The Challenge
In late 2017, an executive colleague approached me to help solve the problem of difficulty accessing hunting land. The idea was to create an online marketplace connecting private landowners with outdoor enthusiasts; or in other words “AirBnB for hunting and fishing”.
Our high level goals were to:
- Design, launch, and support a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Incorporate a startup team around the concept
We targeted spring of 2018 in order to onboard landowners and test real bookings for the upcoming fall 2018 hunting season.
My Role
As co-founder of PrivateAcre, I’m primarily responsible for product research, design, and management along with day-to-day operations. I managed 1-2 visual design contractors who assisted in asset creation and I collaborated with an advisor who developed our logo and brand. I also managed both front-end and back-end development teams through an agile process with tools like Jira and Trello.
Throughout this venture, I’ve personally recruited talent and resources to successfully launch:
- a legal counsel who focuses on startups
- a specialized outdoor industry insurance broker
- a software development partner
- enthusiastic “field team” sales representatives
- a relationship with one of the largest retailers in the outdoor industry
The Approach
Our team agreed that supply and landowners would be the most critical piece to PrivateAcre. Without supply, there is no service. Without an immediate link to a ton of landowners, it was our biggest question mark.
Our limited domain knowledge in rural land ownership meant we needed a way to quickly understand the mindset and problems that private landowners are facing, and specifically figure out which types of owners might be open to renting out their land for short-term recreation.
Overall, we wanted to approach the startup by leveraging design thinking methodologies in which we test & learn a prioritized MVP launched as soon as possible.
User Research
After designing a user research plan and script, I chose to hire a recruiting firm to find landowners for interviews and prototype testing. The rationale was to test & learn, and also recruit early adopters to our platform.
We successfully recruited 8 participants who were farmers, absentee landowners, even a golf driving range owner. Five of them expressed interest in joining our pilot.
Insights & Principles
Neighbor Relationships are Paramount
Landowners were more concerned with property boundaries and neighbor relationships vs. their own property.
Referrals > Background Checks
Background checks didn’t help landowners feel as comfortable as personal referrals and reviews – similar to LinkedIn's degrees of separation.
Hub-and-Spoke Architecture
Research helped inform the key uses cases to focus on, and I designed flows around these based on a “hub and spoke” architecture model. In this case, there are two hubs where a user can start from and return to, frequently. For example, a user will use the Search page as a hub and return to it frequently when searching for the right property. Each flow and page should connect meaningfully to the hub in order to drive users toward a successful booking and limiting the need for a complicated hierarchy.
Private Listings
I designed private listings to be a simple feature that we could easily market to landowners as a way to get comfortable with PrivateAcre using one’s own existing network. However, I used a droplist so that we can influence landowners to keep their listing public as the default option.
Reservation Detail & Messaging
It’s important that users have quick access to the reservation details and especially communication – throughout the entire process prior to confirming a booking and after a reservation is complete.
Interactive Map
We learned that outdoor enthusiasts, especially hunters, wanted a detailed look at the property. I designed a robust, interactive map to differentiate ourselves from competitors that only showed photos – with the feature of pins that show what key locations look like on the map.
I researched and found that we could layer polygon tools over Google Maps instead of going with a 3rd party. We developed a custom tool that both landowners and customers could use on their own.
Reusable Photo Library
After developing the map, we saw that users were looking for quick ways to flip through photos of the property to get the best overview. While an interactive map was a good second step to exploring the property, prospective guests needed something flashier” to get a split-second sense of the property.
I used this opportunity to design a reusable component for uploading general photos, but then re-using this component again on the map to pin photos to specific locations.
To keep it lean and deploy the feature sooner, we held off with drag-and-drop, since there’s a workaround to reorder photos in the meantime.
Designing in the Browser
Since InVision and other prototyping tools can’t easily depict animation and responsive views, I communicated designs by making adjustments directly in code in a component library referenced by the development team.
Product Management
My role was also Product Manager and I used tools like Jira, Trello, and Excel to prioritize features with the front-end and back-end development teams and my co-founders.
As we explored each feature, I was able to work closely with development team experts to weigh pros and cons of integrating different services vs. building our own.
Setting KPIs
Initially, we established our Key Performance Indicators based on our early goals to secure additional funding and show product-market-fit for investors. We established a couple simple metrics to track:
- Revenue per month
- Bookings per month
As our product matured, and we pivoted slightly, we now are refocusing our efforts based on a new company strategy and vision. Our goal is to work towards engagement with content and business-oriented listings, since they key concern from investors was a lack of supply. This led to the following new KPIs that I’ve established and working to track:
- Overall Sign-up Rate
- Listing Inquiry Rate (# initial messages sent to listings per month)
- Monthly Active Users
- Listing Claim Rate (# of listings that are claimed by owners per month)
Roadmap & Prioritization
I collaboratively managed the process with co-founders, advisors, and our development teams to ideate, collect, and synthesize product ideas. In the early stages, Google Sheets was the best tool because it was easy to share, and customize how we wanted.
Eventually, we moved into a combination of Trello and Jira. I established a process by which our team could quickly save ideas and bugs into Trello, so that I could better synthesize these into well-formed stories and tickets for our backlog in Jira.
If possible, we use story points in Jira to better estimate effort on the development side, and we prioritize by a combination of factors including customer feedback, Google Analytics data, and alignment with the overall product vision.
Testing & Learning
We were observing throughout our in-store marketing (Cabela’s, gun shows, outdoor events, etc.) that women were the first to notice our display and marketing materials – often alerting their husband to PrivateAcre.
This led us to hypothesize that women may be a more (or just as) effective initial target for marketing our services instead of men. We learned that men still proved to be more engaged with an A/B test of a social media ad, however women were not too far behind.
Marketing
Leading up to launch and after, I led most marketing efforts and, with the support of visual designers, created physical and digital materials used to get the word out and recruit new customers.
By speaking with customers, I discovered that some outdoorsmen looking for places to hunt and fish had a “hack” where they could look up the owners of certain properties using county GIS websites.
This was a breakthrough and I immediately strategized how we could leverage this (often free) data based on our target markets in the Cincinnati and surrounding tri-state counties.
Impact
PrivateAcre has proven to have a positive impact on customers, and in more than one case, we have seen an outdoor enthusiast decide to spend money with our platform instead of previously planned activities through outfitters and other services.
The marketplace we designed and launched has led to significant revenue and earned us meetings with top investors across the nation. Our toughest challenge still remains: finding a more consistent supply of listings to the platform. By building this minimum viable product, we have been able to prove that there is a market, and reveal where to focus future effort. I believe that timing is everything, and we’re just ahead of a sea change in land ownership, similar to what AirBnB faced.
Generated over $15,000 revenue in 4 months
Recognized as one of Chicago's Top Startups to Watch in 2019
Accepted to Y Combinator Startup School (only 20% of companies that applied)
Raised over $300k in seed funding
“If we can just get on property from you guys, this is unbelievable. I’ve hunted countless outfitters and craigslist; noone is doing it like PrivateAcre.”
- Landon K., canceled his outfitter plans and instead spent that money with PrivateAcre for all of deer season.
