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. 

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.

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.

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.