At the end of my studies at Hyper Island, I completed an industrial placement at Djungo, an early stage social discovery startup. Djungo is a community-driven, social discovery platform that encourages Generation Z to get together in real life. The Djungo team are in a very early startup phase, and were in the process of closing a seed round. To support the investment case, we wanted to build out the business model (see next case for more on this). I took on the responsibility of crafting B2C monetisation strategy and re-designing the user journey.
I was responsible for end-to-end planning and execution of this project, with input from key stakeholders such as the CEO, CTO and a board member with pricing expertise. I also received peer review feedback from another designer on the team.
The Djungo team wanted to create positive proof points of generating revenue in order to support a compelling case for investors. My challenge was to define the monetisation of B2C users in a non-exploitative way that supported the core mission of building community.
I conducted research with users, as well as desktop research on competitors and on consumer trends. There were several key insights that together sparked the idea I eventually chose. Firstly, most competitors in the space were using a 'freemium' model, where the app is free to use, but certain features only available for a recurring fee. This did not feel like a viable option for Djungo, due to the focus on inclusivity and the importance the founders place on having a consistent experience for all users. Indeed, I also found that having different levels of subscriptions deteriorates the user experience for the non-paying users. Additionally, in researching the user behaviour of Gen Z, I found that our target group was much more willing to pay for digital services than earlier generations.
The insights I found in my discovery phase helped shape the ideation sessions I facilitated with the team and ultimately we as a team chose to go with a membership model, where all users pay a small monthly fee. This could avoid creating inconsistencies in the quality of UX by ensuring all members have access to the same features. To encourage sign-ups, the perks of membership includes access to exclusive events and in the future additional incentives could be added. With the co-founders I decided that to garner interest in the membership scheme, we should first release a waitlist that can be marketed on social media, and web as well.
With feedback from users and the team, I designed new branding for the Djungo club, the full membership journey and offering, as well as the waitlist and eventual sign-up form for when the club would be ready to launch. So far the branding has been shipped to the app, and the rest of my designs have been handed over to the development backlog.
Overall, I really enjoyed this project as I had a chance to both strategise and design. I learnt a lot from working closely with the founder and the pricing expert in our ideation sessions and through iterative feedback rounds. It was also very valuable for me to practice prioritising different urgent and valuable tasks in such a small team, as I was also working on more short-term design items during this project. Working on the branding elements of the Djungo Club helped me realise how much I enjoy content design.
