Fund That Flip

Retail investing and crowd-funding platform

Product Overview

Fund That Flip is a real estate crowdfunding platform for real estate investors and flippers to raise capital for their projects and connect with a community of individual accredited investors. It has raised over $2.2B to fund real estate projects and generated over $61M of passive income for accredited investors.

My Role

As product manager of the retail investing division of Fund That Flip, I worked with a multidisciplinary team to ship new features for the crowd-funding platform such as "Invest Now", "Borrower Exposure", "Investment Rollover", and optimize the retail investing experience including "Investor Onboarding", "Deal Discovery", "Payoff experience".

I conducted research and customer interviews, monitored user feedback and platform usage data, defined long term product roadmap, prioritized near term sprint work, and worked closely with UX designer, lead engineers, and other business units to ensure we keep delivering product-market fit solutions to customers.

The "one metric that matters" for our retail investing platform is the total investing dollar amount, which has grown 69% over the past 18 months. This is also the Northstar the whole team is rallied around. The more investing dollar amount we collect, the more real estate projects we can fund, the more revenue we can generate through originating loans, and the quicker we can grow.
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The north star metric is the ultimate output metric we use to evaluate the business viability. However, it is not super actionable to our day-to-day business operation and product development, because (a) it is a lagging indicator and (b) it is too high level to tie to any specific initiative. To overcome that, we further defined some input metrics, which will ladder up to the output metric and at the same time provide us with a certain level of actionality to focus on in the near term.

We broke down the output metric:
Total investing $ = Total number of active investors x Average investing $ per investor

We have grown our total number of active investors by 76% in 24 months by focusing on improving the investor onboarding experience, improving the conversion rate, resurrecting dormant users, and reducing churn. We have grown our average investing $ per investor by 58% in 24 months by focusing on understanding investors' needs and shipping features that increase user engagement.

METRICS

North star metrics

Output metrics VS Input metrics

Actionable

Growth: Total investing $ from accredited investors (actual number is hidden)

Growth: Total active accredited investors (actual number is hidden)

Growth: Average investing $ per accredited investor (actual number is hidden)

Aligning product delivery goals with the business needs is essential and it needs to be checked every step from the beginning. The roadmap became out-of-date the moment it got published.
Business success is realized through delivering value to customers. Keeping eyes only on business metrics may risk over-indexing in short-term goals and missing larger opportunities. There is no substitution for talking to real customers.
User insights and Data-driven are not conflicted and both are tools to drive growth. They reinforce each other. Usage data is objective, scalable, and easier to measure. But it needs couple with qualitative research to understand the "why". User insights are "small data" that provide richer context and product intuition, but it needs to be validated by quantitative data to prove it is actually connected to real problems
I've validated that my design background enabled me to apply design thinking throughout my day to day work as a product manager. Divergent think has helped me to explore enough alternatives before prematurely fixate on any solutions. Convergent thinking has helped me to tie product solutions to key metrics and stay focus.
While I can work with UX designers, being able to do quick prototyping myself allows me to externalize my thinking and facilitate communication. While I can ask data analysts for help with reporting, being able to get my hands dirty with SQL and pull data as I want allows me to validate hypotheses sooner, therefore quick iterations.
Always bring clarity to the team and don't hesitate to over-communicate. Everyone is pumped and heads-down "making" things, it is my responsibility to ensure we are building the right thing and everyone knows the "why".
An ambitious goal is OK, but there is always an opportunity to cut the scope in half and iterate on it. When a big rock project gets broken down into smaller milestones, it immediately feels less daunting and more likely to be prioritized.
To continue the above point, breaking down a 10-week project into five 2-week projects and only delivering value at the end is not helpful. In this way, we lose the opportunity to validate the value proposition earlier, and the chance to course correct. We also lost the momentum that could have been built if we got positive feedback early.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

For the past few years working as a product manager in startup settings, I have learned a lot about how to make discussions, make connections, ship products, and drive impacts.