Learning Post 4— Matrip, re-learning the most common startup mistakes
I worked on Matrip over the past 3 months, a web app to help travelers document travel memories alongside photos, and share recommendations in story forms. I’ve decided to wrap up my work on Matrip and move onto the next idea, due to the 2 month exploration deadline per project that I set for myself, but also because I never quite found the product-market fit. Reflecting and sharing all the lessons I learned through Matrip here, with the hope that it’ll be of value to anyone thinking of going down similar paths.
The birth of Matrip 👶
I’ve been playing around Matrip-like ideas in my head for quite a while, as it stems from my personal travel needs:
(1) Documentation: I couldn’t find a tool that makes it easy to document personal memories alongside photos while on the road.
Some might immediately say, “Facebook or Instagram!” upon hearing that. But due to the social nature of these platforms, I find myself and others mostly using them to present a more packaged version of ourselves, and therefore not the place where I’d be comfortable with documenting my unfiltered thoughts and experiences.
On the other end of the spectrum, most photo management apps don’t even support simple features like adding notes to a photo.
Therefore I often find myself looking at a photo like the one to the left, remembering that this was my favorite dish from a restaurant in Cusco, but couldn’t recall the name of restaurant, where exactly it was, the name of the dish, not to mention other details such as how my friends and I found it and what we chatted about during the meal. A few years from now, I might not even remember that it was my favorite dish.
(2) Exploration & Inspiration: as an avid traveler, I find myself running out of places to travel to, especially around my home base. I occasionally get inspirations from friends’ photos on social media, but these are unpredictable, and when I have a few vacation days coming up and want to travel, I often find myself opening up Google maps and dragging it around to see if I could stumble upon an interesting area to visit.
(3) Sharing: I often find my self sharing or receiving the following two types of information
As detailed in the photo captions, there’s different types of friction that I encounter when using Google docs or Messenger for sharing and receiving recommendations, as they are not designed specifically for this purpose.
Prototype 1
Boom! And I made the first prototype to address the 3 travel needs. Ma Cards for documentation — each card consists of a photo and 4 optional fields (title, rating, ma memory and link), which allows users to quickly document snippets of memories alongside photos and search through them. Ma Trips for sharing — users can combine any number of cards into a trip and share the link with others. And Explore for inspiration — people can choose to make their trips public, which will then surface in the explore tab for others browse.
Mistake 1: For those familiar with Lean Startup methodologies, you may have noticed a mistake I made already — I built a product before doing any user / market research! Looking back I could always give myself the excuse that it didn’t take long, or that I was just doing it for myself. But the rest of my Matrip journey was pretty much spent learning about how much the first prototype confused users, and cutting features; both of which could have been avoided if I spoke to more users and tested with design mocks before building.
User Testing Round 1
With a working prototype, I started my first round of user testing, which was with about 20 family members and friends (Mistake 2!). It’s common knowledge that one should avoid testing with family and friends, because they almost always bias towards being too supportive and positive. Yet it’s so much easier to do, I discovered that even experienced entrepreneurs often repeat this same mistake.
Unsurprisingly, looking back I found myself getting a sizable amount of false hope from friends’ comments such as, “I could see myself using it if you added X and Y feature. But it’s simply so amazing that you’re working on this!” And it’s hard not to latch on to the “it’s simply so amazing” part and feel that perhaps I’m onto something, even though it’s clear that most of my friends aren’t willing to use it.
Despite the downside of getting feedback from family and friends, I did end up with some interesting observations:
Insight 1 (for “Ma Cards”): at first I thought having cards as memory units which could be combined into trips was a pretty straightforward concept. But once I tested with over 10 people, it became obvious that everyone has their own interpretations of cards, as it’s not a convention or commonly used term in software products. Upon first seeing “cards”, some people think of credit cards, some think of greeting cards; and as a result, people also get confused by what information should go into the optional fields associated with each card. Lesson learned — unless absolutely necessary, don’t invent new terminologies or concepts, and try to stick with conventions.
Insight 2 (for “Ma Cards”): I quickly realized that having a travel focus means most of my users can’t immediately start using the app when they first hear about it, as chances are they probably don’t have an immediate trip coming up.
Insight 3 (for “Ma Cards” & “Ma Trips”): in this first prototype, users have to create a card first in “Ma Cards” before being able to add it to a trip. And there wasn’t a feature to directly create cards in trips. This turns out to be a confusing flow for most people, as when they think about documenting for their trips, they start off with “trip” as the overarching unit, and then think about how they want to add things to it to tell a story. And my design was the reverse of this flow.
Insight 4 (for “Exploration): I intended for most of Matrip to be a private experience, unless one chooses to share the trip links directly with others or publish to “Explore”. But I found out that the existence of the “Explore” tab made just about everyone confused as to whether their content under “Ma Cards” and “Ma Trips” are private or not. During lunch with a friend who’s trying out the app, I explained to her that everything under Cards and Trips are private, and that I only manually add trips to Explore if requested. The next time I saw her, which was just a few weeks out, and after she got to use Matrip a few more times, she was still confused and assumed all of her cards were public. 😅
Given Insight 2 (that people don’t travel often enough), I started expanding the product to use cases more than just travel, and wanted it to become a tool to document every day memories (Mistake 3). Once I lost the focus on travel, I realized users started giving me feedback and feature requests that’s turning Matrip into Instagram (ex. prettier filters for photos and card designs, being able to tag their friends). When I shared this observation with a long time friend who’s an experienced product manager, he said, “No! Why would you do that? You need to have an opinion. I loved it for documenting trips. But if you’re making it so general then I would just use Instagram.” This was the wake up call I needed, and pointed straight to the core of the problem — that I’m losing my vision and blindly letting user feedback guide the direction of my product.
Prototype 2
And here we have Matrip 2.0. What’s the difference? Well as you can see, “Ma Cards” and “Explore” tabs no longer exist. So there’s no confusion as to what users should do once they log onto the app — as “CREATE TRIP” is the only visible call to action. In addition, I also completely eliminated the concept of cards. When a user gets to the edit view of a trip now, there’s the option to “Add Photo” and “Add Day”, leaving less room for ambiguity and the user’s own interpretations.
Launch
I then soft launched Matrip on Product Hunt and Hacker News, with the hope of getting feedback from strangers. About 20+ people signed up from the launch, 10 created trip(s), and <5 added photos to their trips.
But most importantly, of the roughly 50 people that have signed up for Matrip since inception, no one ever came back unprompted. 😢
Conclusion & Takeaways
Aside from my own lessons learned through Matrip, I also chatted with a few entrepreneurs who have been in the space, and learned that (1) something like Matrip, namely a product for sharing travel recommendations, is most people’s first idea. And (2) many startups have tried, and a lot of $ has been poured in in attempt to take a crack at this problem, but most come away without much to show for, especially in Western markets (there are some very successful apps in China).
My best guess at the 3 main challenges for Matrip are:
(1) Infrequency of travel — most people don’t travel more than once or twice a year. Therefore for a product that’s meant to be used while traveling, getting it to the users at the right time and having them remember to use it is crucial, but also a very difficult problem.
(2) Documenting isn’t for everyone — after experimenting with writing both postcards and Matrips during my recent travels, I came to realize that making a complete Matrip takes roughly the same amount of effort as writing and sending a postcard. Postcards already aren’t for everyone. And on top of that, unlike postcards, Matrip isn’t an ingrained social norm and would therefore require a lot more education. Another observation to support this hypothesis, is that most of my friends enjoy reading the Matrips I created. Some even repeatedly view and reference my Matrips for places to go while they are on the road. However, getting them to write has been mission impossible — and more direct friends of mine straight out describe documenting on Matrip as “chore-like”.
(3) Not a big enough pain point — I recently tried out TravelChime, a YC company that is solving more or less the same problem, with a dual focus on both planning and sharing. They are way ahead of Matrip in terms of sleekness and complexity, but I found myself dropping off right after encountering a small issue where they don’t allow me to upload my own photos for places. This gave me a different perspective on the user feedback I’ve received. My mom, who’s a professional travel writer, started off being extremely passionate about Matrip. After a few tries she ended up churning, and her main complaint was that the cards and trips weren’t pretty enough. It was a devastating moment, but still I didn’t take this piece of feedback seriously for the longest time, as I thought, there’s no way that it would make or break the product. Yet after using and leaving TravelChime, I came to the conclusion that perhaps there’s a need here, but not a big enough pain point. Hence users would churn the moment the experience isn’t perfect for them.
After reflecting on my Matrip journey and the unpromising results I’ve obtained so far, I’ve decided to move on to the next idea. Even though it didn’t quite turn out the way I hoped, it’s been a fun and fruitful ride. By documenting all the details here, I wish I wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes, and hope you’d find something valuable in it as well.
A special shoutout to Jonas, a fellow member at South Park Commons, who has been giving me amazing feedback on my blog posts. Adopting Jonas’ advice, I decided to modify my learning post format to writing just one highlight / learning per post, with the hope of providing more in-depth content.
Since this post is already very long, I’ll spare you the random musings this time 😆
Goals
In my last post I set out to (1) make an intro post in the Asian Creative Network and have a draft for my Warriors inspired calligraphy work (2) take classes more consistently (3) start market research for my next project.
For (1), I made the intro, was overwhelmed by the ❤️ and support from the community, and also have some collaboration projects underway! Looking forward to sharing them once they are complete. I made some progress on the Warriors calligraphy work, but not as much as I would have liked. (2) has been much harder than I expected, especially when I’m just learning for the sake of learning, and it doesn’t tie to a clear objective. Therefore I plan to de-prioritize classes for the time being. As for (3), I got it rolling! Just need to keep up the work. For the next two weeks:
Goal 1: Warriors calligraphy and showcase submission
There’s an application due for a showcase by the end of the month. Need to push hard on calligraphy for this next sprint.
Goal 2: Continue market and user research for project
The next idea I’m exploring is in physical activity (sports / dance) training. My aim is to speak with at least a dozen more people who’s tried to learn sports or dance techniques through videos (ex. YouTube). If you personally do so or have friends that do, I’d love to chat! Send me a note at fredrachelkao@gmail.com.
