I was quite familiar with the problems of local commerce with the emergence of online sales and the crisis, since my father had owned a local clothing store, Ipemoda, for which he had worked a few years ago. During that time I had been developing websites for local businesses, but I realized that having the website was not enough, since without digital marketing the clients would not arrive.

Realizing the problem, I had the idea of developing a local marketplace for local commerce, with fast last mile shipping. I still didn’t know that it was going to be the biggest challenge I had faced to that date. I decided to involve a friend to support me financially which he invested in my startup.

Once I developed it, I began to visit local businesses offering them the platform to upload their products, since I thought that the first thing I had to have was supply before attracting demand.

With this project we were selected and financed by Bbooster Ventures (Draper B1), the first startup accelerator in Spain, based in Valencia. And we are part of its 9th acceleration program

As founder of an early-stage startup, I was initially in charge of everything (design, development, marketing… of our platform) and then I delegated until I formed a team of up to 5 people. Mainly delegating marketing and development, and maintaining the product design, strategy and vision.

I started with market research and customer discovery that helped us identify an interesting problem to solve. I proceeded to analyze the competition to check the solutions of other startups and how we could face a cost-effective solution (at that time Amazon already existed and Rakuten was approaching Spain).

I focus on the profile of women, between 30 and 45 years, workers with high purchasing power and regular smartphone users. In our study we discovered very interesting things:

• 91% do not buy shoes if they do not try them before
• 89% prefer physical stores located within a radius of 8km to try them due to their immediacy and availability
• 71% use their smartphone to locate the stores yet (with apps like Google Maps)
• 50% of them aspire to buy them before an hour

After some iterations, I thought in a mobile app with an interface similar to Tinder, that helped you discover the shoes and find the nearest store that sells them. Swipe right to save the shoes you love and swipe left to discard those you don’t like. Filter by type, price or location and find exactly what you are looking for. Save time and money walking only the stores that have shoes you like or are on sale.

I make some sketches and wireframes to make the first prototype, always with a premise, do it as fast as possible.

I validate the prototypes with some of our users through usability tests to understand problems or points for improvement.

Finally, the technical team developed the first Minimum Viable Product, removing some functionalities that we discovered that wasn’t necessary at the beginning.

The app was very simple with a modern, fine and elegant aesthetic. The app has 3 main actions: the user can interact with the cards by swiping right to save, left to discard and up to share; user can save products and locate on the map; user can check which products are the most liked by friends, influencers or trendy