The story of building Donut

Welcome to the second edition of ‘Making dough’ — a transparent peak into what we are building at Donut and why.

It’s been a crazy ride since our last post in August and the perfect time to give everyone an update on what we’ve been working on in sunny Berlin. Firstly, some stats about what we’ve moved into ‘Done’:

Thousands of you have signed-up to our waitlist — join the party here 🙌

150 more customer interviews through our Calendly hack 💬

120 ad combinations trialled 🤳

26 flights back and forth to London ✈️

35,000 lines of code resulting in our WebApp MVP ⌨️

50 beta users on-boarded📱

80 🍩 consumed (if you’re in London you need to sample Crosstown’s Matcha Donuts)

1 shiny new office 🏢

70 visits to https://emojipedia.org/doughnut/ 💻

But you haven’t come here to see stats, you’ve come to see what we have built and why…

Landing page

We started September with the launch of our new landing page to explain our product in ever simpler terms. This was based on customer feedback that the initial landing page didn’t explain the proposition clearly enough.

Our landing page is a window into what we are building, how it works and who the team is behind Donut. Our aim for the page was to make the product easy to understand and to enable those who are eager to use Donut a simple way to sign up. We tested multiple designs with users before settling on our new design.

We also used a variety of tools to optimize this page such as HotJar to understand user behavior & Google Optimize (which we are a big fan of) for running simple A/B tests — Optimize is free, requires very little configuration, and great for startups.

We used these tools to optimize the copy & imagery on the landing page alongside understanding our users behaviour better. This resulted in a set of pages explaining the proposition better & features such as a ‘sticky’ sign-up bar allowing a user to join our waitlist regardless of where they are on the page. This feature alone helped us almost double our conversion rate.

Calendly user chat hack

As part of our new landing page we implemented a new verify email address screen to improve the user experience of those who are excited to try Donut. We also added a little text link for users to sign up to a 15 minute user chat using Calendly once they had signed up.

When we released this, we could never have expected the response we saw. Over 150 of you signed up to chat via Skype/FaceTime and some even dared to meet me in person! We had to remove it as I couldn’t keep up with the demand/coffee intake. It would be easy to say this was planned, but we were taken aback by how effective this was as a means to talk to our users.

We would love to say a massive thanks to everyone who scheduled a chat and spent their free time to help us build something they would find useful. You’ll all enter our Donut User Hall of Fame — trademark pending…

In these sessions we explored the problems you are all facing when attempting to invest in crypto. We were also able to test our early prototypes too. This feedback has permeated throughout what we are building and what we are prioritising to help you get to grips with the space.

Donut University

One key theme that emerges in every chat we’ve had has been the eagerness for users to learn how crypto investing works in super simple terms. This is amplified by the technical jargon that surrounds the space which limits investing to ‘tech nerds’.

So we talked to you all about how you learn best — is it video, text, articles? It transpires that people like to learn on their own terms and like to ingest bitesized pieces of information which is explained in accessible language. What is a wallet? What is Bitcoin? There 1600 crypto assets out there? How does it even work?

So, after looking at all the educational apps out there (such as Memrise, Babbel, Udemy etc.) we started working on Donut University. We have some exciting plans for where we are going to take this so watch this space. You can check out its teaser page here.

If you want to know more about university, you can book a slot with the team here.

The MVP

We have also been busy building out our first MVP of our React SPA (Single Page Web App). We’ve rolled out the first version of the app to 50 beta testers. The more we can learn early on, the better we can tailor the app to your needs. We’re pushing updates to the app at least 10 times a day as we trial new features and functionality.

Getting to grips with live graphs…

We’ll share the insights from our beta testing in our next post and what we are doing to improve the app. If you want to see more than the ‘create account’ screen you know what to do 😉….

Agile tooling

We’ve also been working on some some sexy agile tooling behind the scenes as we move towards working in a the scrum framework.

We’ve been getting jiggy with JIRA…

(If anyone has experience with a solution that isn’t JIRA or Trello let us know! The lick of paint doesn’t improve its clunkiness to configure)

Using Zeplin for sharing designs 🎨

BrowserStack for cross-device testing — so much love for this tool it’s unreal ❤️

^ to name a few.

Demo day madness

Neel spreading the 🍩 love

We were also lucky to be able to pitch at the first European Ef demo day which was a blast. The full team flew to London to join the fun. We’re in the process of raising some 💰💰💰 to help bring Donut to you all so this was a key milestone for all of us.

Our founder Neel is flying around Europe spreading the Donut love whilst the rest of the team are heads down in our new crib.

Donut HQ

We’ve also just moved into our shiny new office which is awesome — we’ve taken ownership of a house plant and have already run out of wall space… Swing by if you fancy one of Jordan’s Club Mate’s…

One more thing…

Our front end developer Cameron also had some spare capacity to build a fun little quiz for those on their commutes to see if they can spot a real coin from a fake one (a task which our CMO Julian enjoyed a bit too much)…

We even got some Twitter love from Mr. Hoover and the gang at Product Hunt… As a massive PH fan, this was a nice surprise…

Can you tell your Potcoin from your Litcoin? Play here.

We ❤️ your feedback

Your feedback is super important to us, so if you have anything to share get in touch:

Email: dan@trydonut.com

Tweet us: @trydonut

Chat to us: http://m.me/trydonut