About the project
Mollie started as a Payment Service Provider. They serve over 200.000 businesses and raised a $800 million Series C round in 2021 at a $6.5 billion valuation.
They set out to move beyond just being a Payment Service Provider and position itself as a financial service provider for eCommerce businesses. Mollie Capital was one of the initiatives and ideas to move into this direction.
I led and executed all of the formative and evaluative research and discovery work, brought an alternative and more effective strategy for the earliest stages of the product development process, and designed the first versions of the product.
We moved from zero, to the first half a million of actual loans provided and paid back through the product to a hand full of customers within 8 months.
Introduction Mollie Capital
Challenge
Upon joining, there was barely any documented context on Mollie's customer base and who would benefit most from the new proposition idea. The first challenge was to better understand the customer base, their need for financing, and see if merchants had any past experiences.
While internally the initial idea was to just build a first version of the idea, I helped move towards a different approach that helped us learn faster:
We leveraged an existing community of Mollie merchants to survey and interview them about their business challenges and to uncover their needs and experiences around financing.
We leveraged the CSM department to pulse business challenges and potential finance needs from bigger merchant accounts. We would take these accounts to initiate more in-depth interviews.
Instead of building an MVP product into the dashboard right away, we tested the value proposition on a sub-set of Mollie merchants through a landing page within the dashboard. Interested merchants could sign up by answering a few questions, providing us with a pulse on interest while learning more about use cases and the amount of financing they desired.
We gathered a ton of insights in a matter of weeks. It validated the high level value proposition. It falsified some critical assumptions around the biggest use case and type of merchants, and we gathered a lot of insights into the types of merchants interested, the typical use cases, ranges of financing desired, and past experiences.
We gained confidence in the overall proposition, were able to shape a better value proposition with specific benefits, and also gathered our first set of merchants to test a solution with.
Solution
With a list of merchants we had talked to and turned out to be interested in a solution, I designed a first version of the product in a few weeks based on some core design principles we set with the team. After internal reviews and feedback from our product team, designer peers, and management, we had our first user testing sessions on the overal flow for requesting financing.
Because of this, we quickly went through various iterations with improvements in clarifying our positioning, explaining the concept of how flexible repayments worked, learning about our rates, and improving understanding and usability in process of requesting financing.
Over the course of the next few months, we didn't build out the full flow to request financing but took a lean approach to building out the product with these insights gathered and design iterations made.
We started by building the most uncertain and risky technical part: flexible repayments – the part where a customer would pay a percentage of each sale back to the loan automatically.
By leveraging Figma prototypes with real data and offers for interested merchants, we onboarded the first few customers, after which the real repayments part we built was triggered and displayed.
When this worked, we built out the complete flow and optimised the experience further before I handed over to a fellow internal designer that would support further future optimisation and roll-outs.
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