The Case for Solving Core Problems
If you don’t already, you should know Fast. Fast solves a core problem with the internet that you likely deal with all the time. In fact…
If you don’t already, you should know Fast. Fast solves a core problem with the internet that you likely deal with all the time. In fact, I recently left a promising role and a great team as Senior Director of Product Design at Turo, the Airbnb of cars, to join them.
People often ask me why I left. I was happy there. And Fast is a Series A startup, so I’m choosing a higher risk opportunity, to be sure. But let me tell you why I believe it is also a higher reward one, why you should be as excited as I am about Fast, and why the desire to solve core problems, rather than symptoms, is at the center of it all.
Symptom One: Hopper
For this to make sense, I have to go all the way back to the summer of 2015, when I was working on a new product called Hopper.
Hopper was using big data to predict the future price of airfare, so you could book plane tickets at just the right time. This could save you money and provide the confidence that you scored the best deal. It was pretty cool, and our customers loved it. As a mobile-only product, one reason for our success had to do with the state of buying a flight on your mobile phone at the time:
You’ve probably been here yourself at one point. The process of buying a flight online was long and drawn-out. There were a ton of form fields to fill out. The airlines each wanted to “own” the relationship with the flyer, so it felt like you were always filling in the same information time after time with each one — name, email, phone, etc. The consumer doesn’t care if the airline wants to own the relationship. They want the best flight for them, in as few steps as possible. But, airlines had no incentive to share this information with each other, and the customer was the one that suffered.
Back then, working at Hopper, we didn’t think that made sense, and so we built this: QuickTap booking, where you could book a flight in 4 taps on your phone.
And when you came back, if you wanted to fly a different airline because you found a better departure time or price, you could do it again in 4 taps, without repeating any of your information. Hopper created the Amazon experience for repeat purchasing of flights.
How? Well, first we allowed you to use the same information regardless of what airline you booked with. But, another thing we realized early on was that so many of the fields the airlines are asking you to fill out are not made with you in mind — they are made for the airlines. Airlines want to collect more of your data. They want to use it for remarketing and to convince you to only book with their airline going forward. If you remove those self-indulgent asks, what was really required for you to legally buy a flight was far less.
The Airline’s incentives were misaligned with yours, however. This is where Hopper comes in. As a neutral third party, Hopper can think beyond the individual motivations of any one airline and build something that just makes it easier to book flights generally. What we created was pretty neat, and it allowed you to quickly snag those great deals that Hopper was helping you find, regardless of where they came from. I wrote about it here — and people really liked what we were building.
But, what I didn’t yet realize, is that I should have been building Fast.
It was clear I didn’t realize this because I would go on again to try and solve the same problem for another individual product and vertical. This time it was for Turo, the Airbnb of cars.
Symptom Two: Turo
As Senior Director of Product Design, I led the Guest team at Turo. The guest team designed all the products associated with people who wanted to borrow cars from others, our hosts, on the platform. I was passionate about solving many things at Turo, but reducing the many steps in our checkout flow was a major one.
Renting a car is risky, and fraud and insurance complicate the user experience requirements to maintain a safe platform. This, along with marketing requirements, a low bar from the competition, and no one owning the end-to-end experience of checkout, led to a bloated user experience.
There were upwards of 20 steps to book a Turo. You had to verify your ID, enter lots of information, and add the same information multiple times, among other user experience offenses. Why? It was in many ways a symptom of how we built at the time: compromising a cohesive experience for individual team goals.
Let me give you an example. Turo’s Insurance teams have the incentive to want friction during the checkout process to ensure your identity is safely verified before giving you the keys. However, this made you more likely to leave the app before finishing booking. That, in turn, would naturally make marketing worried this would cause a drop-off in the funnel before they could capture your email for remarketing. This tension made a booking on Turo feel fragmented. It felt like two separate teams building two independent solutions and only sticking them together at the end.
The consumer doesn’t care if Turo wants your email for marketing. They want the best car for them, in as few steps as possible. Our design team was convinced it could have been simpler, however. So, our talented Guest team explored how to do just that, designing solutions that would reduce steps and make everything feel more unified and cohesive.
We made some inroads on solving this problem for Turo. But, again, what I really should have been doing was building Fast.
Why? Well, a theme was starting to emerge for me: incentives were often misaligned for individual companies to solve the more general problem of complicated checkout funnels.
The Core Problem
Companies had incentives to offer you great products and services but, when it came to you giving them your money for it, other goals got in the way of them making that easy for you:
Departmental silos satisfied individual team goals but at the expense of a unified and efficient overall user experience
The desire to capture unnecessary data, that only served the business, made steps longer for the consumer
The desire to “own” the customer relationship resulted in companies not sharing your information with competitors or other, unrelated product and service categories, creating duplicate steps across sites and stores
In other words, no one is solving the core problem of how to share your information safely, across multiple products, services, and sites. No one is solving how to do so quickly and efficiently, while only taking what it needs to make the transaction. We are all solving the downstream symptoms: how to buy and re-buy an American or United Airlines flight; how to buy and re-buy any flight on Hopper; how to book and re-book cars on Turo. This is resulting in worrying trends in e-commerce user experience.
Customers often have to complete over 12 fields to complete the average e-commerce funnel [1], despite tests showing reducing form fields from 11 to 4, for example, can result in a 120% increase in conversion [2]. As a result, e-commerce sites convince only about 3 percent of visitors on average to complete checkout [3]. Passwords are forgotten, reset, forgotten again. Emails, credit cards, names, are all typed, re-typed, and typed again, time after time.
No wonder it has become so much easier to book on Amazon. At least they know my name; my address; my shipping preferences. Why set up a new account on some site I have only been to once, when I can instead look on Amazon and enter none of those everyday pieces of information? But the problem that this creates is it leaves out all the other small businesses, or retailers, who don’t put their merchandise on Amazon. That limits our options as consumers. So, where does that leave us in all this? Who is going to solve our problems?
The Fast Solution
Fast forward (pun intended) to the summer of 2020 when I met Fast’s two founders Domm and Allison, and when I realized people were trying to solve this exact problem. People were trying to solve this as a core issue for the internet, not just via the numerous and narrow symptoms. And they were talented, experienced people too: from Uber, Visa and HotelTonight, to name a few. A recent funding round led by the payments giant Stripe [4] also added to their industry expertise.
Domm and Allison were building one-click login and check out for the entire internet, and they aptly called it Fast. Fast, now live to the public, allows you to carry your identity with you across the internet, wherever you want to log in or buy something. This reduces the need to input the same information, specify the same preferences, and create the same account with the same name, each time you want to do something online.
By solving this problem directly, Fast makes the internet easier, and, well, faster. Not just to log in or check out, but to do all sorts of other stuff it enables, like tracking packages from multiple online stores all in one place.
It enables you to change and use your address, credit card, or phone number in just one place while using it with hundreds of online stores across the internet too.
Or it enables you to re-purchase products from different websites in one place, without needing to go back to the individual sites you bought them on.
And that is just scratching the surface. The possibilities are nearly endless. One-click government forms. One-click flights. One-click event registrations. One click movie steaming. One-click dinner.
When I heard the vision, it clicked. I realized that Fast can think more freely about new ways to solve the problem precisely by focusing on the core issue, not the symptoms. Others limit their thinking from the start by solving the problem only to support existing businesses: like buying flights, or cars. In this way, Fast can make e-commerce better for everyone, not just one product, service, or vertical.
This is why I am so excited to join the team at Fast. And why what we’re building is going to be worth keeping your eyes on. So, buckle up, we’re in for an exciting ride, and I want to take you with us. How? There are few ways for you to join us on this journey:
Sign up at fast.co and start logging in or buying in one-click wherever you see a Fast Checkout button!
Follow our Design team on Dribbble, where we will be sharing our design journey building the product
Look for jobs at fast.co/careers if you want to be a part of the fun! We’re hiring Designers, Engineers, PMs and more!
It’s 2020; check out should be faster, safer, and easier. We’re ready to go Fast. Are you?
—Pantelis (PK) from Fast, on twitter at pantelisak
Sources: