Coffee Boba Meets Bagel is a responsive web app designed for young Asians in English-speaking countries to apply to date each other.
Our app accumulated over 40,000 users and got acquired, all in the span of 1 month.
OUTCOME
In 1 month:
THE PROBLEM
Every Facebook group has their own set of rules, quirks, culture, and people. Subtle Asian Dating was no different. This was a group of 300,000+ Asian members looking to connect with each other and find their next partner.
However, this was a unique use case in which Facebook Groups wasn’t designed for this level of intimacy.
In Subtle Asian Dating, people auction off their friends in the form of posts.
Each post consists of:
ISSUES
Messages and profiles were fragmented.
If you were interested in someone, you had to reach out via LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc. It was difficult to keep track of people you've viewed and messages you've sent.
DM'ing someone was overwhelming.
The only way to show interest in someone was to DM them. This has always been a daunting task, so many people just don't do it.
OUR TARGET USERS
We first began by understanding our audience. We studied the Facebook group, read people's profiles, and looked at what people were posting in the group. Our target users were very similar to us.
College student
As a college student, I want to meet interesting people just like me, so that I can begin dating.
Young professional
As a young professional, I want to find someone so that I don't have to feel alone while I'm working 9-5.
BRAINSTORMING
We thought about a number of different ideas and pitched our friends for feedback.
A feed of dating profiles to Like and Dislike, a Tinder-style swiping experience, a way for people to apply to date each other, and even an email experience where we send you one profile a day.
From talking with friends, we realized that the majority of our target users were young and had little working experience. So, the apply-to-date concept seemed the most promising.
IDEATION
From here, we explored 7 different concepts for applying to date someone.
REALIZATION
Sketching out our ideas made us realize something: We don't even know if people will use our product - let alone sign up.
So we took a step back to come up with a minimal MVP to test our idea.
MVP
Stripping this down to its basic functionality:
🚀 TESTING
Will people be interested? How well does this concept of applying to date someone resonate with them?
How will people feel about using a new app instead of staying within the Facebook group?
We launched the MVP as a way to test the concept with these two scenarios in mind ⬇
Scenario One
Loryn creates his page from Boba Meets Bagel's website. Then, he shares his page to the Subtle Asian Dating Facebook group.
Scenario Two
Amy browses Facebook and notices Loryn's auction with a new apply to date link. She's interested so she taps on the link, creates her profile, and applies.
Bringing old school emailing back
Emailing was a critical part of this MVP experience. These needed to be fun and drive engagement. I designed and built these emails that our users would commonly interact with.
TEST RESULTS
6000 signs ups
within the first 24 hours.
~100 links shared
on Facebook during the first week.
LEARNINGS
We used the MVP launch as a way to test the apply-to-date concept. To our delight, it was a successful launch. However, We learned two very important things:
1. Many emails were being marked as spam.
Since I created the emails, I kept updating the HTML and test-sending emails to spam-proof our content. This was an ongoing process.
2. People wanted more profiles to apply to date outside of just links on FB.
Our biggest feedback was the users wanted more. It was clear that people were willing to sign up and use a new app, outside of FB.
NEW FEATURES
Over the next few weeks, things were getting crazy. We were getting a ton of sign-ups, feature requests, people posting their page links, and memes.
Now that we knew our idea works, we aimed to increase engagement in our app.
Discover
Ability for people to go through the profiles one at a time in the app. This was a step in building more in-app experiences.
More new features
Matches
Applications
Viewing History
404 error
A page for when pages aren't found.
BRANDING
I also worked on the branding and art direction while staying true to our values.
Attention grabbing
Our name was a play off of Coffee Meets Bagel. It was controversial (because it was similar to CMB) which grabbed people's attention.
Fun and playful
Our name, colors, visual design, and illustrations were all designed to give off these feelings.
Relative to the asian demographic
References to boba, Pikachu, Crazy Rich Asians, etc.
Maintain the nature of the FB group
As with the FB group, we used lots of emojis and words like "Shoot your shot".
OUTCOME
In 1 month:
KEY TAKEAWAYS
This project is near and dear to our heart because of the level of impact we had and how collaborative and scrappy we were able to get to connect our asian community.
Learnings:
Not everything warrants a full design process.
It depends on constraints like time, level of effort, level of impact, and domain knowledge. Ultimately, it's up to you and your team to work with a process that works for your situation. Do what works for you.
Execution matters more than the idea.
There are so many dating apps out there. But, we were able to market this to a niche audience and brand it in a way that resonated with our people.
Biggest Challenge:
Knowing which customer feedback to act upon.
We were overwhelmed by the amount of customer feedback: new feature ideas, bugs product suggestions, etc. It was difficult to work through but we kept tying things back to the core problem.
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