In the micro financing Industry, where empowerment and inclusivity matter the most, Merkat Intellekt Technologies Pvt Ltd took a stride that is redefining the landscape. Introducing Credifie, a revolutionary integrated platform designed to uplift female self-help groups in Tamil Nadu through streamlined loan processes. This story of Credifie – emerged from one of our client’s vision and is now embarking on a journey to revolutionize the landscape of micro financing with innovation, efficiency, and empowerment. Merkat Intellekt takes pride in delivering a complete User Centric Agile Design within 2 weeks for Credifie – The Integrated Platform for Micro financing Institutions for Woman Self Help groups.

​​With our partnership, Credifie has moved from just an idea to a prototype faster and in a more sure-footed manner.

​Following are the UX services Merkat Intellekt delivered for Credifie:

• Expert analysis – industry analysis and benchmarking
• End-to-end user experience design for Web & Mobile.
• User interface engineering
• A Rapid prototype with responsive design and service design

The Credifie Solution with Merkat Intellekt Advantage: I2IP Model

At Merkat Intellekt, efficiency isn’t just a word; it’s a way of life. The “Innovate to Implement in 60 Days” (I2IP) model, designed for rapid development, was tailored to suit this client’s requirements. Surprisingly, the journey from requirement analysis, UX/UI design, to client presentation for Credifie took just 2 weeks delivering 98 screens across Web & Mobile.  The result is a testament to the power of collaboration and streamlined processes.

Credifie isn’t just a static solution; it’s a versatile tool that can be customized to fit various micro financing processes. It has the potential to empower different demographics, address specific challenges, and contribute to the growth of micro financing in diverse contexts. Tailored for micro financing institutions, Credifie empowers them to provide small and medium loans to female self-help groups with unprecedented ease.

Our UX services were focused on delivering the Key Pillars of the platform:

Web Application for Micro financing Institutions: The beating heart of Credifie, this web application grants micro financing institutions the power to seamlessly process loan applications, manage existing loans, and generate insightful reports. It’s not just a tool; it’s a gateway to efficiency.

Mobile App for Self-Help Groups: With the Credifie mobile app, self-help groups find themselves at the forefront of financial control. They can apply for loans, track existing ones, and make payments, all through a user-friendly interface that puts their needs first.

Mobile App for Loan Collection Employees: Ensuring smooth transactions is vital. Credifie’s mobile app for loan collection employees simplifies loan collection, tracking, and management, fostering a seamless interaction between financial institutions and self-help groups.

 Join the Journey:

The Credifie story is an open invitation. As we continue to transform micro financing for the better with our customer, we invite those non-technical founders in the financial industry, who are still struggling to get their ideas into a quick working prototype.  If our contribution to Credifie’s impact sounds intriguing, or you wish to explore innovative solutions that matters to the end users, we encourage you to reach out. Let’s begin a dialogue and together, make lasting change a reality.

Initiate the conversation at support@merkatintellekt.com

Conclusion:

Credifie is the embodiment of a client’s need transformed into a tangible solution. As this case study finds its home on our website and echoes through our network, let it serve as a catalyst for discussions, collaborations, and shared visions of a brighter financial future.

The post A Complete User Centric Agile Design (UX) delivered in 2 weeks for Credifie – The Integrated Platform for Woman Self Help Micro financing Institutions first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.

Our unique proposition is that we help you develop your idea into a marketable and sellable Intellectual Property in as less than 60 days. In startup ecosystem, that’s a rather very short span and a big promise. So, how do we deliver it?

We open up our methodology.

Merkat Intellekt’s Idea to IP (I2IP) Engagement Model is the core concept we employ in all our projects. In this post, we’ll identify the key parts and the components within each that make it work.

Ideate – Validate – Create – Grow – Fund

Discovery Phase:

As part of Discovery phase, we help our prospects answer these important questions and help them ascertain their positions in the market.

1) Ideate – The Idea

Why does this idea matter to you? How can this impact your world and the world-at-large? What problems are you solving? Tell about the products and services that are in the offing. What’s the scope for growth and how will it make it happen? Support everything with data.

Overview Statement

Crystallize the vision, the problem statement and the solution you’re envisioning into a crisp overview statement for your earlyvangelists, team members, partners, influencers and advisors.

The Market

Describe your target market as specifically as you can. Identify your direct and indirect competition. How do you plan to take on them? Explain your business model. Alternatively, try to answer these questions: Why you? Why me (the target audience)? Why this? Why now?

Customer Personas

Identify and describe your market segments. Draw a character sketch of them. Explain their hopes, desires, needs, challenges, and fears. If you know who your future customers are in exact detail, it will be easier to sell to them.

2) Validate

Surveys

Surveys are valuable tools to gather insights from your audience about the problem you’re solving, the veracity of your assumptions, and solutions that you’re building.

Interviews

Talking to your earlyvangelists is the most reliable way to learn the peculiarities of their situation, the pain points, their workarounds and the solutions that they have in mind.

Advisors

Identify a few potential advisors who will stick with you over the long haul, cheering you on, add value with their connections, and be a beacon of inspiration and hope.

Experiments

It’s not enough to gather insights through survey and interviews. We will help you to identify potential solutions in an inexpensive manner through experiments. This can be as low-tech as required. The key is to keep the expenses low and be lightning fast.

The team

Upon identifying the core features that need to be built as part of the MVP the next important aspect is to put together a team that will be able to deliver core features as part of Product Development. Have you identified them? Who are they and what are their roles & responsibilities?

Create

The Roadmap

It’s a fact that it’s not possible to build everything at the same time and hence our recommendation to build the core features and goto market as early as possible. You need to focus on building the most crucial parts without losing track of the less critical ones. Product roadmaps come in handy while also reducing the overwhelm.

Overview Spec

We will write a high-level, screen-wise story of your customer interaction with your product detailing out the end-user journey – user stories, use cases and acceptability tests along with GTM strategy. This helps the entire team to get on the same page and discuss heavily on the product direction.

Funnel Stages & KPIs

For each stage of the product funnel – Discovery, Consideration, Conversion, and Retention – we will determine the right KPIs that help move the user to the next stage. Using the right KPIs is crucial to make the right decisions.

UI Spec

A UI Spec lists the contents and elements of every screen, page or view in thorough detail. This pre-wireframe step will ensure everyone involved in this project start from a shared vision of the features that the resulting product will have.

Tech Stack Decisions #Clarify

Our expert team will help you to choose the tech stack for your software product that has a direct impact on your business model, your ability to acquire and retain your customers, how fast you can ship code, the growth of your team and the ability to ensure performance levels.

Data Architecture

How you architect the data that flows in and out of data pools like emails, analytics, project tasks, documents, invoices, code, notes, chat messages, tweets, articles, posts, and so on – determines the quality of decisions that fuel your growth. We will help you in setting up a future-ready base tech architecture along with failsafe and integrated growth hack strategies.

UX Flow Chart

A UX flow chart represents how a link/feature unfolds view by view. This will help your developers pull the required data into your application correctly. This is the first stage of visually communicating the functioning of your product to your engineers, CEO, salespeople, and others in your team.

Financial Model

It’s important to ascertain the soundness of the business model by defining the financial model and making a preliminary forecast. When can the profits be expected? Where is the initial seed money coming from?

Agile Development

The basic principles are: Build for speed. Constantly evolve the requirements and solutions. Don’t be fixated. Adapt the team based on current requirements. Be okay to fail quickly

Wireframes

Wireframes are developed to show the layout, user flows, and contents of your app. They make it easy to understand the workings of an app through even before building it. Wireframes are an important deliverable for web apps, mobile apps and websites.

Mockup

Now is the time to set the brand colours, style treatment and so on. We quickly create a minimum set of mockups that illustrate the core functionality of the product/service.

Prototype

Our front-end developers will quickly convert the mockup into a clickable prototype, ready to be fully developed by our engineers.

Intellectual Property

We offer three types of IP security for you. Contractual security (through Non-disclosure agreement and IP security clause in the contract); Physical security (through Work Area security and Procedures for storing and protecting printed project materials and files); and Network Security (through Security for Network Links and Security and access to customer’s proprietary data).

Grow

Private Alpha

The MVP is now deployed on the staging server, which can be accessed by your advisors, team members, and your early-evangelists.

Coming soon page

Once the basic pitch is ready, it’s very crucial to put up a coming soon page that keeps building a list of potential early-evangelists and first customers. It’s a one-page website that lists the value proposition of the product and the key benefits.

Exploring product-market fit

We should keep doing mini-experiments to identify the big-wins that result in large volumes of customer acquisition and engagement.

Fund

Pitch

Put together an executive summary, pitch deck, and the high-level financial summary. Choose a communication method that works for you for both in-person meetings with your investors and email/phone interactions.

Closing first round

Connect with relevant angel investors and early-stage VCs to get your product off the ground and flying. Throughout, we will help you manage the inevitable stresses and indecisions that are part of developing your business and raising money.

Communicating with Investors

Keep your investors abreast of developments from time to time on both positive and negative ones.

Conclusion

As an entrepreneur, this is how you should work, step-by-step, to take your ideas to an Intellectual Property and beyond.

Download Whitepaper

The post Beginner’s Guide to I2IP Framework/ The First Few Critical Steps of a Startup Journey for Entrepreneurs first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.

Let’s understand what a Minimum Marketable Product and how it can help you launch quicker, reduce time-to-market and make money sooner.

“Build it and they will come,” is not a strategy; it’s a prayer.”

You need a strategy for building your product the right way – faster. We aim to show you how.

But first, what is a minimal marketable product?

A minimal marketable product is a product with the minimum set of features that will delight your early evangelists. It allows you to launch quicker, reduce time-to-market and make money sooner.

Multiple MVPs lead to the MMP.

The following diagram shows the difference between MVP, MMR, MMF and MMP.

We’ve got a new term there: Earlyvangelists.

Earlyvangelists

In every market, there will be a set of visionary customers who are ready to give feedback for your product as you develop it. They also happily spread the good word about your product – on their own. These people are called evangelists. There’s a special subset of people who not only give feedback but are ready to pay for unfinished and untested versions of your product. They are your earlyvangelists.

Let your product development be squarely focused on their needs and satisfaction.

You can identify earlyvangelists by a few characteristics.

– They have the problem you’re solving for.

– They know that they have this problem.

– They are actively looking for a solution and want it within a specific timeframe.

– They are dealing with the problem using a makeshift (workaround) solution.

– They have the budget – and the approvals – to have this problem solved.

“In big companies, the product spec is market-driven; in startups, the marketing is product-driven.”

iPhone’s Humble Beginnings

The mighty iPhone shipped first without many features that were standard in existing phones:

You can’t change the background wallpaper, there was neither copy/paste nor the ability to send SMS to multiple recipients, and you can’t text in landscape mode. There were no App Store or turn-by-turn driving directions through Google Maps. The notifications center and Siri were all later additions. And it was way more expensive ($499) than the competition.

Apple wasn’t scared to release a product that had presumably, only essential features required by earlyvangelists. Their mandate was clear: to not waste time building non-MMP features and instead build things that would make iPhone an iPhone!

“What would excite earlyvangelists?” was the question they based their decisions on. Not, “what would excite everyone?” Everyone came later – perhaps in 2013. In 2007, when iPhone was launched, it was a niche product with essential features targeting earlyvangelists.

Build for your Earlyvangelists

“No startup can afford the engineering effort or the time to build a product with every feature a mainstream customer needs in its first release.” – Steve Blank

Are you building an average product for the average Joes or do you want to build the MMP that gives you an edge with your earlyvangelists? I hope you pick the latter.

“You tend to collect a list of features that if added, will get one additional customer to buy. Soon you have a 10-page feature list just to sell 10 customers. The goal is to have a single paragraph feature list that can sell to thousands of customers.” – Steve Blank

Once you come up with a handful of truly differentiated feature set, take it to your customer. Are they emotionally moved by your offering? Do their hearts beat fast as they hear your pitch? Do they want to hear more?

If you nod yes to all the questions above, congrats, you’re on your way to building breakthrough MMP.

Positioning

You can position your product against mighty, existing competitors only by picking the right product features that make an impact on your users’ life.

If you’re up against a monopoly or a market leader, the only possible move is for you to resegment the market with one of three forms of differentiation:

– Product attributes (faster, cheaper, extra, Stanford professors, better protection, etc.)

– Distribution channel (overnight delivery, coach at home, training via Skype, cars near you, etc.)

– Service (lifetime warranty, we pick your call within two rings, results or get your money back, etc.)

Scared by the MMP?

If you choose to build your product as an MMP, it doesn’t mean that you’ll not be able to include all the other excellent features you have in mind. You will build them later – like Apple did. There’s a time and space for everything. Prioritize the other features based on the feedback you get from your earlyvangelists. Before first ship date, we urge you not to waste your limited time and resources building features that are not ‘stand out’.

Conclusion

If you choose your earlyvangelists carefully based on the five-point criteria explained earlier, come up with a differentiated feature set that creates great impact for them, and position your minimum marketable product, you will be able to go-to-market sooner, reduce the cost of development, and while improving the odds of your success in the long run.

Download Whitepaper

The post How to Develop a Minimum Marketable Product (MMP): Timeless Advice from the Master of Startups first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.