mercurius.io
Background
Mercurius is a startup I co-founded in 2017, together with Fabrizio Machella (CEO and CTO) and Lorenzo Malanga (Head of Trading).
Mercurius had the goal of turning sports betting into a new alternative asset class. Our vision was to build the technological infrastructure to make happen in sports betting the same revolution that blockchain brought to finance.
Scope
To realise our vision we adopted a lean approach to iteratively validate technological risks, legal risks and market viability.
Release of Advisor (2018), a subscription-based web app offering betting signals that users had to place manually. This gave us technological confidence and market insights: 3000+ accounts with 15000+ signals used.
Release of Tradr App (2019), a web app offering a fully automated sports trading bot based on our sports trading strategies. This allowed us to create the closest experience to an investment fund we could create. 200+ people used our application to allocate more than 1.2M € over 2 years, for a total of almost 5M of traded volumes.
Pilot project with a Swiss asset manager (2020) to realise an investment fund based on Tychedge, our b2b technology. The project was stopped in 2021 as it has not been possible to complete the implementation of the investment vehicle.
My role
As Head of products and CMO I was responsible to design and implement the company's products in all their aspects: strategy, design, marketing and customer operations.
Branding
UX/UI design
Front-end implementation
Strategy
(product and marketing)User research and profiling
Product/people management
Results
Usually, I explain the process that lead me to the design results, but in this case, it would mean to write an entire book as design decisions are deeply intertwined with too many factors! So I decided to give you an overview of my duties …
Strategic thinking
My approach to defining the product and marketing strategy is based on design thinking / gamestorming methods and co-creation. I believe in democratic leadership, so I usually organise workshops with all relevant stakeholders to gather inputs and insights, then I wrap up and take decisions based on my experience.
This approach allows me to build artefacts with the whole team and hence create a common vision: more consensus, less silos and fights.
Tools and methods: business model canvas, lean canvas, ecosystem/stakeholders map, message architecture, ideation sessions, product roadmap, funnel architecture, product tree, competitors audit, product/brand positioning …
UX research and user profiling
At every iteration, we do understand something more about our customers/users. My role is to push for tools and methods to dig deeper and keep the team aligned, both on the product side and on the marketing side. Analysing user needs, goals and behaviours helped the team to identify which features to develop and prioritise; profiling customers and prospects by looking at their sociodemographics, channels and influencers helped defining how to communicate with them and to build the right acquisition funnel.
Tools and methods: UX and buyer personas, value proposition canvas, customer/user journey, mental models and decisional models, kano model, user story mapping …
Design
My role included also the actual design of all the assets (marketing, website and assets, web apps, white-paper, …). My design process starts from a co-creation workshop, where all relevant stakeholders are gathered to ideate; it continues with the creation of the information architecture using wireframes and working together with the sales/marketing/copy members. At this point I work with quick feedbacks from team members or users to then move to the mockup phase and gather feedback again. Design operations are included in each design sprint, in order to build a progressive design library that grows and changes at every iteration.
Go to results for more screens →
Tools and methods: co-creation workshop, wireframes, moodboards, UI research, wireflows, visual mockups …
Validation
In my practice, I try as “evidence-driven” as possible. Evidence can be qualitative or quantitative, at Mercurius I used different approaches based on the company stage:
ethnographic interviews to validate needs and explore the problem space;
key metric identification and funnel tracking to validate the adoption and retention of our products;
A/B testing to validate copy and/or design;
customer feedback via support and sales team.
In order to make informed decisions, it was crucial to set up a multi-website tracking system able to give us consistent metrics across the whole funnel. My contribution was in defining which metric to define and why: our key metric was asset under management because it was the clearest sign of users activation; besides this metric all other ones changed according to what we needed to test and validate, adopting an experiment-driven approach.
Tools and methods: funnel mapping, events mapping, google analytics/optimize, google spreadsheets, CRM integration, custom integration, mom tests, interviews, questionaries …