Buenven

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Project duration:
Sep 2023- Jun 2024

The Team:
Co-Founders - Michael, Arturo
Designer - Coco
Frontend - Phoebe, Vasavi
Backend - Nigel, Jessica

The Problem:

Influencers drive culture, achieving “micro-celebrity” status via local online communities. More specifically, food creators seek to build genuine connections with their followers to grow their brand and revenue. The challenge is bridging their culinary expertise with operational capabilities to enhance online engagement and expand their celebrity in the food industry. Because of all this, they want to monetize their content while wanting to bring the online offline in the meantime. BUT, the content creation process for food creators is resource- and time-constrained.

In a broader sense, what’s causing this?

Influencers often struggle to balance a full-time job with the demands of regular content creation, leading to burnout and reduced creativity.

From scripting and filming to editing and posting, influencers invest significant time and effort to maintain a consistent presence online, making it difficult to keep up with other responsibilities.

The limited interaction opportunities can lead to a disconnect between influencers and their followers, hindering the development of a loyal and engaged community.

What they need:

To better engage with their communities, the food creators/influencers need to take a lot into consideration, from securing a suitable location with necessary permits and equipment while providing operational support with staff and logistics offline, to ensuring effective ticketing and promotion through collaborations and platforms online.

To solve these:

Conceptually, how does Buenven solve?

To fulfill the influencers’ needs, Buenven helps small-to-medium influencers by curating tailored events, providing an established network for operational support, and managing ticketing and financial transactions through its platform. This streamlined approach allows influencers to focus on engaging with their followers while Buenven handles the logistics.

Initial User Journey & Ideation

To rapidly build the MVP for the Buenven app, we adopted an agile methodology, allowing us to design, develop, and test ideas quickly within each sprint. To begin testing our concept, we created two general user journeys for both influencers and their followers. Additionally, a few mid-fidelity wireframes were developed to better visualize the concept, which was crucial when pitching the idea to investors and stakeholders, as well as gathering their feedback.

On Fan Side, the journey begins by opening the Buenven app and selecting their favorite types of food. They can then explore profiles of food influencers who align with their interests. After finding events hosted by these influencers, they can sign up and ultimately connect with other food enthusiasts during the events.

On the Influencer side, the process starts with building their profile in the Buenven app, where they share details about their favorite foods and upload relevant pictures. They proceed to create events that cater to their audience's interests, track sign-ups, and engage directly with their target audience through in-person events, fostering stronger connections with their followers.

User Profile

For influencers, a typical user might want to build a personal brand that reflects his cultural heritage while generating income through collaborations and in-person events. His main challenges include balancing content creation with his catering business and navigating brand partnerships.

For fans, the user might seek to expand her social circle and participate in in-person interactions but struggle with choosing the right events, balancing travel, and managing the costs and value of these experiences.

Iteration

Before iterating and continuing on building the MVP, we interviewed 15 people including stakeholders, potential users and investors.
Overall, 90% of the stakeholders are enthusiastic about the direction of Buenven. However, some feedback and questions that emerged from discussions with stakeholders and investors include:

The overall flow on both the influencer and fan sides is clear.
On the fan side, the left and right swipe feature on the Influencer profile, along with the bubble tags, is somewhat confusing.
There are technical concerns about how the data will be synced on the backend for the matching process.
Questions arose about why the gamified swiping experience is featured on the influencer side but not on the fan side.
When building a profile, too much information is presented on one page, which could overwhelm users.
Given that 80% of influencers are visually oriented and may not track their performance data frequently, suggestions were made to better organize the data analytics to make it easier for them to navigate.

Flowchart
Based on the feedback, we started to sketch out the information architecture for both sides and a more comprehensive user flow is drafted.

⬇️Initial drafts on user flows.

Flowchart on fan side:

On the influencer side:

And with the flowcharts, I was able to create the Prototype. (Click on the screen to play with it!)⬇️

Market competition

Benven combines a focus on food-centered events, influencer-first strategies, comprehensive event hosting, ticketing, and robust operational support. Unlike other players that may excel in one or two areas, Buenven offers a holistic solution tailored specifically for influencers, making it the only platform that fully caters to their needs from event creation to audience engagement.

Buenve’s Impact & Key Results

Offline:

Online:

Thoughts and Takeaways

How transferable are followers for an influencer? Can followers be seamlessly transferred from other platforms to Buenven?

Users might prioritize the event and gathering experience over the influencer connection. Does Buenven aim to enhance the connection between influencers and their fans, and if so, how can the experience be more focused on this relationship?

Considering that Buenven targets existing influencers, will requiring them to build a profile from scratch deter registration? Can influencers sync photos from their existing social media accounts, and what would that experience entail?

Greater consideration should be given to backend functionality during the design process. For instance, how will data related to purchasing experiences be stored and presented to influencers?