accordingly). 
• Platform - The diversity of products is as wide as people's imagination.  Of course, what Assembly provides are the building blocks (see below) of a web product building.
• Revenue Positive - As far as I could tell, Coderwall is its most profitable product; based on 2014 payouts, it seems to have about $24K MRR with 86% profit margin.  Wow!
• Engineer Heavy - I've joined a few products and started one to test the default experience.  I don't have hard figures, but based on new people who sign-up to a project, the site is engineer heavy, followed by designers, followed by non-technical people.

What Are the Building Blocks of a Web Product?

One of the reasons Assembly interested me was that the product makes you think about what the building blocks of a web product development are.

https://assembly.com/discover

In essence, Team Assembly would have had to deconstruct the core elements of software development, and so doing, virtualized and abstracted a traditional coming together of a team.  Abstraction and virtualization are both long-term trends in the software-centric world.

So, apart from that interesting academic question, here's my hypothesis about what Assembly believes are core building blocks.

• Software engineers - Which is great, because a platform like this would be self-selecting to software engineers who are used to working "in the web."  Remote working is a norm in this community.
• Comprehensive communication - Communication is key in product management.  Many good vs. bad outcome can be traced back to good vs. bad communication.  Assembly uses Slack threads for each project you join.  Seems like a good solution.
• Project management - This seems to be a missing piece of the platform.  Teams likely will use a Trello board or Google docs outside of Assembly.  The communication threads are nice, but not sufficient for serious collaboration. 
• Version control - Assembly-built products are linked to Github repositories.  There is no separate bug tracking here, but can be managed through communication threads and pull requests.
• Incentives - I think Assembly's solution is particularly novel and effective.  I think it is very meritocratic, because coins are awarded based on contribution.  The overall model is very Silicon-Valley-esque. The founder holds the lion's share of initial coins, and if everyone maxes out the contribution efforts, the founder's holdings can be diluted down to 50%, and everyone else holding 50% ... unless founder herself is doing a lot of work and awards herself.  Apart from monetary incentive, the product also leverage's people's sense of curiosity and personal value. You can say, "hey, I'm only a designer, but I can add this little piece to the overall effort!"  And so on.  For many, I would say, money is a distant second or third incentive.
• Team Trust - This is another challenge.  Trust is really hard.  Most startup teams at least, fail because of bad founder selection.  Here, the process is just left up to the wind.

What else is important to building a good product?  Really, it is customers, and a good process to deliver what those customers want.  That's it.  If you don't have customers, things like project management, engineers, and everything else doesn't matter.  Only thing is, some startups start out with a hypothesis they can get customers, and start building.  But, in the end, you need customers.  Communication, version control ... don't get lost in the details.  

It's just tools and processes to serve the customer.

Assembly's mix of light-weight and mostly off the shelf tools is an interesting approach to discovering better ways to build for the customer.

You Might Also Like ...

Are you a product manager?  What's your philosophy and approach to building great products?

You might also like the following teardowns and meta talks on products:

• Hierarchy of product love
• Hotel Tonight room price triggers
• Prosper 1 Click - Not Really and 404 

What Is Your Approach to Product Management?

A product manager at Radius asked what my approach or philosophy about product management is.  My answer wasn't very interesting.  I subsequently read a post by Ernest Kim that was.

Certainly, getting the build, measure, learn cycle can be a key part of the iteration necessary to walk toward building anything good.  Are you getting analytical in your product management?  Click the link for some great articles on building with data.

Additional Reading:

• WTF is a product manager by Ernest Kim
• Hierarchy of product love by David Kim

Or if you want to get more nitty gritty on actual product management, Marty Cagan goes into ton of details, including how to staff and work with your engineering and designer teams, what product manager really does, etc, etc.  

Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

Marty worked at Netscape, among other places, where he worked with luminaries like Ben Horowitz.  So, some of his experience is a little dated (in my opinion), but the wisdom and the principles hold true, because those are timeless!

Getting Analytical and What Makes You a Great PM

Few months back, Peter and I started connecting with the Startup Digest readers.

To be transparent and fair, Peter and I wrote a medium post (“What makes a good startup event”) and shared it with our readers.

Still, we were frustrated with the lack of good data on those readers. We had a choice. On the one hand, we could ignore our readers and improve the digest using our knowledge. On the other hand, we could devise ways to collect more information.

Quantitative data is important. But, I recall a conversation with Ryan Glasgow, in which he pointed out how valuable qualitative data is in the right hands. (By the way, Ryan will speak on 11/18 at Weebly - see below.)

We decided to craft a very simple survey, and we gathered some direct data not available via Google Analytics or Mailchimp. For example, we obtained data like job title, which could link to net promoter score.

I performed a rudimentary regression analysis and compiled the results of the Startup Digest survey analysis - Silicon Valley.

It turns out, asking the right questions is really important, and in some ways, this was a squandered effort. We are now looking into something like a cohort analysis, but the data we have from Mailchimp is pretty limited.

I started looking into this, and suspect that many of you would either enjoy teaching or learning either one of the following:

• Survey design - asking the right questions
• How to perform cohort analysis

As related in an earlier post about data-driven hustling, the first step is simply getting into the mindset of measuring, and starting super simple.

Reading List

Use this spreadsheet for churn, MRR, and cohort analysis by Andrew Chen

“Cohort analyses are also essential if you operate a SaaS business and want to know how you’re doing in terms of churn, customer lifetime and customer lifetime value.”

53 Articles and Books that will Make you a Great Product Manager by Noah Weiss

This is a collection of links and articles.

The Agony and Ecstasy of Building with Data by Julie Zhuo

“Can’t decide how you truly feel about the future? Have Data and A/B Test take the decision out of your hands. Don’t want to invest long-term in something that has the uncertainty of failure looming in the horizon? Take the easy path instead with a bevy of A/B Tests.”