The Challenge

After 2 years of hockey stick growth, Fintech acquired Lilypad in 2019. At that time, Lilypad was already the leading CRM and sales tool for beverage alcohol teams, boasting clientele ranging from the largest supplier in the world to the local brewery down the street from your house.

Now as a part of a big organization with even bigger goals, we needed to reimagine the Lilypad product, technology, and message to achieve the kind of scale we knew we were capable of. The Fintech leadership team looked to me to set that vision for the future.

Our Goals

• Leverage Fintech’s cloud data warehouse to power the Lilypad application and enhance our feature set.
• Create a three-tier architecture that ensures data integrity across a suite of applications and enables reusability of services across current and future products.
• Provide a more flexible offering that captures multiple market segments with minimal resources needed for onboarding and retention.
• Create a clear upgrade path that allows for upselling and cross-selling with our newfound sister products.
• Set ourselves up for the future by building a modular and more extensible platform on the best technology available.
• Cement Fintech as the leading technology company for alcohol suppliers.

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Market Analysis

Over the course of the next two months, I would lead the team on a deep dive into our market, competitive positioning, pricing, clients, feature set, brand voice, design, architecture, tech stack, and data layer.

I started by hunting down statistics for our total market and our clients. This included not only our internal data but also 3rd party data regarding production and retail sales. I merged these data sets together then compared the distribution of our current clients to the total market to more accurately estimate buying power and consequently TAM. From here I sectioned off the market into 5 tiers.

I conducted interviews with clients and prospects from each of the tiers to understand the Lilypad features that were most valuable to them and where we could do better. I created a matrix from this feedback and then compared it to actual usage statistics across our web and mobile applications.

Next, I took an in-depth look at our competitors, scrubbing their websites, breaking into their help centers, and interviewing their clients to get a detailed understanding of feature sets, pricing, technology, and design to see how it compared to ours. I brought all of the features for our product category into one place where I could compare the competitors side by side next to the actual usage of the same features in our current app.

I was able to leverage this research to create a data-driven plan for the Lilypad 3.0 feature set and pricing. Consequently, I was able to confidently predict TAM and project revenue under the new pricing structure through a custom ARR calculator.

Go To Market

In order to pull off this new packaging and pricing, we needed to reimagine onboarding for the product. I designed from scratch an interactive mockup of what the buying decision and onboarding would look like for clients of Lilypad 3.0. Check it out.

With all this research at our backs, I collaborated with our lead UI designer to reorient our product toward its new future. We completely changed the navigation and menu structure in order to drive our users towards the features they cared about most. We partitioned off the features to create clear lines of demarcation between the Grow, Pro, and Enterprise tiers of the product while providing just enough feature teasing to entice users.

Brand Voice

I geek out over a finely tuned brand voice so I did an audit of Lilypad’s current voice and created a new one incorporating all of the market research used above. Check it out.

Architecture

Lilypad’s tech stack and architecture were in need of a revamp since we were no longer the same bootstrapped startup. Besides that, Fintech has a data lake, infrastructure, and talented team we needed to leverage. In collaboration with our development team, we carefully studied the Fintech systems that were in place and the technologies available on the market today. After a lot of evaluations, diagrams, and conference calls, carved off a path forward to transition our hosting, BI databases, and data ingestion services as well as our mobile and web application frameworks.

All of these findings were put into a hefty presentation and delivered to our executive board. The project plan was unanimously approved and the plan has been in action ever since.