Onboarding project | Vamaship

"Our company: Where every day is an adventure in figuring out what exactly we do"

Vamaship is a B2B SaaS platform - a logistics aggregator - that allows sellers to book their orders with various delivery partners.

Vamaship is in the process of positioning itself as the RTO experts in the industry.

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"Our ideal customer is like Bigfoot—everyone talks about them, but nobody’s ever seen one"​

ICP 1 - ecom companies

Meet Anjali. She leads logistics at an e-com company, often with up to 25 others in the company. Her company is usually bootstrapped, and is usually in the pre PMF to early scaling phases. She is responsible for logistics costs and delivery rate, and is the primary decision maker when considering how deliveries are to be made - which partner/aggregators to use, what packaging is to be used, etc. In a few cases, when her company is funded, often, the VC may have a say as to the shipping partner to be used. She gets 10-100 orders per day, from a variety of pincodes. Each day, her team books shipments and hands them to the delivery partner. Each day, she responds to queries from customers; enquiring where their orders are. The ground reality of delivery in India is one where a combination of a lack of transparency and a lack of accountability ("shipment will reach when it reaches") - and this makes her life very difficult. She spends most of her day on call, or on email - co-ordinating with various folks. Her CEO is often upset at her when deliveries don't happen on time - as brand value gets eroded. She uses a basic office setup - a computer, a printer (for printing labels), a personal mobile phone - has to manage inventory on Shopify/Woocommerce, etc, and uses Whatsapp to interact with customers.

ICP 2 - Social sellers

Vikram, however, is a social seller. He usually operates alone, and sells products on instagram & facebook. He is often talking to customers, and can garner 1-2 orders in a day. Upon receiving the order, he has to manually enter his shipment details to book the shipment. After creating content, he seeks that his profits not be eroded by logistics costs. Due to the personal connect with the customer, he is less likely to face RTO issues.

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​"Our users’ goals are like New Year’s resolutions—great in theory, but abandoned by February"

Anjali the logistics head is looking to solve for a functional goal - she is trying to

1. fulfil orders conveniently
2. across a variety of pin codes
3. without any post-booking hassle
4. Reduce RTOs - part of her KPIs
5. Economical shipping - part of her KPIs

Vikram the social seller is looking to solve for

1. Primary: Financial goal - low cost shipping
2. Secondary: Functional goal - convenient order booking

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These goals were arrived at, after talking to 10 users, split across ecom websites & social sellers; who were booking shipments in the 2nd month after signup.

​"Our onboarding process is like assembling IKEA furniture—frustrating, time-consuming, and always missing a crucial piece"

Vamaship - Marketplace product teardown.pdf

​"Our activation metric is like a first date—if they don’t come back after the first time, it probably wasn’t meant to be"

When we speak to our customers, their goals are stated as, "Fulfill orders in a profitable manner". Quality (measured in RTOs) is a huge contributor to making their orders profitable. The problem is (as described by one customer): "I can see the prices on the door, I can see the quality only when shipment is delivered". There is a time lag from order booking to shipment delivery. Even when the shipments are delivered, if it's too few shipments, that's not enough to make a judgement - it could be randomness. As such, 2 important metrics to track are: Shipments booked (to get enough sample size), and RTO% for first few shipments.

Hypothesis:

Customers who book at least 5 shipments in the first 30 days build a habit, get enough data points to validate the CVP, and are retained for longer

Conclusion: This is the perfect metric out of all hypotheses. Retention rate is higher even at 120 days.

Metric: Customers who booked 5+ shipments in the first 30 days after account creation

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Hypothesis:

Users who get a low RTO rate for the first 5 shipments are likely to be retained for longer as they experience the Core Value Proposition.

Conclusion: This is a strong indicator of whether the customer will retain. Thankfully, most of this is in Vamaship's control, rather than the customer. Note: It takes more than a week to know if a shipment will be RTO'ed.

Actionable for Vamaship: All new entities' shipments must be followed up on, to ensure delivery (for first 5 shipments)

Metric: RTOs for first 5 shipments

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Hypothesis:

Users who integrate at least one channel (their sales outlet, such as on Shopify, Woocommerce, etc) in the first week find convenience in using Vamaship, using it long enough to experience the CVP, and thus are retained for longer

Conclusion: This is a good metric, but the influenceability is questionable. A customer cannot integrate their channel without having a channel - social sellers, for instance, don't have one.

Metric: Customers who have integrated a channel in the first week

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Hypothesis:

Users who change their advanced settings (partner preferences) in the first week are retained for longer. For the same reason as above - they are involved enough to stick it out to see the CVP.

Conclusion: This also seems to be a short-term metric. There is initial interest. Eventually, though, it matters less and less. Maybe it can be used as a gateway to booking 5 shipments in 30 days?

Metric: Customers who changed their partner preferences in the first week

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Hypothesis:

Users who change customer notification settings in the first week are retained for longer. User intent (branding purposes) implies the customers rely on quality; and thus value the CVP.

Conclusion: Also a short-term metric.

Metric: Customers who changed their notification settings in the first week

Both short-term metrics can be completed the instant a customer comes to the platform for the first time.

All 5 metrics will be tracked for now; but in the long term, the best activation metric would be, "5 shipments booked in first 30 days" and "RTOs for first 5 shipments"

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Note: It is possible for a customer to use Vamaship's services without coming on the portal. As such, portal activity such as logins does not make for a great activation or retention metric.