our MLP story from ideation to open beta

A lot can change in 3 months. Especially for an early-stage startup trying to find its market fit, those “changes” are an unavoidable part of the process, sometimes even essential. Today I would like to share some of the more “interesting” things we found/learned and iterations we went through during our time between the first test build till our most recent “open beta”. I hope someone can learn something useful from this.

Market Insights we received from early testers and the ipad market

• A lot of people felt that instant messages are not “special” in any way whatsoever. They wish for a more meaningful way of expressing their feelings for the special people in their lives rather than with instant messaging, which does not have any real “weight” or “depth” and is made worse by swiping culture. There is no personality or deliberation in the way we have gotten used to communicating on text, its extremely hard to understand tone and sentiment, and Ai is seemingly taking the “person” out of text communications. There is also a niche market of people who want to use alternative communication apps, especially ones which are slower in pace and does not trigger any kind of Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) or anxiety.

• There are no digital collectibles with any real use-cases and whatever digital collectibles are on sale are incredibly expensive. There is a huge market of stamp collectors, nostalgics, paper enthusiasts as well as collectors who love digital collectibles

• Older people who are not the most comfortable with text based communications can still use pencils/pens to write, they are also familiar with the concept of sending lettres and making penpals. Accessibility for older people is a challenge for most popular communication apps, making these apps harder to use for an entire demographic considering the physical limitations of smartphones.

Some of these insights drove our objectives for most of the iterations we went through.

Iterations we went through

To avoid falling into the all-too-common trap of building something we loved, but no one else needed, we opened a dialogue with our early users. We wanted to understand their needs, get a sense of their expectations, and invite their suggestions. This helped us refine our idea of making a more deliberate and intimate mode of communication.

For that to happen, we needed people to take a step back, put their thoughts and time behind crafting a memento which will be worthy of those special people. Making friends with a stranger from across the globe should have more depth when getting to know them is not based on a quick swipe on a phone screen. Sending that birthday greeting with a hand-written note expressing one’s love and appreciation is priceless. Receiving that secret recipe from a grandparent is a reward by itself. Whatever may the use-case be, we needed to deliver a seamless lettre writing experience.

Wireframe phase

• Putting our ideas on “paper” helped us simulate the user/interaction flow so we can assess usability and lay out the foundation of the user journey we wanted to design. This is where it all started.

• It helped us understand the essential pain-points we wanted to address and what unique aspects we wanted to focus on; the lettre writing and digital collecting experience being our top priorities.

• A neat example would be, during our on-boarding process, to avoid friction with the interface; we found it better to send the user actual lettres from the team with tool-tips written on the lettre itself instead of opting for in-app tutorial pop-ups. Our expectation was, to allow us to showcase a feature (our mailbox), using it to explain itself while allowing the user to freely interact with the app at their own pace without any annoyance.

Closed alpha phase

• Our “Toy” phase basically allowed us to set the standards for the assets we will be using in-app. From our digital papers and envelopes to the stamps we were designing. Our objective was to experiment and optimize different types of assets using different techniques before settling on the ones which gave us the best possible immersion in simulating the mailing experience (so far).

• Even though some great ideas fell through the cracks due to time, we took extra effort in backlogging those ideas with appropriate priorities because most of them positively impacted the overall immersive experience of the app. Examples would include postcards, customizable wax seals and immersive sound effects, which we believe will add value to the user experience.

• We used this time to also test our lettre dispatch services and other relevant back-end systems powering the app. During this phase, our alpha users could send each other lettres using pre-set test accounts as well as trade their allocated stamps during this time!

• We designed the first version of our stamp economy and the first time user on-boarding experience, which comes with a bunch of free stuff! Every user will get a collection of papers and envelopes they can use indefinitely and 15 premium handcrafted stamps based on the continent they are signing up from. Each continent has their own starter packs unique to that continent.

Lettre’s graduation from closed alpha to open beta

• This is one of our biggest early milestones, being able to release to a larger user-group for the first time.

• Users can sign up and immerse themselves in a holistic lettre writing and stamp collecting experience.

• We want to gather as much user feedback and usage-insights as possible from this phase to further optimize our digital collectible economy as well as improve the user experience with more polish. We want to add features and options which will further enhance the entire postal experience as well as tweak existing ones to deliver an experience our users will absolutely love.

I hope you got some value out of the time you spent reading this. It’s already getting too long, so let’s all just go home today. Thank you for reading this far

Love,

Atik from the Lettre team

P.S. — We appreciate you ❤