Helping young professionals save money to reach their goals.
HelloGold is an award-winning savings app built to help protect wealth with gold. People can buy, save, sell, and redeem physical gold. It’s easy, and people can invest less than $1 at a time.
Two of my friends and I co-founded HelloGold in 2015 to determine how we might build a savings product that makes it easy for people in emerging markets to save money to reach their goals.
The result of our teamwork was a platform that gives young people the opportunity to save money with gold, enabling diversification outside of their local economies. HelloGold has been recognised as Islamic Retail Banking’s Most innovative Product and the Fastest Growing Islamic Wealth Management Fintech Company. It has over 200,000 active clients and the current version has over 3,000 android store reviews with an average of 4.5 stars.
Building a company is a messy kaleidoscope of passion, personalities, money, and ideas. This case study isn’t meant to describe the ups and downs of co-founding a company. It’s meant to share the design story behind the creation of HelloGold. How design thinking and Lean Startup principles were used to bring HelloGold to life.
Who Was Involved
The creation of HelloGold was a collaborative effort from the beginning. Of the three original Co-Founders, Robin Lee was the visionary behind the gold based product. Antonio De Lorenzo brought expertise in Payments and Shariah Finance. I brought experience in Project Management, Financial Inclusion, and building financial products in emerging economies. Ridwan Abdullah entered as our first major investor and brought excellent strategic connections.
A team of people made HelloGold possible, most importantly, our employees, especially the development team. The UI was done by Smile Machine. Branding was done by GA Brand Design in Kuala Lumpur. Red Hut in Singapore helped with parts of our marketing strategy. A group of students from Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy assisted with parts of our research.
My Role
My most important role was as the champion of our customers - getting to know them through research, and understanding how HelloGold might be able to make it easier for them to save money.
My second most important role was as the facilitator of people by drawing out the expertise of each of the co-founders and arranging their skills and effort into an executable plan. I managed the execution and kept the momentum rolling. I facilitated and managed the product design and backend service design. I managed the overall launch project plan - going from idea to product. This included research, prototype development, testing, process mapping, and managing the implementation.
Prior to starting HelloGold, I had never built a digital product from scratch. I learned from books (Lean Startup, Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products), from co-workers, consultant, and by doing. I learned about design thinking and how to use many of the Human Centred Design tools.
What we did
Of course, we started out with assumptions. Each of us were experienced professionals and came with informed ideas from our experience. My years of working in financial inclusion brought assumptions about how to build accessible products, and my years at Saturna Capital allowed me to see behind the curtain of a digital financial product.
Each co-founder had our own archives of secondary research we had collected over the years. Robin was focused on gold products, and I was focused on financial inclusion. Research confirmed demand for gold products, but not for a digital gold product.
Our initial assumptions and secondary research allowed us to have a somewhat defined How Might We. How might we build a savings product that makes it easy for people in emerging markets save money to reach their goals.
We held interviews to explore financial habits, financial goals, behaviours, and to learn if our assumptions were on the right track. Our key insights were that there was a cultural connection with gold, and gold was thought of as a safe place to store wealth. The interviewees liked the idea of physical gold, but they were sceptical of digital gold and digital financial products in general.
Although we were focusing on South East Asia, we were not sure which country or subgroup would be our initial focus. We conducted field trips to understand new markets, and we conducted focus groups to learn further about savings behaviours. We met with savings groups in Kuala Lumpur and groups of Filipino domestic workers. Through this research, we come to the realisation that technology would be a barrier for some of the people we were initially thinking of targeting. We decided to focus on younger people because they were more comfortable with technology.
A target market started to materialise. We realised that younger emerging middle class professionals in Malaysia should be our beachfront market. Also, we found a gap in the market. Few financial institutions were specifically targeting younger people. Not only that, but investment accounts and US dollar accounts were not accessible to the majority of consumers because of their large minimum deposits and fees. This made it difficult for people to diversify outside their own economies. An opportunity materialised.
Our interviews and focus groups confirmed that we might be on the right track. We found that people wanted an easy and low cost way to save using something safe like gold, but in order for people to invest using the HelloGold platform, we would have to gain people’s trust. Trust was the largest barrier to overcome.
Customer Journey is blurred to respect the company’s privacy
We created a high-level potential customer journey in an attempt to earn their trust and to make a smooth user experience.
We ran several cycles of the design thinking process to identify the features our customers valued. We identified problems through interviews; we ideated and created concepts for features we believed might solve their problem. We then tested these concepts in the next round of interviews, usually with just a handful of potential users.
We eventually landed on our core set of features. One of our challenges throughout this process was narrowing the focus and prioritising the features that would help our target market. We couldn’t design for everyone. Wireframes were designed and tested with our target market to help us prioritise.
Because our research indicated how important trust would be for our success, we decided to launch with a polished product and service. This allowed us to deliver quality customer service on day one. In addition, we built financial compliance features such as Know Your Customer that went beyond our regulatory requirements at the time. This increased operational complexity, but we believed that it would help our brand in the long run.
To build for this complexity, we crafted a blueprint that blended the customer journey into our wireframes, our processes, and our backend panel design. Prior to launch, we held closed group tests and launched the product with an Android version in 2016.
I am no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of HelloGold, but I am cheering on their success!
What we learned
A continued focus on the customer keeps momentum moving forward even when problems arise and resources are limited. The co-founders were continuously pulled in multiple directions, but a relentless focus on our customer and trying to solve their problems kept us moving in the right direction.
Some prospective customers might just be too difficult to reach. There were groups, such as the Filipino Maids living in Singapore, that deserved help, but due to technological barriers we found it difficult to find a business model that worked for them
Not every good idea needs to be integrated into the product on day one, and there may be advantages of releasing features at strategic times. We waited to release multiple features until after launch. The team made events out of the releases.
This is what brought me to Service Design and specifically to building a blueprint. Although our blueprint was more detailed than normal, and perhaps more than it needed to be. It helped to blend all the systems and process. Also, it helped to get the whole team on the same page. Overall, this project really expanded my HCD skills.
