For this project, I want you to think hard. Think about the last time someone you know borrowed something from you. Now, what if I told you, next time you could get paid for that? Would you freak?! 😆 I know I would.
Building something from nothing
at JustGrabIt.
Role
CEO & Founder
Team
1 Lead Front-end Developer
1 Lead Back-end Developer
1 Strategy & Growth Lead
1 Social Media Lead
Year
September 2019 – February 2020
The Challenge
- Understanding where our user’s pain points were.
- Designing a simple, but different product that still communicates towards user needs.
- Developing and executing a strategy & growth plan to attract early adopters.
Our Approach
- Researching potential users, markets, industry leaders, & competitors.
- Practicing agile design & development workflows.
- Design, test, and build an MVP Sketch, Figma, & WordPress.
- Design, test, and build a full mobile product with Sketch, Figma, & React Native.
Gathering research, understanding our users
Doing early stages of research shown above ultimetly helped build the product we have today
At JustGrabIt, our users are our everything. We spent a lot of time really honing in on who those users are by practicing agile design workflows: designing, testing, receiving feedback, and redesigining with our controlled group of testers.
We learned 3 things pretty quickly:
• 8 out of 10 potential users would rent out an item on our platform instead of buying it.
• Trust is going to make or break our relationship between our platform and our users.
• Allowing our users to rent anything only confused them even more. So we ultimately realized doing something niche really well first, and then expanding would be very beneficial for us.
We took this into our MVP build out and figured out how to build and retain trust between us and our users. We then started sketching out our early product.
“As a minimalist, I’d like to rent a camera for my trip.”
“As an ‘Uber driver’, I always want more ways to make money, so I’d like a way to share my extra stuff for cash.”
‘Uber driver’ can also be replaced with ‘Airbnb host’, ‘Doordash deliverer’, etc. This is a personality-type we’re targeting.
First iterations
When it came to designing our first iteration, we understood who our users were, what they were looking rent and share, and where they were located – in highly-dense tight-knit urban communities.
Knowing that information was not only vital, but also made it easy to start sketching out and creating some early low-fi mockups.
Some of our early mockups and ideas
Pivoting & building an MVP website
After designing the early iterations of our mobile product, we also very quickly realized that it would be much easier to sell this concept quickly if we have something up and running. So we designed and developed a simple WordPress site that does the job. It’s bare, basic, and minimal, but it is usable.
This site is currently live and is being used until we get our mobile product ready for the public.
Finalizing our mobile experience
After designing the early iterations of our mobile product, we also very quickly
realized that it would be much easier to sell this concept quickly if we have something up and running. So we designed and developed a simple WordPress site that does the job. It’s bare, basic, and minimal, but it is usable.
This site is currently live and is being used until we get our mobile product ready for the public.
