Baton Market

Frontend team augmentation to deliver Minimum Loveable Product for small business owners

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Challenge

Streamline intensive user acquisition & onboarding process

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Outcomes

Deliver a sticky, smooth, and scalable user onboarding experience

Baton Market welcome screen

An image of a desktop scene showing a Welcome page on the Baton Market mobile app

Situation

Serving small business owners with potential buyers

Baton is on a mission to shake up the world of small business ownership. Using data-driven business valuations, Baton has created the first two-sided marketplace connecting the 32 million small businesses in the U.S. with potential buyers. They aim to empower business owners while bringing transparency and access to a market worth $11 trillion. 

Quote from Jamie Roth, Co-Founder at Baton Market

I had worked with a thoughtbot engineer previously at Kickstarter and had a great experience, so I thought of thoughtbot for this project to bring on senior engineers who could…bring strong attention to detail and work with a high degree of uncertainty in an agile fashion, given how early we are.

Jamie Roth
Co-Founder of Baton Market

Challenge

Smoothing the way for easier customer acquisition

The Baton team comes from a family of small business owners and has made it their mission to help other small business owners get paid for their lifeʼs work. They aim to be the old friend who knows first-hand how hard small business owners work, and who can provide the services and partnerships that business owners need. 

As part of the hard work to make all this happen, the Baton team engaged brand agency Human NYC to help hone the visual branding and undertook extensive research to develop a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) scope.

However, the team realized that getting the product over the finish line on time and meeting the high standards they’d set for themselves was a big ask. Baton’s goal was to create a smooth and scalable onboarding process, but user acquisition efforts were blocked by the high levels of human effort involved. 

Like all great small business owners, they knew when to ask for help from the experts and after exploring a few partners, chose thoughtbot as the team for the job.

Baton Market Search & Listing screens

Desktop scene with two mobile phones, one displaying the Baton Market Search function and the other showing the Baton Market Business Valuation screen

Solution

Extra hands deliver on frontend and UX goals

thoughtbot’s MVP Mobile Design Development and Early Stage Product Validation teams joined Baton’s in-house developers and designers to accelerate the delivery of both the marketing site and the core product. 

On the marketing site, thoughtbot worked with the Baton team to build out the initial version, working on CMS buildout, home, about, and landing page templates.

On the core product, transparency and clarity of ownership were key. The Baton team focused on business valuation service, notifications service, behavioral data stack, backend, and API work. The thoughtbot team took the lead on the front-end experiences, looking at business owner onboarding flow, search filters for business profiles, and a custom API to generate business profiles on the fly.

Quote from Jamie Roth, Co-Founder at Baton Market

The engineering team has great attention to detail and is product-minded, often thinking about complex edge cases and communicating often about their needs and blockers.

Jamie Roth
Co-Founder at Baton Market

Screenshots of various Baton Market UX screens

A desktop scene with two mobile phones, one showing Baton's Business Results page and the other displaying a specific business listing

Outcomes

Delivering a great user onboarding experience to increase customer acquisition

Baton was looking to build a scalable beta version of their core product that would accelerate user onboarding and retention. 

The thoughtbot team leveraged two core working practices stemming from agile principles: prioritization and iteration. They swiftly created a clickable Figma prototype of the new user onboarding workflow, to quickly generate actionable user feedback.

This enabled the team to prioritize the delivery of the MLP and move forward bringing it to life. As a communication tool, it ensured thoughtbot was always working on the features that added the most value for Baton customers while keeping costs as low as possible to Baton. In less than 10 weeks, we were able to ship our first version.

Quote from Jamie Roth, Co-Founder at Baton Market

The communication was great and we really enjoyed our collaboration from start to finish. I've worked with a lot of agencies and this level of communication and attention to detail are rare to find.

Jamie Roth
Co-Founder at Baton Market