WisePass has been evolving the past few years from a lifestyle startup with a subscription service starting from 300$ a month in Vietnam in 2016 to a regional startup that expanded in 2017 after its seed funding to Thailand and the Philippines in 2018.

With the pandemic in 2020, what happened to the startup and how did it adapt to such a business context?

In this article, we will focus on the way WisePass changed the way it operates. The answers are collected from an interview with the founder and CEO of WisePass, Lam Tran. This is a long interview and will be broken down into 3 different articles. Here's part 3.

The way I have approached the business since 2019 is to transition from a long product development cycle towards a short product development cycle.

Before

The way we improved our app in the past was by yearly cycle. I'm talking about the design of the app, the backend and the reporting to track all our metrics. All these changes in our product roadmap usually took months and required several discussions on the next thing to work on as we were in the process of understanding the best way we could make the user experience.

In 2015, we were struggling with people using our product. It is required to get a code and then give the code to a staff that will redeem it on a web portal... That was solved with the QR code so redemption was done within seconds right on the app.

In 2016, it was really about how to make people use our product without having any employees around and scale that up. We solved that by bringing up a great value proposition for our subscribers to enjoy with 1 bottle every night for 300$ a month

In 2017, it was really about how to show that our product wasn't designed to deal with bottle service in the nightlife and we solved it by adding use cases with lunch, dinner and coffee so the app could be used for different purposes at different times of the day.

In 2018, the product needed to update with the expansion towards new countries with different currencies, language, user activity. We solved it by adding Thai Baht and Philippino Peso and language internally to adapt to the locals and we broke things down by user activity by city so we could measure which city performed the best.

In 2019, the product needed to change with a new model where the redemption wasn't the same so we had to quickly adjust and let people scan 3 times a day to redeem specific items. We solved that by creating an ad hoc system to launch it within weeks and move forward and became profitable 5 months later.

In 2020, the future of WisePass was about to enable brands to build this relationship between consumers and we needed to have a proper modus operandi to deal with any brand. We solved that by redesigning internally the product so we could deal with the PASS currency instead of scans.

Each year, a problem was solved but it took a year to really see what could be done and then execute it.

After

Today, the approach is radically different as we're making changes every other week. The system keeps updating with very short cycles on very specific aspects of the product so the waiting time is lowered down. By working like that, the tech team can deliver more features and they can prioritize with the rest of the organization.

The problem we address is mostly the frustration generated. As most of the team members don't understand why changes take that much time and is getting impacted in their respective fields. Reducing the time to complete a project in a couple weeks or less is more business driven and helps each team to perform better.

In 2021, we are reviewing each core function of the product and look at how it could be improved within 2 weeks so that can drive up a specific metric.

This quarter, we're looking to implement free trial for people to discover and use our app for 30 days. That leads people to use our app with less concern. They can understand enjoy the benefits first instead of getting charged right away.

For us, that helps to increase the subscriber base in a scalable way so we can track the conversion rate and work on the next features to keep adding new subscribers.