KADO

One tool for all your business relationships

Role: Solo UX/UI Designer

Year: 2022

Introduction

Overview

KADO is a groundbreaking, mobile-first end-to-end enterprise networking tool designed for professionals in large businesses who manage an extensive portfolio of clients. Tailored to meet the needs of various industries, including bankers, lawyers, realtors, and contractors, KADO positions itself at the crossroads of popular platforms like Salesforce, LinkedIn, and Twitter. With a powerful suite of features, KADO empowers professionals to enhance their client relationships and streamline their workflow.

KADO Networks

KADO, a proud graduate of the Techstars startup accelerator Class of '22, is on a mission to empower professionals to cultivate and leverage meaningful relationships that result in valuable business opportunities.

The Problem

Digital Business Cards

The Digital Business Card industry typically serves freelancers and small-cap businesses. However, it has been hesitant to fully adopt digital cards, with many competitors treating them as secondary features. A key challenge is the lack of scalability for mass onboarding of enterprise users.

Customer Relationship Manager

Contemporary CRMs have become excessively feature-rich, often alienating users. These tools rarely prioritize the development of social profiles and personalized customer relationships. Legacy CRMs suffer from steep learning curves and overwhelming feature sets, leaving users yearning for a more streamlined and intuitive experience.

Research & Discovery

Methodologies

In the context of this product development project, resource constraints and tight deadlines necessitated a pragmatic research approach.

The primary strategy employed was to rely on competitive research as the foundation for the initial product launch. Subsequently, real-time user feedback was harnessed to iteratively refine each feature implementation.

As KADO successfully reached the milestone of MVP1 on its roadmap, the approach to future enhancements transitioned. The primary methods for refining the platform now include prototype user testing, in-depth user interviews, and the utilization of internal analytics tools.

Goals

Optimizing Onboarding: Investigate and enhance the onboarding process to ensure a smooth and user-friendly experience for new users.
Understanding Lead Generation Motivations: Uncover the underlying motivations that drive users to engage in lead generation activities, providing valuable insights into their needs and goals.
Contextual Information Seeking: Explore the context in which individuals seek information about their contacts, addressing the fundamental questions of who, what, where, and why they search for such information.
User-Centric Task Planning: Gain a deep understanding of user goals in planning itineraries and performing tasks, enabling the design of user-centric features and functionalities.

Competive Research

In our rigorous product competitor research, we bifurcated our analysis into two key segments: Business cards and relationship managers. As KADO adopts a freemium model, our investigation encompassed both paid and free features within these segments. Additionally, we delved into best practices of each tool. This in-depth competitive research is integral to our strategy for success in the digital business card market, providing invaluable insights as we enter this dynamic and evolving landscape.

Digital Business Card Competition

The Digital Business Card industry has primarily served freelancers and small-cap businesses. However, a significant portion of this market remains reluctant to embrace a purely digital model, opting to maintain physical business cards. Additionally, many QR code companies treat the digital business card as a secondary element within a more comprehensive suite of offerings. Notably, none of these solutions effectively scale the usability of the product for enterprise-level needs.

HiHello

Poor admin tool
Poor contact management & integrations
10 year tenure

Linq

too attached to physical cards
No real admin tools
Basic integrations

Beaconstac

Secondary product lack of focus
Poor contact management & integrations

Relationship Manager Competition

Modern CRMs have, in their quest to add numerous features, struggled to capture a significant market share. Users often find them unwieldy and frustrating to work with, mainly due to excessive feature bloat and subpar user experiences.

Salesforce

Bloated
Enterprise reputation

HubSpot

Bloated
Hyper Focused on mid-small cap companies

Clay

Venture Capital Focused
Style over UX

Research Synopsis

Identifying Untapped Market Demand for KADO's Product Roadmap
Through a comprehensive analysis of marketing competitors and a dedicated exploration of relationship-building pain points, we have uncovered an unmet demand in the market that KADO is poised to leverage in its product roadmap. This demand centers on an enterprise-focused digital business card platform coexisting seamlessly with a relationship hub, aimed at simplifying the complexities of existing relationship managers. The strategic integration of micro-services will be instrumental in establishing KADO as the ultimate destination for users seeking to cultivate relationships and drive successful deal closures.

Implementation Challenges

Challenge

Unleashing Untapped Potential due to Limited User Awareness
During the product life cycle, a significant challenge emerged as users displayed application usage problems within KADO. Despite their initial engagement in creating business cards, a notable pattern emerged where users seldom returned to the application. This lack of return visits resulted in users not fully realizing the extensive capabilities offered by KADO. The swift implementation of features in KADO's roadmap contributed to this challenge, as users remained largely unaware of the broader spectrum of product features available to them. Addressing this awareness gap became a pivotal aspect of enhancing user engagement and maximizing the utilization of KADO's functionalities.

Solution

Enhancing User Engagement and Experience in KADO
In addressing the usage challenge, a strategic shift in the roadmap was imperative to craft improved user journeys and foster increased engagement within the application. To reinvigorate user interaction, we concentrated on refining essential features, focusing on tools that would reimagine the overall user experience of KADO.

1. Bridging Business Card and Relationship Hub
Introduced a seamless lead generator associated with business cards to enhance the connection between the business card creation process and the broader relationship hub.

2. Strengthening Relationship Science
Expanded the functionality in the contact's area by enhancing tasks, emails, notes, and meetings, all powered by micro integrations. This comprehensive approach aimed to provide users with a more holistic understanding of their contacts.

3. Redesigning the Home Screen
Developed a new home screen to serve as a user-centric landing point within KADO, consolidating essential features in one location for ease of access.

4. AI-Driven Smart Feed:
Scaled the home screen to include an AI-driven smart feed, leveraging machine learning to recommend hot leads within the user's relationships, ensuring personalized and relevant content..
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5. Communication and Notifications Strategy:
Elevated focus on boosting notification engagement by leveraging them as educational tools to entice users back to the application. Revitalized newsletter communications to better inform users about KADO's development journey. Augmented the frequency of blog posts and strategically disseminated them across various social media channels. Substantially enhanced the quality of push notifications, ensuring they are more meaningful and enticing, thereby fostering consistent user returns to KADO.

Conclusion

Success

KADO strategically addressed the unmet demand in the market and successfully launched in January 2022. The growth trajectory was extraordinary, with a 1000% organic growth rate achieved, all while deploying limited to no marketing efforts. As KADO became recognized as a viable option for digital business cards among enterprise companies, the platform experienced an astounding enterprise growth rate, with over 100 mid-size and larger companies adopting it, resulting in more than 5,000 paid users.

By the end of Q4 2022, KADO boasted an impressive user base, with 13,000 unique freemium users, indicating a robust adoption of the platform. The daily engagement was equally noteworthy, with an average of 380 Daily Active Users (DAUs). This exceptional growth and user engagement underscore the success of KADO in not only meeting but surpassing market expectations, solidifying its position as a leading solution in the digital business card industry.