Shance

Design

Background

Not all investment search services allow communication with the author of a project which a potential investor is willing to invest in. Fingers team had got the chance to test the idea of a fundraising chat.

Tasks

Today there is a huge number of startups and startupers eager to promote their ideas and realize their prospects.
For many years well-known crowdfunding platforms allow people with crazy ideas raise funds required to execute those ideas. However, an investor don't always has the opportunity to personally interact with the author of the project which he is willing to invest in.
Shance originates from idea of creating a service which allows investors to communicate with the authors of startup ideas.
The ease and efficiency of communication, the ability to help both in monetary terms and professional advice, or whatsoever, were the main requirements for designing a mobile application. Fingers starts developing an app with data acquisition and sketching.

Solution

Shance is an innovative service that allows you to create a project and to communicate with potential investors in the chat. Hitherto Shance has been implemented as an Android application and a website.

In the first phase we implemented minimum functionality where every author of a project is able to create only one project and post it for 60 days – this is the time to collect investments, to get advice and any other assistance from investors through chatting, to make new friends and acquaintances.
The application is made according to Material Design guidelines.

Project feed

The list of current projects (division into Popular and New).

My project

Information about the project, views, communication with the author.

Favourite

List of favourite projects.

Statistics

1200+ installs (Android). General rate in Google play is 4.7.

1200+

installs for first 1,5 month

4.7

rate in Google Play

Development

Challenges

In the designing, we relied on MVP — Minimum viable product. This meant the need to focus on minimum set of functions for the first version which could further be expanded and improved. The first version was intended for Android platform only, iPhone adaptation had been delayed.

The original idea was to introduce registration only for the authors, in order to simplify communication of investors and the authors of the projects. At the same time investors could write to the author of the project without any registration and discuss all the questions in the chat. However, the design stage revealed a number of problems that we could face in the future having implemented such a service:

1. As early as at the stage of designing a mobile application we knew about a similar website scheduled for the future. While registering a mobile user with a security token of his device is quite appropriate, it is not as reasonably applicable to a browser.
   
   
2. It was not an ordinary task to restore the whole previous anonymous correspondence of a newly registered user.

From the issues above it was decided to introduce registration for all users, though, not to scare them away and give them time to get acquainted with the application, the registration was not required unless a user tried any of the following:

• To create a project.
• To write a message to a project author.
• To add a project to his/her favorites, or.
• To view his/her messages.

Creating a project in a mobile app was designed on a step-by-step basis so that to make it as user-friendly as possible.

Project description was expanded with active hyperlinks so as to share projects with other services and to complete Shance base.